Cucumbers in a container
The cucumbers I’m growing on my patio in a container are doing well enough, considering how often they need to be watered. The bottom leaves are yellowing and dying now, but I’m getting a few veggies from the plant. Overall I’m happy with it. It’s a neat decoration, if nothing else.
My tomatoes all got blight! It’s a fungus, I’m told. The back yard has been INSANELY WET this year, and that probably helped the fungus grow. I still got very nice looking tomatoes, and I’ll still get a bunch more, but the plants are dying quickly…very, very quickly.
Patch of 12 tomatoes in late July. Dying of blight fungus.
Clockwise from the closest corner…Rutgers, Super Marmande, Gardener’s Delight, Cold Set and the mystery pear tomato that snuck into my seed packet.
Closer shot of the sad, dying tomatoes
The fruit doesn’t have a problem…it’s just the green leaves of the vine that are dying. I’ve already harvested 24 pounds of tomatoes from these 12 plants and I expect to get almost that much more before they are completely dead.
Gardener's Delight cherry tomato doing slightly better than the rest.
I actually doubt I’ll grow these fun cherry tomatoes next year. My main use for them is in canned stuff and it’s a pain to peel and seed these smaller ones. They aren’t a tiny cherry tomato…some are golf ball size…but still, it’s a lot more work to get 10 cups from these little guys than it is from bigger fruits.
Gardener's Delight Cherry Tomato
It’s hard not to love these guys though. Very attractive, very prolific, very tasty and pretty large as cherry tomatoes go.
Close-up of Gardener's Delight Cherry tomatoes
Canning
Above you see chili sauce, spaghetti sauce and salsa plus a jar of bread & butter cucumber pickles and a tiny jar of bread & butter banana peppers. As I said in another post, I learned canning this year. We have also already eaten 4 jars of salsa and 4 jars of the pickles. I am thoroughly enjoying this garden!
At store prices, I’ve made $30 worth of salsa, $15 worth of spaghetti sauce, $5 worth of chili sauce and $10 worth of pickles. Meh, just $60, and I spent some to make it—especially considering that most of the jars were new this year—but still it’s better than 50% off, completely local, free of pesticide, no preservatives.
And very satisfying!
I added this article to WikiHow last year after I made my wife a birthday present. I’ll add in the pictures I took along the way.
How to Make a Ring from a Silver Coin
If you can spare the change and a little bit of time, you can create a simple ring from any silver coin. It’ll be cheaper than buying one, and it makes a more personal keepsake as well.
Steps
Tips
Warnings
Things You’ll Need
Mrs. Wages spice packets
I love Mrs. Wages. Don’t tell my wife.
Actually, I think my wife loves Mrs. Wages too.
I have harvested over 18 pounds of tomatoes so far this year from the back yard. I have also learned to do canning in glass jars! I’m very excited about having this skill now. It’s very comforting to know that I have not only saved the food I’ve grown from rotting unused in the kitchen, but that I’m not counting on the freezer to keep running either. These have all been labeled as experiments to see if our family likes the recipe.
I have canned:
By far my favorite thing has been the sweet pickles. I experimented with cucumber slices ranging in size from 3 inch shorties to a big 8 inch cucumber with semi-developed seeds. They all taste awesome, but I do like the smaller ones a bit better.
My wife’s favorite, and a close second for me, has been the salsa. It is truly awesome salsa and I can’t believe I made it myself! Then again, I’m pretty sure I’m not really allowed to take much credit because I used the Mrs. Wages spice pack.
Using the tomato based spice packets does add a significant cost to the tomato-based products. $2.25 per packet makes 5 quarts. I would spend less than half of that on spices if I used my own recipe.
The pickling packets make far more product…10 to 12 pints I think it said, so I’ll definitely continue to use those.
Oh! I canned up experimental jars of bread & butter Jalapeños and Banana Peppers. The sweet brine flavor was tasty, right at first, with the jalapenos, but then…FIRE! By *FAR* the hottest jalapenos I had ever tasted. I’m not going to have another one. They are HORRIBLE by themselves they are so hot.
By the way…aren’t the quarter-pint jelly jars just FUN? Too bad they cost the same as halves and full pints.
I went out to the garden and picked a whole bucket of stuff this morning! Green peppers, Jalapenos, Tomatoes, decorative mini-pumpkin gourds (yes, they are way too early, maybe I’ll try to dry them), cucumber (finally) and there is a whole bucket of green beans for the kids to pick today.
There is a lot left to pick…a bunch more green beans, a big cabbage, a bed of carrots, more peppers (4 kinds!), lots of tomatoes.
The one Jack-o-Lantern pumpkin is still growing bigger and showing no signs of starting to turn orange yet. It, too, will be done too early for halloween, but we’re going to try roasting the seeds!
Over the weekend we went out of town. I picked over the garden pretty well Friday night, harvesting zucchini, banana peppers and green beans. I left a 3 inch zucchini on the vine. When I checked that zucchini again Monday morning before work, the darn thing was already bigger than my forearm!!! Oops!
The watermelon seem to be growing bigger every day. I’m very excited about that because although I have tried growing them before, they haven’t ever given me anything edible before frost.
Still no cantaloupe set on that vine.
This year I planted 4 varieties of tomato. Gardener’s Delight cherry tomato, Super Marmande, Rutgers and Cold Set. I started them all from seed in March and along the way, one seedling cup lost it’s label. I guessed at what it was, and planted it with two other Rutgers.
