This and That

I had to get my lettuce seedlings planted. My wonderful successions are starting to fall apart. Some lettuces take longer than others. To plant these I took out four plants. One that just wasn't growing. A Deertongue which I know gets bitter in the summer heat, so I didn't want to leave it in very long. A romaine that sort of headed up. And a nice pretty red oakleaf. And two of the lettuces I planted in the spot the basil used to be in.

So now I have a patchwork quilt of lettuces. I'm finding that two week successions is too short and three is too long. Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot for my space. Though the pretty crisphead that is growing well and sizing up nicely, is taking a long time to grow. I think these kinds of successions work better if you know what you are growing. When one lettuce takes a month longer to size up than another, it just doesn't work well. It either leaves holes, or you are pulling plants prematurely, or just not planting all of the seedlings.

I also planted out the next attempt at basil. If you will remember my first set all died from downy mildew even though I planted them in random spots in the yard. This one was planted in the herb circle. I hope it survives for a couple of months.

The last succession of corn needed thinning out. I plant three seeds. Most of them come up, but some are stronger than others. I also thinned out the squash at the end of the bed.

I was checking on the first four successions. Three and four have caught up to one another. I always plant toward the fence first. That bed is more shaded. And it gives the squash a chance to get going faster. But it does bring the beds together in timing a bit.

I usually don't let my rhubarb bloom like this. I like to keep it cut back better since it is in front of my air conditioner. I finally got around to it. Now it is much more under control.

The sweet potatoes have started to vine. Whoot! This meant I could take out most of the bamboo poles I put around them. I like to cover the ground enough to keep the cats from digging. We have a horde of cats living in the neighborhood. But they leave the soil alone once the plants grow big enough.

I was checking some photos from last year. My sweet potatoes seem to be a little bigger than last year, but the melons are way behind. I might be picking my melons in September, which is sad as they won't be as sweet that way.

Preparing for Winter

Yes summer hasn't started yet and I'm getting ready for winter. Last week I froze one packet of spinach which I know isn't much, but it was a start. This week I've been doing more. Since one of my rhubarb plants came out, I used all the stalks to make rhubarb butter. A couple years ago I made this but it had a lot of sugar. I wanted something that had no more than a teaspoon of added sugar per serving of two tablespoons. Last years recipe had about three teaspoons of added sugar per serving. Sugar is something I've been trying to reduce to get well again. I'm at the point where I'm OK adding a bit of sugar, but not to the degree of a typical jam.

Personally I think it tastes really good. But my tastes have changed. When I make jam or butter, I tend to share them with my neighbors during the holidays. Will they like the more tart butter? Or will they dislike it? I think when I make strawberry jam (and it looks like it will be a good harvest of strawberries this year), I might make two batches. A small one for me and a bigger one for the neighbors.

Tart Rhubarb Butter

• 2 1/2 lbs rhubarb
• 2/3 c sugar
• 1/3 c OJ concentrate
• 1/4 c water
• 1 T cinnamon

Wash and chop the rhubarb into small pieces. Hopefully yours are redder than mine so your butter won't look like puke. Mine tastes good and is productive, but not all that pretty. Put it all into a large pan. I used a huge monster frying pan because it cooks down really really fast that way and I don't slave over a hot stove as long. Cook as long as it takes to get to the thickness you like. It will thicken up a bit, but this is not a jam and won't set like one. You have to boil out the water to make it thick. Transfer it to a smaller pan and use an immersion blender to puree it into a smooth butter. If it still isn't thick enough cook it down some more. Can it in a hot water bath for 15 minutes. Or at least that is how long I did it for. Rhubarb butter is not something on the USDAs list of things they have tested in their canning. 10 minutes is probably enough as that is the time for apple butter, but stewed rhubarb is 15 so I gave it that.

Today I'm dehydrating some sage. The sage is all in bud right now. Supposedly herbs are best picked before they bloom. I've done it both ways, but I needed to cut this one back anyway as it was starting to take over. Tomorrow I'll do another batch until I've gotten rid of most of the sage buds.

