Hey regs (all 3 of you). Slim pickings today



Farmer. I used Survival Garden Seeds cucumbers. And I’m growing more in September and the sweet success look very long, gigantic, and firm. kind of Like my uh, yunno my, ah nevermind !!!! Lol

So it’s fall in Florida weather for me this September. Looking for suggestions as what rise to grow. Sweet potatoes are sprouting too. I’ll get picture of them and of very my first little melon growing out, I named it “Melly”!

Got some peppers forming here and gooseberries are going absolutely ham

Well I said earlier in the thread when I got into my new house I'd start a little garden. Moved in last week, planted some okra, cilantro, jalapenos, and bell peppers on Sunday.

Woke up this morning and all 6 okra plants have sprouted!

Dang, I missed the updates. Mine's coming along. I just haven't snapped a picture for a while.

Glad your cucumbers are coming along. Just a word on that. I can only vouch for their quality for eating. I don't recommend them for anything else.

My pepper are still a ways out. You do anything with gooseberries? I had neighbors with them growing up and would eat them off the bush, but I think some people do jelly.

It's so satisfying when stuff pops up. Off to a good start.

Looking good Retoaded

This is our first year growing anything so will probably just eat them, Fukn love gooseberries

Garden upate:

Square foot garden is still producing.



Spinach has all gone to seed though. I've been pulling it to clear out space, but there's several still mixed in. Lettuce has been doing ok in the heat. Beets and carrots are coming along. I'll probably try some beets over the weekend and see if they're ready.

Lots of empty space here. I had a couple tomato plants die. The squash and cucumbers are still filling in the empty space but in another month this one will be mostly covered.



Same as above but from the other side:



Onions bottom left are doing great. Potatoes in the center. Squash on the left. The squash will fill all the empty space in a few weeks.

Corn patch with some other stuff on the sides:



Still really weedy. Just been tough to keep up this year. Had a stretch where we got behind and haven't been able to recover. We'll still have more than we can eat.

Finally got the corn cleaned up. Opposite direction as above, but you can see we pulled a bunch of weeds.



Ate our first beets. We just steam them, and they are one of my favorite vegetables.

Pickled beets are good af, you have so much different stuff growing

Almost everything is growing well in my yard, raspberries are taking off


Blackberries


Different type of gooseberry


Picked up an Evans sour cherry tree, choke cherry, weeping cutleaf birch


So on this one side have the raised garden, four apple trees, one sour cherry, two elms, one chokecherry, and two Siberian larches

Lookin good. I need to get serious about getting some fruit trees in. I've been a little lazy because my parents live around the corner and have all the apples we can eat. There were also plums on the property before I built my house, although I think they mostly all got caught by a late frost.

Berries are looking good. Do you have trouble starting them without fencing around them? That really hasn't been a problem for me. I'm in the process of starting grapes and have a decent blackberry bush. I started the grapes last year and the blackberries a couple years before. Both really got set back by last winter. It was just a long cold winter and I had quite a bit die back. Both doing great now so I'm hoping to get some good growth and less die back next winter.

Square foot gardens are doing good. Lettuce is about done and I need to clean it out. I'll probably plant more in a few weeks. Beets are getting good, we're eating them a couple times a week now. Haven't pulled any carrots yet, but I'll bet we can start any time. Dill is looking good (lower right), which is good because we'll need it for pickles soon.



Zuchini in front is a little scraggly but producing. Tomatoes on left have green ones but nothing ripe yet. Cucumbers on the right are producing well.



Winter squash coming along. This one's a burgess buttercup. Probably our favorite variety. I like to grow winter squash because they keep well. We do better using produce when we're not on a tight timetable.



Vounteer squash plant of some sort. Not sure what it is yet (maybe spaghetti squash). It just came up on it's own. It's not in a great spot, but I let it go because I was curious. Potatoes and onions in the back.



Onions on the other side. Ready to start eating.



Corn patch with pumpkins on the left.



Boston picklers. The cucumbers above are our slicing cucumbers and they're ahead of these by a couple weeks. These are loaded with blossoms though so we'll have bunch soon and it will be time to get out the canning supplies.

so got some flies and caterpillars going HAM on my Okra. wat do? read to spray it with water with a tiny amount of dish soap mixed in?

everything else has sprouted now too and going well, no pests bothering anything else but they love the okra plants.

Bump for Katya maybe? Water with soap sounds reasonable and safe. When I have bug problems I start with weaker solutions and then amp up if they don't work.

I don't have any experience with Okra. Most of the stuff I grow doesn't have much trouble with bugs other than potatoes. Usually, I just get a few potato beetles and I just ignore them or brush them off. Once every couple years, I'll have potato beetles bad and then I just dust the plants with insecticide. I tell myself it's fine because it's on the plant and not the part you eat, but I don't know if that's true. I try to stay organicish, but I'm not a purist.

List of things I ate from the garden this past weekend: swiss chard, cucumbers, potatoes, string beans, carrots, beets, zucchini, yellow, summer squash, and onions. Corn is a couple weeks out. Peppers and tomatoes are getting close. I think next weekend we will be ready to do a batch of pickles.

Beets and first carrots of the year:

Been such a slacker lately. Haven't weeded anything for weeks. My wife has been putting enough water on things to keep them alive. We just got busy for a stretch. Regular summertime family stuff, which is great, the garden just suffers. We're eating most stuff now. Winter squash is still a couple months out, but we'll be eating corn within a week:



Really need to get my racoon traps out. This is about the time they start to get into it, and they can really make a mess.

Pickling cucumbers are starting to come on strong. Probably need to can a batch this weekend. In the past week I've eaten zucchini, yellow squash, onions, beets, string beans, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and potatoes from the garden.

