Wednesday, June 6, 2018

post vacation chores


Well, that was exhausting. And time consuming. What I've done since is try and use up the bounty from the garden. I'm a slow cook so it has taken me three days to make a peach pie, enough eggplant parmesan to feed us two nights and put enough in the freezer for two nights, a quart and a pint of tomato sauce, and 24 oz of crushed tomatoes I used for enough eggplant bolognese for tonight and more. Also I blanched 9 ears of corn but didn't get the kernels cut off and packaged for the freezer yet. Not my corn but from the corn guy at the market. Insurance in case mine does zilch. Today zucchini is on the menu. This recipe has the zucchini slow cooking for 4 hours!

I've been conducting a pitched battle with the stink bugs since my return. They are greatly diminished but many of the fruit had already been injected. Marc was great on watering but not so great bug maintenance. One of the reasons anything to do with tomatoes has taken a lot of time (and everything to do with eggplant and zucchini seems to involve tomatoes) is cutting out the stink bug damage which in some cases was the whole fruit. Not to mention the 15 or so of fruit affected by blossom end rot which I tossed into the yard at large before I read that the rest of the fruit was fine, just cut the damage off. Oh well. Not nearly the harvest that we had last year which was so bountiful it was ridiculous. But then we lost most of what I froze for future use during the flood. The zucchini, on the other hand, is doing the best it's ever done.



Minnie lays in the shade of the corn while I'm weeding and watering and stuff

Emma, in her passive aggressive way, has decided that Minnie's bed is just right for a nap

The yard needs so much attention since I was gone for 3 weeks but have I mentioned how hot it is here? Hot. Brutal. August hot. And it hasn't rained for weeks. We had a long mild spring which gave us hope that summer would start slow. Wrong. About a week after I left temps jumped up in the 90s and have stayed there pretty much since, the heat index even creeping into triple digits. Early morning and late evening is tolerable.

Rocky is back on the job. He got all the tile cut for the bathroom, hall, and closet floors and the floor of the shower and started to set the tile.

we decided after laying it out that it needed two rows of blue





11 comments:

  1. Looks a lot like my place except that I've already given up on the tomatoes. Shower tiling seems to be a project which will last until infinity. I'm already sick of summer and it hasn't actually gotten here yet. Last night I told my husband I was ready to move out of Florida and he said, "It's hard to move a tribe."
    Hard. Not impossible. Jesus. I'm too old for this heat and the bugs. And the hurricanes. And...you know.

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    1. he's right about that. the main thing I took away from my vacation was I could live there. I could easily live in Portugal, cash out and move, but I'd have to convince the whole family to move too.

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  2. We seem to have sucked away decent weather. Actually, too damn cold for me. Sixty on a summer morning is inexcusable! You do have a lot of garden to deal with, and are moving at my speed. Do tell more about stink bug injecting plants. I despise the little bastids, but our problem is in crawl spaces and clothing in closets.Smash them and there is a stain, not to mention stink!

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    1. they inject an enzyme into the tomatoes to feed which causes weird white spots and hard knots in the fruit. mostly I have leaf footed bugs, close relatives to the stink bugs. reading up one reason they are so bad this year is that I didn't redo the space around and between my raised beds after the flood washed all the hay and weed cloth away and it is filled with weeds giving them shelter. I've been spraying them with insecticidal soap.

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  3. Like that pup in the corn, hope she isn't a digger.

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  4. Oh garden pests. Nearly impossible and so are the deer. We have the entire garden and other beds covered in that orange building whatever. It is ugly.

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  5. Gardening is all out warfare most of the time. Us vs. insects, nature, lack of time. Still, there is nothing like a tomato plucked warm out of the garden, is there? I think (hope) I have quit channeling a 1930s prairie housewife vis a vis my canning urges. Last year I came to my senses and only canned small batches of things. I'm still working on 2014 canned tomatoes. I believe they have a nuclear life. I bet it will be nice to have all the repairs and redos finished.

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  6. Stink bugs, fortunately, are not something we deal with here. I didn't know they "inject" vegetables. Bleah! Hope you get lots of edible food nonetheless. Sounds like you're reaping a bountiful harvest!

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  7. As usual, you're industry makes me tired! Ha! I'm afraid to say this (and I wish I could write it in a tiny whispery font), but we haven't seen any stink bugs in a while. That's good, because we have enough other insects who can't remember that they want to live outside. We spend half the time shooing things out of the door.

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  8. WE just started harvesting tomatoes, got there just in time before the slugs. And just discovered the first stink bugs, too. So, no more weekends away until the harvest is in, says he.

    I like that bathroom tile job.

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I opened my big mouth, now it's your turn.