I'm going to leave the one in the herb circle though as I can see it from my kitchen window and it will be pretty. I don't think I need so much sage right now as to have to chop all the flowers off. I don't mind collecting some after blooming time. My chives are in bud too, but I only harvest chives when I want them for something. I've never dried them.

Taking Stock

I went out yesterday and it really did feel like spring. Even the daffodils have started to push out of the soil. Which means it was time to start planting as long as the ground was unfrozen. I'll get to that last part tomorrow, but for now I'll go through the state of the perennials and overwintered crops.

First up is the spinach. It had survived well. Many of the older leaves were dead, but the new ones were starting. They looked better than I expected after being buried in 6' of snow (I shovel the path onto their bed and the snow from the solar panels on the roof comes down on top of them, so they get a lot of heavy heavy snow on top of them).

The dwarf curly kale always seems to do well. And they all survived. I don't eat those old leaves, but new ones will start to grow soon. Sadly the mache looks pretty ragged. If it doesn't grow new leaves before it bolts, I won't be eating it.

The Winterbor kale looks pretty sad. It isn't totally dead. Only time will tell if I get anything edible out of it this year.

The garlic has started to come up. The grid looks perfect, so most if not all of the plants survived. Those are the only overwintered plants in the garden. I do have a lot of perennials - mainly herbs in the garden.

Many of my herbs are in the herb circle (chives, oregano, English thyme, garlic chives, savory, and sage). I did a quick clean up of the bed. I used the garlic chives stems to help mulch the ground as otherwise the cats will dig in it. I cut the sage way back. I think this year I need to get a circular support for it. Otherwise it drapes itself over other parts of the circle and kills the herbs there.

The big question every year for me is if my rosemary has survived or not. And I'm really not sure yet. It has faded quite a bit. I'm in zone 6b and rosemary is not hardy here. I use Arp which is a hardier rosemary, but not reliably hardy. I used to have four plants scattered around the yard. This is the only surviving one. To keep it going I really need to scatter more around. And as you can see the sage plant nearby is leaning over it. I have four sage plants scattered around the garden. At the start they would die off often, but I think I've finally gotten them in places they like. Which is good as we go through a lot of sage every year.

The French thyme has survived well here. It wasn't very happy in the herb circle so I took a cutting and put one here. It likes the location because it has winter protection. I prop the garden gate open in the winter and it goes right in front of the thyme. This keeps the wind off of it. Usually French thyme is harder to keep going than English thyme, but it seems a lot healthier than my English thyme in the herb circle. The pots above are my mints. I don't see any growth out of them yet, but I'm sure they are alive. Can you kill a mint?

My tarragon lives next to a current plant. I cleaned up the dead branches and leaves. I see small shoots coming up underneath so they are doing well. I don't use a lot of tarragon in my cooking, but enough that I need to grow it.

And last but not least, my rhubarb is coming up. I'll have to think about what I'm going to do with it this year. I've taken a lot of the sugar out of my diet and you really can't eat rhubarb without sugar. I could make some rhubarb butter for the neighbors again. That was so so good. And I can eat the leftover bits. Yum.

Tomorrow I'll talk about my first plantings. I was so excited to find soil that was unfrozen. Whoohoo! I love spring. Sadly the forecast has three days of dismal cool temps, with highs in the 40s, but the weathermen assure me that it will warm up on Friday and it will even feel like spring. I'll be able to garden in a sunhat instead of a fleece cap and coat. Time to get dirt under my fingernails.

An Early Morning in the Kitchen

I hate days that I don't get enough sleep the night before. Why I woke up at 5am this morning I'll never know. I'm a very light sleeper. I'll wake up to anything. Sadly if it is after five I tend to wake up for good. I'm not a napper and the only time I can sleep in is if I'm sick. I like my eight hours of sleep but some days . . .