Pickles in the water bath for canning:



We'll be eating corn later this week. Almost everything is ripe now, although the tomatoes are just coming on and we're still waiting on the brussel sprouts. With the corn getting close I put out traps to try and keep raccoons out of it and caught one the first night I had them out. I talked to my dad later that day and he told me his corn had been hit that night, with a couple pieces of corn eaten. He put out a trap last night and caught two in one trap.

I planted grape last year. They had decent growth before winter, but last winter was a doozy and they died back to the roots. For a bit this spring I wondered if they would come back, but they did. I have three plants:



Hopefully I'll have some graps next year. Kind of the same story with my blackberries. Blackberries produce on the canes that grew the previous year. Mine has been established for a couple years now, but pretty much the whole plant died back last winter so I didn't think I'd get any berries this year. There must have been a few twigs that survived. I don't have a ton of berries, but I do have a few.



It will still be a bit before they are ripe.

U mirin' this morning's cucumber haul:



Tomatoes in the back were picked yesterday. Counter's messy from my wife's most recent Costco trip. And, yes, we do drink at least 6 gallons of milk a week. Ate fresh corn from the garden for dinner last night (first of the year). Harvest season has arrived at my house. I bring a cucumber and a carrot for lunch every day, and we will have something from the garden with every meal from here until the first hard frost in late September or early October.

My "northern" variety of corn in on. The honey 'n pearl is getting close but still has a week or so to go. We had a bunch ripe this weekend and we usually process and freeze it to eat through the year, but it was a busy Saturday so we turned my middle son loose to sell on the side of the road. My wife posted it on ******** marketplace and my son sold about 80 ears in a couple hours. Pickling cucumbers are really producing now:



That was half of what I picked yesterday. My kids' favorite pickle recipe from last year is this one:

https://foodchannel.com/recipes/ball-dill-pickle-spears

We have the cucumbers doing the 24-hour salt brine soak and plan to can them this evening.

Pickles yesterday. After soaking for 24 hours:



15 quarts canned, using the recipe linked above:

Last Saturday was our day for processing corn.

I picked it:





I grabbed around 100 to 115 ears. The kids shucked it and fed the husks to the cows. Then we trim up any bad spots. Worms get in the tips of the ears sometimes and we had more of that than usual this year. Then we boil it for 4 minutes, then 4 minutes in an ice bath. Then we cut it off using serrated electric knives. This is what we ended up with:



We scoop it into freezer bags and freeze it. My wife said it measured out to about 86 cups and says it's about what we use in a year. Also did another batch of pickles yesterday - 17 quarts so we're up to 43 for the year. I think we're done with pickles. An even 50 wouldn't be bad but the kids are getting into fall sports and we're just going to be short on time. I always feel a little guilty just letting the plants go and not picking them, but it is what it is.

My biggest annoyance right now is the caterpillars eating my brussel sprouts. Some of my plants have just been destroyed. Yesterday I must have pulled 25 off one of them by hand. I do try hard not to use pesticides on leafy greens close to harvest, but I think some of my plants have been damaged enough they probably won't produce anyway so I might just dust those for revenge. I get a little irrationally angry when my plants get destroyed by bugs.

Update here

Apple trees




Sour cherry tree


Non-edible but friggin sweet Autumn Blaze maple


Berry bushes, three types of raspberries + blackberries + gooseberries, these were twigs not long ago

Also look at this fukn caterpillar I spotted on one of the maples

Dang, that is one fat caterpillar. Way fatter than anything I've seen.

Your trees and berries are looking great, too. I'm crossing my fingers that this winter won't be as bad as last year and my blackberries and grapes can have a little momentum going into next year.

You're in the US right, are you in a spot that gets bad winters?

Definitely entirely possible our blackberries won't survive the winter but will see, hopefully they and everything else makes it because this has been a crapton of effort

Yeah, I'm in the US. My USDA plant hardiness zone is 5a (-20 to -15 °F/-28.9 to -26.1 °C). Last winter our extreme cold temperature was on the colder end but generally in line with normal, but it was a pretty brutal winter. December temperatures hit in November, and it pretty much just stayed cold until April. My grapes and blackberries died back to the roots but did come up again. A lot of trees around the area didn't survive the winter.

Blackberries were limited this year. Most of last year's canes didn't survive the winter. We got a few though:



Blackberries picked at peak ripeness are so juicy and sweet.

First frost is usually between the middle and end of September so our growing season is getting to an end. We still have a bit of corn. Kids will probably sell it this weekend. We have lots of tomatoes, including cherry:



Lots of peppers:



And pumpkins are turning orange. The squashy looking volunteer plant that I mentioned way back at the beginning of the summer turned out to be a pumpkin plant:

Picked plums over the weekend. Didn't get a bunch, maybe 20-25. The weather this spring wasn't great for them.



Corn is done, but we are still eating a lot of other vegetables. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers are still producing well, but probably just for another couple weeks.

Winding down for the year here, just dropped a lot of fertilizer and overseeded the lawn as well

3 plants x 3 types of raspberries that started out as twigs (one still is)









Blackberries


Gooseberry


Maples

Winding down here, although we haven't had a frost yet so most things are still growing. Last night we had cucumbers, carrots, cherry tomatoes, squash, and beets from the garden with dinner.

Carrots:


Also picked pumpkins this last weekend:


Could have a frost any time now.

We have a hard frost coming up this week so we started bringing in the last of it.

Spuds:


We've been eating them all summer, but dug up what was left.

Onions:


We still have a bunch of carrots and beets to dig up. Squash and pumpkins were brought in a week ago. We still have tomatoes growing, but they'll just make it another night or two. I need to take some time to enjoy my last good tomatoes until next summer.