Now that it has grown, it has set a large number of 3 inch pear-shaped green tomatoes. I didn’t plant a pear-shaped tomato seed…on purpose. I don’t even own a packet of this type of seed. Strange things are afoot in the backyard garden.
So what’s more likely? Do you think I got a random seed that was in the wrong packet, or do you think my seed came from a tomato that got cross-pollinated before it was saved?
Green plum tomato...not mine.
This picture isn’t from my garden…I found it here and used it without permission.
Thank you to Irish Sally Garden blog for this neat idea.
The blog mentions that a friend of theirs named Mary grows strawberries in the setup above. Lengths of gutter with a trickle hose fed down through the whole thing under the dirt. Each course is slanted down on purpose to aid drainage of excess water. It seems like a very interesting idea!
It comforts me that it’s real.
It totally freaks me out that it’s real.
In the north arctic part of Norway, there is now a fully functional doomsday seed vault. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds seeds just in case all this genetic engineering cross-pollinates us into having nothing fit to eat.
From the official site:
The world’s seed collections are vulnerable to a wide range of threats – civil strife, war, natural catastrophes, and more routinely but no less damagingly, poor management, lack of adequate funding, and equipment failures. Unique varieties of our most important crops are lost whenever any such disaster strikes, and therefore securing duplicates of all collections in a global facility provides an insurance policy for the world’s food supply.
The seed vault is an answer to a call from the international community to provide the best possible assurance of safety for the world’s crop diversity, and in fact the idea for such a facility dates back to the 1980s. However, it was only with the coming into force of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, and an agreed international legal framework for conserving and accessing crop diversity, that the seed vault became a practical possibility.
The vault is in a mountainside near the village of Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Svalbard is a group of islands nearly a thousand kilometres north of mainland Norway. Remote by any standards, Svalbard’s airport is in fact the northernmost point in the world to be serviced by scheduled flights – usually one a day. For nearly four months a year the islands are enveloped in total darkness. It is here that the Norwegian government has built the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, to provide this ultimate safety net for the world’s seeds.
Permafrost and thick rock will ensure that even without electricity, the samples will remain frozen. The vault’s construction has been funded by the Norwegian government as a service to the world community. The Global Crop Diversity Trust considers the vault an essential component of a rational and secure global system for conserving the diversity of all our crops. The Trust is therefore committed to supporting ongoing operational costs, and is assisting developing countries with preparing, packaging and transporting their representative seeds to the Arctic.
Some articles say that the site’s location is so thermally stable, that even if the globe gets much hotter and the A/C shuts off for 200 years, the freezers will still be frozen, just waiting for someone to go grab a packet of unmodified soy beans and start over again.
I just can’t believe that this project was taken seriously enough by people with the money and power to get it done. It’s not just a plan. (Burying nuclear waste in the desert in the southwest was just a plan, never actually done, just talked about for 20 years.) The seed vault is OPERATIONAL. Now.
I really hope they are just preparing for something they don’t expect here. I’d like to think if they knew something was coming they would tell us. 
Or maybe I really don’t want to know.
This article cites some of the negatives associated with this project:
The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage, that the Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally unjust. It takes seeds of unique plant varieties away from the farmers and communities who originally created, selected, protected and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible to them. The logic is that as people’s traditional varieties get replaced by newer ones from research labs – seeds that are supposed to provide higher yields to feed a growing population – the old ones have to be put away as “raw material” for future plant breeding. This system forgets that farmers are the world’s original, and ongoing, plant breeders. To access the seeds, you have to be integrated into a whole institutional framework that most farmers on the planet simply don’t even know about. Put simply, the whole ex situ strategy caters to the needs of scientists, not farmers
In addition, the system operates under the assumption that once the farmers’ seeds enter a storage facility, they belong to someone else and negotiating intellectual property and other rights over them is the business of governments and the seed industry itself. In the case of most so-called public genebanks, the seeds are said to become part of “the public domain” if not “national sovereignty” (which increasingly translates to state ownership). The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which runs about 15 global genebanks for the world’s most widely used staple food crops, has even set up a legal arrangement of “trusteeship” that it exercises over the treasure chest of farmers’ seeds that it holds “on behalf of” the international community, under the auspices of the FAO. Yet they never asked the farmers whom they took the seeds from in the first place if this was okay and they left farmers totally out of the trusteeship equation.
The new Svalbard Vault lies squarely at the pinnacle of this faulty architecture and false assumptions, inevitably exacerbating these problems. Because it is a “doomsday” backup collection, it raises the stakes to new extremes. Nobody really knows for sure if the Vault will be effective in keeping the seeds alive and its security is untested. Just days before the opening of the Vault, Svalbard was at the centre of the biggest earthquake in Norway’s history, even though the facility’s feasibility study assured that “there is no volcanic or significant seismic activity” in the area. But more troubling than any technical matter is the issue of access, the keys to which are held by few hands.
One group of 3 carrots that I pulled up today was caught bifurcating in a rather dirty looking way:
Carrot Sex?
The full scene
It is just your dirty mind.
P.S. For those keeping score, no, I don’t have my Canon Powershot S1 back yet…but I did get back the ZR-90 video camera and learn how to take crappy small photos onto it’s memory card. The battery is dead after sitting idle for 2 years, but indoors I can plug it in and take some pics.