At least the morning was productive. Yesterday I picked just over two pounds of rhubarb and turned it into juice. I chopped it up and added a bit of water and boiled it down for 15 minutes. Then I used a muslin and strained the pulp out. Yesterday afternoon had gotten hot and humid. So I decided to put the juice in the fridge and deal with it some other time. Well an early morning is just the time. The kitchen at least starts out cool.

I had three cups of juice. I wanted to make a simple syrup with it, but I thought the 1:1 ratio of sugar to liquid was a bit too sweet. I wanted to taste the rhubarb. So I added two cups of sugar and boiled it down for 5 minutes. Like with jam the top gets a bit foamy and it needed to be scraped off before canning (10 minutes in a boiling water bath).

The final product looks prettier than I expected. My rhubarb is mostly green, so I don't get the pretty red color. But amber isn't bad. I ended up with four and a half half-pint jars. The half of a half-pint will go straight into the fridge for trial this evening. The question is do I pair it with gin or tequila. A Rhubarita sounds pretty tasty. Would a gin and tonic taste good with rhubarb instead of lime? Would the tonic be too much and should I stick to a gin fizz? Last year I made lavender syrup and trialed that one out. I guess this year it will be rhubarb syrup. Don't you think a rhubarb mojito sounds good? Too bad my mojito mint isn't up yet. I hope it didn't die last winter.

As soon as the jars were in the canner I had another hot chore to do. One of my squash was getting moldy so I wanted to cook it. Most of it will be pureed, but I am roasting one of the squash. I figured roast squash might go well in a summer salad some day.

I feel like I've been productive already today and I haven't even had breakfast yet. Maybe it won't be such a bad day after all.

Over the Fence

Last year one of my neighbors asked for a rhubarb division. I gave it to him, but told him that it wasn't really the time to split rhubarb and it might not live. It didn't. Yesterday our soil was thawed out (I do have one shady corner that is still frozen about 7" down, but most of the garden is thawed) so it was a great time to dig up the rhubarb plant and split it.

I put the division into a bucket to give to him. He lives just over my back fence. But as we say in New England, you can't get there from here. There are no gates in our fence on that side of the house. We have thought about it, but have never put one in. So I had to go the long way around about two or three blocks. It seems so silly for it to be so long since our back yards touch. I told him when he was done with the bucket he could just toss it back over the fence. At least it could take the short route. He later emailed me to tell me it was planted. I hope it grows well for him.

Then it was on to planting. Yesterday I did the Asian greens bed. I prepared the soil and planted those early starts. From left to right I have bok choy, tatsoi, and mizuna. The bok choy is smaller because when I seeded it, I seeded it in the wrong cells. It was seeded with my parsley. I decided to let the parsley grow and reseeded the bok choy. I'm hoping that in a month I'll have a good harvest. The rest of the bed was direct seeded with bok choy, tatsoi, mizuna, and choy sum. I do have some transplants growing upstairs. We will see which is bigger in a couple of weeks. I might just use the transplants as I suspect they will be better than the direct seeded ones.

When I was done I put a netting row cover on it. Now they just need to grow. Grow little babies. Grow!

Last fall when my daughter came to stay with her dog, I wanted to be able to bring him into the garden. But dogs of course love dirt. And they love eating organic fertilizer. So I put up some bamboo and string to tell the dog where not to go. My daughter's dog is very trainable, but I found he does need a visual clue when he gets excited. He could easily jump over it, but it is just enough to remind him. I used some old bamboo that was breaking and small. I didn't like it much as all the sticks are of different size and some were sharp where they broke.

So I replaced them with some old stakes. These stakes used to be next to my beds. They were to keep the middle of each 4'x8' from expanding due to the pressure of the dirt. Well the reality is that the stakes never touched the side of the bed after the first year. So they weren't really doing anything. Yesterday I pulled them out and used them to hold up the string. It looks much better now doesn't it? I didn't have enough stakes for the whole garden. The west bed in the circle garden still uses bamboo, but all the other beds at least are nicer.

