Harvest in high gear

The beginning of the semester has certainly cut back on my free time. Every minute I’m not at work, I am harvesting or putting up. An early rain shower this morning gave me an excuse to catch up my blog while the garden dries off, although I could be pickling jalapeno peppers right now. Sometimes it just feels good to sit down for a little while.

The late summer flowers are blooming all over. Here are some examples:

Boneset gets its name from the leaves that are fused at the base. In the Doctrine of Signatures, the similarity of the leaves to a mended bone led people to believe that the plant was beneficial for setting broken bones. This turned out not to be true.

Joe Pye Weed. I bet there's a story behind that name, too.

The white stripes on the underside of the flower are a characteristic trait for Great Lobelia.

Tall sunflower is one of only two sunflowers with alternate leaves. It has a red stem while the stem of sawtooth sunflower is whitish.

The red raspberry harvest is gearing up. So far, Terry has done all the harvesting. I think it’s good that he gets in the habit of harvesting what he’s grown since Hilda and I have all we can manage with our garden. I have probably mentioned that Terry tends to act like fruits and vegetables magically jump from the plant to the freezer.

Red raspberries

Here is a photo of what I picked and processed one day last week. From left to right, you can see tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, cucumbers (under the potatoes and carrots), cherry tomatoes, cabbage, fennel, cantaloupe, zucchini, pattypans, and more tomatoes.

One day's harvest

The last variety of corn to mature was Silver Queen. It was supposed to be all white. Some ears (probably most) had some yellow kernels. I had to explain the miracle of double fertilization to Terry. It’s been a long time since he was in college. I can’t imagine that a horticulture major never learned it. When flowering plants are pollinated, two sperm nuclei travel to the ovary. One sperm nucleus fertilizes the egg to form the embryo. The other fuses with two female nuclei to make the endosperm, which, in one form or another, nourishes the embryo when it sprouts. In a corn kernel, the embryo is down near the cob. Everything that you see from the outside is endosperm, which is only 2/3 maternal. Thus, if a kernel gets pollinated from a yellow corn, it will be yellow. Terry was confusing a fruit with a seed. The seed is a product of fertilization. The fruit is entirely maternal. A fruit will always be true to the mother plant. A seed will have traits from both parents. End of botany lesson.

Silver Queen

We had some wicked hot and humid days last week. I changed T-shirts three times on Friday before the day was over. Kate came up for supper on Saturday. As we were having red raspberries and scones for dessert, a fog came over the hay field as the sun went down. It was beautiful.

Evening fog at sunset

One of my three T-shirt changes happened after the chicken round-up. When Hilda scheduled the butchering for August 22, she had no idea it was going to be one of the hottest days of the summer. I ordered a poultry hook online Monday, and it arrived on Thursday, much to my relief. It helped, but there was a learning curve. Mom and Dad had gone to visit my brother for the weekend. That was too bad because Hilda was the only one among us who knew how to use a poultry hook. I didn’t think to ask if there was a trick to it. The trick, I discovered far too long into the process, is to hook them above the ankle. Time out for chicken anatomy: the thigh of the chicken is truly a thigh. The joint between the thigh and the drumstick is the knee. The ankle is below the drumstick. The “foot” of the chicken is really just toes. When I hooked the chicken above the toes, it just walked out of the hook. If I hooked above the ankle, it held, and I could pull the chicken to me. In any case, Terry and I had all twelve in the cage in about 20 minutes. Then I had to change my shirt again.

In conclusion of the dual-purpose experiment, we are going back to broilers next year. Yes, they are messy, but the inconvenience is a good deal shorter, and they are much, much cheaper to raise. We fed the broilers for 8 weeks and got 5.5- to 7-pound chickens. We fed the dual purpose chickens for 15 weeks and the biggest ones were 2 lbs 15 ounces. They came back from the butcher looking like undernourished Cornish game hens. I expect we would have had to keep them several more months to get to their full size, which I assume would be close to the Light Brahma hens we had that had a dressed weight of 5 pounds. Living and learning.

Left to right: 5.5-lb broiler, 2 lb 15 oz dual purpose, 5-lb laying hen (probably one of the two fat ladies)

The cucumbers are dying back. The zucchini and pattypans have largely succumbed to powdery mildew with the resumption of regular rain fall. We need to dig potatoes when we get a dry day. The first batch of onions is hanging in the basement with much gratitude to Dad for putting them in the nylons.

Onions in nylons, which is the best way to store them for a long time

The current push is to get the tomatoes canned. Hilda is doing most of that. I have to work. I’m the only person in my house who isn’t retired. But I’m not bitter, that’s the important thing.

Biggest plum tomato so far!