Garden Update: September

Oh September, you arrive and leave so much quicker than I am ready for. How can 30 days pass so quickly? September is full on harvest time. Peppers are coming in by the bushel, tomatoes are ripening, corn is drying down, stones fruits are falling from the trees and need to be processed immediately or they rot. And of course all the melons start to ripen and you have to eat a melon a day. Such a hard job!

This passed weekend I harvested all the Big Jim peppers and the tomatillos and roasted them for salsa verde. But because there were a dozen other things to do, we froze them and they’ll come out another day to made into the most delicious fresh salsa.

Back in August we harvested the onions. They’ve finally dried down and I cleaned them all up, separated the ones that flowered, which won’t store, from the ones that didn’t, which will store right on through April or even May, if we manage to make them last that long.

Occasionally my work and puttering will garner the attention of my little garden buddy who very much wanted the world to see her favorite color of flower, Pink. Every pink flower we have is the best one.

She also wanted to eat a carrot while I was harvesting peppers and so I pulled out the one she wanted and it turned out to be three carrots all wrapped up together. I’ve really got to make thinning a priority next season!

For those of you interested in our corn breeding project. Here’s a little peak at that. I had no idea at the time, but my most popular post and most popular pin on Pinterest is of our corn harvest last year of all things.

I think people are intrinsically called to the beauty of anthocyanin. We use the purple corn as filler for any of the corn seeds in our breeding project that don’t germinate.

Now that the nights and soon the days will be getting much colder soup is starting to be our meal of choice again. That means celery is back on the menu. Have you ever seen how green celery is before it gets blanched? I quite like the verdant flavor of the celery before blanching. You only need one stalk to get a huge amount of flavor. Once we harvest the celery, I like to dry a lot of the leaves and then crush them into small bits to use in soups and stews as added herbs.

We’ve been experimenting with growning our own grains. I love making bread every few days and I’ve always wanted to bring that process full circle and actually grow the wheat myself. So I can truly say I know what it takes to make a loaf of bread. That story will have to wait until next summer, but growing grains is kind of like falling down the rabbit whole. Much like having an herb garden. There are so many incredible varieties of wheat and ancient grains. The one pictured above is called triticale. I’m pretty much in love with this little known grain. Little know to the general public anyway. It’s super easy to grow, heat and drought tolerant, grows super tall and from one seed your get like 30 seed heads that have around 50-60 grains in them. That to me is very, very worth it. And the grass hoppers don’t seem to love it as much as they do wheat, which is a huge bonus.

Last, but not least, we’ve had a huge boom in the praying mantis population. This lovely lady posed for a photo op for me.

Thanks for sticking with me this long! How is your garden doing? Leave a comment below, I’d love to know what things are coming along in your neck of the world.