I had plenty of time to do more yesterday, but today is supposed to be a gorgeous day too, so I wanted to save one of my beds to dig up. Really the weather is supposed to be gorgeous and above normal temperatures for the next week. We might get some rain on Friday and maybe Saturday morning which would be nice. But other than that it will be mostly sunny and warm. We went straight from winter to late spring weather. It sure makes planting easier. Usually I'm out sowing and planting and freezing my butt off. I remember so many spring days planting spinach in a down coat with frozen hands. Planting with a light wind breaker and a sun hat is so much nicer. I just hope the soil in the spinach bed is all defrosted today.

Canning

I spent the morning and a small bit of the afternoon canning today. The pickles were made with pickle crisp for the first time. I really do hate the mushiness of canned pickles. I've tried all the typical tricks like ice, salting, and starting just after you pick those cukes. And yes I always cut off the blossom end and leaves a bit of stem. But nothing ever works. I haven't yet done the low temperature canning. But if this doesn't work, it will be my next experiment. The thought of standing over the canning pot for 30 minutes and making sure the water stays at the appropriate temperature doesn't sound like a lot of fun though.

The other jars are barbeque sauce. Since I can't eat the tomato variety, I figured I'd experiment. I made peach BBQ sauce mostly following the Ball recipe. I did take out all the peppers. I also added some bourbon and made half the fruit plums. It does taste more like barbeque sauce than the other experiments, but I don't like it all that much. It is OK. I'll see what it tastes like on meat though to make sure. I really don't like the honey in the recipe. I want brown sugar. But honey is acidic (it varies but about a pH of 4), so I'm afraid to just replace it.

The browner sauce is Ball's Victorian Barbeque Sauce. Granny sent me the recipe. It is made from rhubarb and raisins. I used an immersion blender to break up the raisins and make it into a thick sauce. It doesn't taste much like barbeque sauce, but oh my gosh is it tasty. I just want to sit down and eat it straight. It reminds me more of apple butter than anything else. If I end up not liking it on meat, I think I'll bring out the ice cream and put it on top of that. Or just use it as a butter and put it on bread. In fact I think it would be to die for if I put it with some sharp cheddar. I'll have to try that too.

Tonight I'm going to do a test. I'm going to use the above sauces and some Chinese plum sauce that I made earlier to coat some chicken breast. I'll grill it. Then we will do a taste test to see which ones we like the best.

Preserving

Last weekend my townhouse mates asked for some greens for their spaghetti sauce. The spring greens are gone and the only real summer green in the garden is my chard. So I went out to harvest chard. I brought the basket over and she said she didn't want a lot. Often she takes tons. So I tossed the rest in the fridge. And it had been sitting there. I needed to get it frozen and finally did.

Then it was time to wrangle with the rhubarb again. Their placement in the garden is fine if I keep them well picked. If not they block the air conditioning unit as they grow too high. So I picked and I chopped. I had 12 cups of chopped rhubarb to use up. I decided to make rhubarb jam. I followed the recipe except for adding a tablespoon of cinnamon (I used Saigon cinnamon). In my opinion rhubarb isn't the same without cinnamon.

The recipe calls for a lot of rhubarb. Usually rhubarb is paired with another fruit because it barely has any pectin. This one was using orange which has a lot. But it doesn't put nearly enough in if you really want it to set up as jam. It also doesn't have the sugar to become a jam. Typically you have about the same amount of sugar by weight as you have fruit in no pectin jams, give or take a little. This called for one pound of sugar and 2 1/2 pounds of rhubarb, plus however much the orange weighed. Jam seems a lot like an art in the kitchen, but the reality is that it is a science. It is true that the less pectin you have, the less sugar you need. But you do need enough of both to make those bonds (plus acid, but rhubarb is quite acidic so no issues there).

