Gardening Thread- Show me your gardens!

For sure. Fresh fridge pickles are great. They're always crisp as opposed to canning them where if you're not careful you get mushy pickles (and nobody wants that)

 

Fridge pickled eggs are another favorite of mine. Especially with some malt vinegar thrown in there. Mmmmmm......

 

Stunning garden! But you are selling us short. I have been eating out of my garden in Vancouver since April.

 

LOL
thanks!!
my apologies.
Let me correct that, growing in MY part of Canada can be challenging and short. Yes, tropical west is much nicer than the dead prairies.

 

Yeah, Vancouver's a totally different climate than Alberta. April in Alberta involves snow. April in Vancouver mostly just involves lots and lots of rain.

 

SOOO Dry.
Haven't had even a single drop of rain at my place in 3 weeks. None forecast until maybe this weekend, either. My garden water totes ran completely bone dry this weekend, and I spent the last two weeks watering just enough to keep things from drooping. Now I'm using the well to do it instead, lol. Everything's pretty much stalled, no new growth that I can see. At this point we need 3-4 days of steady solid rain to bring everything back. My lawn's so dry that it crunches under your feet when you walk across it.
All of the weeds are flourishing, though.

 

Ugh, was waiting for some time to start canning my tomatoes. Went to go pick a bunch yesterday and 50%+ were mush because of some little fucking yellow Beatles. Anyone have a remedy for them that isn't a pestacide?

 

All yellow, or were they stripey with spots on their heads like this?
Colorado Potato Beetle:


Or like this:

Cucumber beetle:

 

More like the cucumber one but spotted.

And here it is. It is a cucumber beatle.

http://www.insectidentification.org/insect-description.asp?identification=Spotted-Cucumber-Beetle

 

Well at this point your options are fairly limited. You can pick 'em clean, you can sprinkle some Sevin dust on there and kill them all off (which will also kill your pollinators), you can try vacuuming them up, putting out sticky pads, etc.
Once you get rid of them you can put some row covers on there to help protect them, but that also blocks access to your pollinators.
One thing you can try next year (probably too late to save your plants this year) is to plant a 'trap crop' to try to lure them away.

 

I canned 35 jars of pickles in the span of two weeks.

 

LOL... can't help but to chuckle thinking about an old Andy Griffith episode.

 

Dust the plants and spread around them with DE. http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/1531412/diatomaceous-earth-pets-and-cucumber-beetles

 

Few more pics.
It's a small garden but plentiful!

 

Well, possibly thanks to all of the rain we had last week nearly all of my tomatoes came ripe within a few days of each other.
Picked a bunch of blackberries too, and had to do some canning.





Got 23 pints of Spaghetti/Pizza sauce:


And 30 half pints of Blackberry jelly:

 

do you keep the jam with or without seeds?

 

Without, mostly.
Running the berries a couple of times through the hand-crank processor in picture 3 gets all of the juice and only a couple of the seeds.
Honestly that little processor has more than paid for the $50 I spent on it with time & work it has saved me. It strips tomato seeds and skins while giving you 100% of the juice and pulp, and does nearly as well on blackberries and raspberries. It saves you having to peel and core apples for applesauce, because as long as you quarter and steam the apples first it'll do everything else for you, and you get all of the edible part of the apple. It took me all of 20 minutes to completely process that entire table of tomatoes, from washing, quartering, and separating the seeds and skins from the pulp.

I love blackberry jelly, but it's such a pain to separate the seeds by hand that I never used to bother. Now I make a ton of it every year and have extra to give away as gifts at Christmas, and it's almost 100% seedless.

 

yeah we have one of those too...works pretty good IMO..

 

I'm not normally one to 'plug' a product, but I'll sing praises about that one to anybody I know who cans. Makes the whole process SOOOOO much faster and easier.

 

What brand is that? Does that say Roma?


Edit: I see it at the bottom of the page.