On Wednesday morning I woke feeling almost normal-for-me again. I worked on photos and then got ready at 6:30AM to go out to the Big garden to finish it.
When I went to put my stuff by my sitting chair, I was fed up with the magnolia branches trying to take my hat off. So I got a big sled and started cutting them up away from my hat. The sled was soon filled to twice capacity. But my hat was again safe.
I’ve never seen so many fruit on the magnolia as this year. There’s at least 100 if not more.
I needed to check the green beans to see if there were any worth harvesting. To my surprise, there was enough of quality to warrant doing it. Before I finished picking, my general helper arrived at 7AM. I set her to cleaning out the mesclun beds, getting a lot of the seed heads out.
Once I finished the beans, I moved to the peppers and tomatoes. I needed to trim off blighty or too low leaves and tie them up higher. There were lots of medium small bell peppers coming along and lots of the Hungarian paprikas.
I found the first red tomato, but not quite all ripe. She had finished the Mesclun and moved onto cleaning up and harvesting the artichokes.
She’d gotten 9 and I had 4 for supper, the oldest ones.
We moved onto the north end of the garden. I had planned to pull off the bug eaten outer leaves of the cabbages, but soon realized that they might just be protecting the heads from the slugs. There was no slug damage on the heads, unlike the outer leaves. So I left the cabbages alone. I will soon have to harvest them for sauerkraut, but I’m putting it off as long as I can, so the sauerkraut will last longer into the winter.
So we both tackled the comfrey. There were a lot of runners outside the bed and I’d planned to transplant them to the Little Trees II area. But that area was full. So we ended up pulling them out. I got a lot of the dead comfrey out also.
I had to go sit down for a while so my general helper tackled getting the weeds, etc out from behind the propane tank. I decided to leave the horseradish and rhubarb alone, as they weren’t too bad and had the grass removed earlier.
The dill had done very well but I found no swallowtail caterpillars on any of the stalks.
We had finally finished the Big garden and just had to deal with the pea fences.
In the past we had laid them down to clean them off, but I wondered if standing them up between the gardens would work better. It certainly was easier.
We soon had all 3 cleaned and rolled tightly for storing in the peak if the garden shed. With the 8’ ladder and a few little acrobatics, my general helper was able to get them all hung up. That was the last outside job for that garden.
Back inside we had the pectin to deal with. She brought the Squeezo back upstairs and we ran the apple-quince pumice through it. Then we added more water and reheated it and put it back in the buttercloth. This time that was the right one.
I got more liquid out and I’m hoping it reduces down into pectin. I’m keeping the 2 batches separate in case the 2nd is a bust. I’ll have to process it on Thursday.
She left once we’d cleaned up the mess and I went to rest and eat lunch. I got a 2 hour nap and eventually got started on the green beans.
About a third of them were too old but I got enough to put in the freezer. I finished about 6PM.
The dying cat gets fed right at 6AM and 6PM every day, not a second earlier. Of course, there’s always the crazy theatrics of a dying cat who is never fed, for about an hour beforehand. So he was doing his usual when I realized he was really pouncing on something. Precisely at 6PM he had caught a mouse.
He was quite proud of himself and I told him he’d done a good job, got a nice mousie. I did later distract him with supper, once it was dead. But he had a great time playing with it afterwards until my brother came down and took it away to toss over the bank outside.
On Thursday I hope to finish the Small garden as it doesn’t need much. Then move onto the New Herb garden and weed the 3 rows I’d done over a month ago. My helper friend will be here at noon and I plan to make @sunscape’s zucchini fritters, finally. I also have to process the pectin.
Another hot humid day, as we didn’t get enough rain Wednesday evening to change anything.