So the recipe isn't really rhubarb jam. It is rhubarb butter. You can also tell that it won't be jam by how long they say to boil it down. Jams don't usually take 45 minutes, even jams without added pectin which usually require longer boiling times. So I got out my huge stock pot as it has a good thick base to make for even heating and put it on my quick boil burner and boiled it down fast. 2 1/2 pounds of rhubarb became four half pints of rhubarb butter. And it was to die for. It is very sour with just enough sweetness to be tasty. Like a lot of very sour things, it will do well on a buttered piece of toast as eaten plain it is way too intense. It would also be good as a topping for ice cream or cheesecake.

I had more rhubarb and made a couple of jars of stewed rhubarb. Interestingly enough it has about the same proportions of fruit to sugar. So it was also a bit intense. I can't eat that plain. I expect to eat it with something like like pudding.

Both got preserved in a boiling water bath. I always find the recommended USDA times for processing very strange. Rhubarb jam is 5 minutes. Stewed rhubarb is 15 minutes. Stewed rhubarb is not a very thick product and I would think it would need a shorter processing time than something thick like rhubarb jam. Is it because of the higher sugar content n the jam? Sugar is a preservative if you get the concentration high enough, which it is for jam. But I would think the processing times are based on how hot the interior of the jar gets - you know, to sterilize the jar. I did both for 15 minutes to be safe.

I keep thinking I need a red rhubarb to make my preserves look pretty. It looks a little like, well, vomit. I swear it tastes good though. I often give gifts to my neighbors during the holiday season. Do you think these look too bad? They really are a great treat and you can't buy them in a store.

Usually I make pickled peas earlier at the start of the pea season, but this year I've been freezing them instead. After eating a burger and missing them terribly, I decided to make a small batch. I don't process pickled peas as they turn to mush, but I do love them as refrigerator pickles. To make them use any pickle brine you like and just toss in the raw peas. Don't heat the peas up. I often keep a jar of brine in the fridge so I can toss in extra peas or cukes when I harvest them. Refrigerator pickles are so much better than ones that need to be shelf stable for storage. The heat really hurts the texture and a refrigerator pickle never needs to be heated.

Though this is not technically preserving (though I might freeze one of these). I made little pies.

Plating from those little dishes isn't easy. Mine didn't come out perfect. But you can't eat them in the ramekin because you need space for the ice cream. I've decided that gooseberries can't be eaten without some kind of cream. They just really go together. I hate whipped cream, but ice cream works. And I must say this was way too much to eat at once. Each of the little ramekins holds about a sixth of a pie. I think tonight I'll eat just half of one. I only had enough gooseberries left for half a pie, so didn't use a real pie pan.

Gooseberry Pie

• 4 cups gooseberries topped and tailed
• 2 cups sugar (makes it sweet, use less if you like it more sour)
• 1/4 c flour
• 1/2 t salt
• T lemon juice
• pie crust (enough for the bottom and top)

Mix the dry ingredients together. Add the lemon juice to the fruit. Then mix it all together and pour into the pie crust. Add crust to the top in whatever arrangement you like.

Preserving and Organizing

I was going to preserve my rhubarb in the morning, but I kept getting distracted. The first problem was finding my Ball Blue Book. I hate that book. It is so thin and doesn't have any writing on the end so you can't tell what it is. If it were just BLUE like the title suggests I'd be fine. Instead it is very nondescript. So I was tearing out my bookshelf to try to find it. I made a pile of books to go upstairs in the attic room. I never use them so they don't need to be very accessible anymore. I cleaned out my whole bookshelf.

One of the things I found was my old exercise sheets. Since January Caroline (townhousemate) and I have been exercising together. Lifting weights is hard for both of us. Neither of us like it, but it really does help you age with less aches and pains. Doing it together makes it easier. Sadly for me, but good for her, she starts a new job next week and won't have time to do that with me. We talked about it and decided that we would do it by ourselves, but do it six days a week, but just ten minutes a day. It ought to be easy to make yourself do ten minute workouts. It is what I used to do years ago. And hence my sheets that I found. So I spent the next block of time redoing my exercise routine plan. I've got four exercises each day. I even typed up a different one for Caroline as I'm really hoping she keeps it up.

I talked with my husband about getting it set up. I told him I wanted to keep it up because I had a good role model. My MIL. She is the epitome of aging gracefully. My husband thought about it and has decided to try to join me. My husband has never lifted weights in his life as far as I know. So I'll believe it when I see it, but I hope we both keep it up.

Anyway that bit of organizing was done. Then I had my Blue Book in hand and went to look in the spice draw to see if I wanted to add any spices to my preserves. I decided not to, but the spice draws have annoyed me since I moved in. I put the spices in drawers because there are so many little tiny drawers in this kitchen. Little tiny drawers aren't really useful for much. Spice jars are thin so easy to fit in them. The jars were just tossed in. There was no way to keep the jars in their spots and they always got mixed up. Ick.

So again my preserving was put on hold. I went into the basement to look for something that I could tack to the bottom of the drawer to keep them contained. I found some old balsa wood. I cut it in one foot sections and tacked it to the bottom of the drawers with tape to see how it would work. I liked it a lot, but I needed smaller wood.

The next day I got out to the craft store and picked up some 3/16" bass wood and glued it down. Now at least the bottom part is all tacked down. The left side has my "sweet" spices and some random things. My right drawer has my savory spices.

As you can see my savory spices are mostly from my garden. But they weren't so pretty earlier. They used to have the old labels on them that had been relabeled and relabeled. I went on a label cleaning kick. Dang those sticky labels were hard to get off. Used scouring powder and a scrubby to do it. And lots of elbow grease. But they are much prettier. I wish I had the pretty oval labels for all of them, but they came with my most recent canning jar purchase and only had twelve.

You see the powdered garlic? Well that was done that morning too. I had the dried garlic slices from previously. I hadn't processed them. So of course they had to be done right then.

And I don't even know why my upstairs freezer got cleaned out, but I'm sure there was some minor distraction that made me do it. I'm not sure what came over me that day. Really I'm a messy person and not usually obsessive compulsive. I leave that for the rest of the family. It must be catching.

Those preserves were finally made. One jar didn't seal. That is the first jar all year that didn't. I really wish I had a pan that could process one jar. Then I could just try it again, but no way am I going to heat the whole huge canning pot up to process just one jar. I don't like the green of the rhubarb. Shouldn't rhubarb be red and pretty? I'm going to have to replace the one I tore out with another. Anyone know a good red variety? The one I bought was supposed to be red, but of course it wasn't.

Head on over to Robin's place at The Gardener of Eden for other Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard posts and link up to let others see what you've been using or preserving from your garden and pantry.

Catch Up

I'm having trouble figuring out where to start after not really blogging about gardening for two weeks. I've done my harvest and cooking posts, but not any gardening posts. Above are my sweet potato vines that are taking over the world. Isn't it funny how a morning glory self seeding itself in my vines? I kept thinking that I needed two zinnias in the middle to make it a very pretty bed, but it turns out all that I had to do was let this one "weed" grow. I didn't even know it was in there since the leaves are close enough that I didn't notice.

As you can see there are two different flowers in this photo. The small pink one is from my Garnet sweet potato. It has a morning glory like flower as it is in the same family, but it hides under the foliage and is smaller.

The second bed of sweet potatoes has no flowers at all. That bed has my purple sweet potatoes that Norma gave me. All the sweet potatoes are intent on taking over the world. They are in the circle garden. The center circle is my herb garden. The vines were quickly encroaching on it. So I hacked them back. I thought about just turning the vines in as I'd done in the past. But it was just too much this time. So off with their heads. Many had already rooted into the ground and I had to rip them out before cutting them off. Sweet potatoes are very aggressive. Not as bad as a squash plant, but they are persistent.

It looks like a lot of bare soil doesn't it? Well only one half bed is bare. The one with the upside down trash barrel (I put the sprinkler on it to make sure it gets over the row covers) is empty, but the half part closer to the fence has newly germinated lettuce and beets. The bed to the right near the fence (next to the single row cover) should have carrot seedlings. I tied to get them to germinate but they just wouldn't. Luckily this was my second bed I was putting in carrots and my first bed is up just fine. I weeded and thinned it the other day.

The small patch of fall peas that I planted are up and doing well. The pole beans also germinated. A handful in one section died to damping off in the heat, but the rest are growing well. The bush beans germinated spottily, but are up. The fall brassica bed is growing well. I might get to harvest some bok choy soon. Oh and that empty bed that hasn't been planted, well it is going to have my quicker maturing Asian greens planted there. I might put some kohlrabi in too, but I don't usually plant that one until the end of August or the beginning of September once the weather cools off.

My cover crop came up well. Both the section I put soil over and the section where I just raked the seed into the bed.

Each of my beds are 16' long and divided into two 8' sections. This is the same bed that has my cover crop but it is the other 8' section. I can't use the 8' section near the fence for fall crops as it is in total shade in the fall. The front section at least gets some sun - for a while. This bed was seeded in kale as you can see. It all came up well and has been thinned once. It really needs to be weeded soon.

I've done a lot of weeding in the last couple of weeks. It has been hot and I've been watering so the weeds are in abundance. The crab grass is trying to go to seed so it has been a challenge to keep it down before it seeds all over the garden.

Do you remember from earlier in the year when I told you about my monster rhubarb? It insisted on going to seed even though I kept trying to cut off the flower heads. As summer progressed it became even more unruly and very ugly. I think of rhubarb as a pretty plant. But half the plant rotted out and it was right in front of my air conditioner during a hot summer. So I decided to kill it. I took it all down. I'll be pulling it out for months I'm sure as it tries to regrow. The nice rhubarb that was next to it was harvested by half, but otherwise left. Though that rhubarb won't produce as much as quickly, it is a much prettier rhubarb and won't block the air flow to my air conditioner. Let that be a warning to my plants. You get out of line and out you go.

Usually I like big plants. I had a huge sunflower with over 20 flowers on it. It was probably just under 10' tall. I loved its monstrosity. Though it did attack me when I was trying to turn on the spigot. I had to keep it propped up with five bamboo poles it was so heavy. It made me smile every day as I bumped my head on its heavy flowers. But sadly it broke under its own weight. Not even during a storm either. It just got too heavy. The lower part and a few flowers are left. So sad. But I'm not at all sad about my rhubarb. It was an ugly thing. Now I have to keep up on pulling the leaves to kill it. I haven't yet taken a shovel to it. I really ought to dig out as much as possible, but it has been too hot for that kind of work.

The Good and the Bad

Beans starting to run

We have had a spate of cold wet weather. Monday's high was only 52F. Brrr. At least today we are supposed to get into the 60s finally. We only got two inches of rain over the last four days, but it has been constantly drizzly so not much work has been done in the garden.

But the beans were starting to run and I hadn't put up the strings for them to climb. I did find a not so wet time yesterday to finish the chore after being chased in previously. It might be cold and the insects might be chewing on the beans, but still they want to grow. Go beans! That is my good news this time.

As to bad news, I lost one battle. This is my rhubarb. I was trying to keep it from blooming, but it was hopeless. It just wanted to. I had cut off numerous flower shoots, but it wore me down and I finally let it go.

Ugly huh? The aphids have really taken over the fava beans as usual. I hope the lady bugs come in and breed like they did last year. I really need them about now.

And probably the worst news, the earwigs have been really bad this year. This is what an earwig does to a Michihili cabbage. Luckily one seems to be untouched. But at least two of my three Napa cabbages have been hit, though not as hard. It will be interesting after I harvest to see what is edible inside. But all of them will be taken apart outside so I don't bring those nasty things in. But my biggest worry about the earwigs is my corn. The last time I had an earwig boom like this year they ate all the silks off my corn. I will have a lot of corn in the garden this year.