Summer visitor

Taken in the zinnia bed early this morning. 

Wrapping up the (summer) garden

My summer 2025 garden is officially done. With the exception of the pepper plants (that are still cranking out a few peppers here and there) we've harvested everything. Yesterday we pulled up and discarded the worn-out plants and gave everything an initial tidy up. I know those of you from even slightly more northerly climes are probably scratching your heads right now, so let me explain. By this point in the summer, the intense heat and humidity have started doing a number on pretty much all vegetable plants. Our last frost date is early April, so we plant out very early. The plants have been growing and producing for three months already, and now with day after day of sweltering heat, they're just giving up the ghost.  I don't blame them. I'd be ready to die out in this heat day and night, too! Plus, the f*cking stinkbugs have shown up and tried their best to attack and ruin the last of the tomatoes. (I seriously hate them, much more than the hornworms which are much easier to control). 

So anyway, the garden is mostly kaput. I've kept careful notes, and this morning I sat down to "compile my data" :) Here are my results and takeaways from this year's garden.

Tomatoes:

This is always the most important part of the garden to me. I love good tomatoes eaten fresh, and when there's extra there are lots of things you can do with them. Since I really hoped to have some extra this year to can, I tried something different. Instead of growing all heirlooms (which taste great but often struggle with production in this climate) I divided my tomato-growing space in half: room for 8 heirloom indeterminate plants that I started from seed, and 5 bushy young determinate plants I bought at Lowe's. Determinates, of course, set a lot of fruit all at once, early in the season, and then they're done. Perfect for having big batches of canning tomatoes that are ready by the time our hellish South Carolina heat scorches the garden! Check out my results:

Determinates

Bush Goliath: 

2 plants, 

28 individual fruits

Total: 10.55 pounds

Better Bush:

1 plant

10 individual fruits

Total: 2.61 pounds

Heatmaster:

1 plant

11 individual fruits 

2.86 pounds

Roma:

1 plant

24 individual fruits

5.05 pounds

Determinates

Eva Purple Ball

3 plants

43 individual fruits

10.05 pounds

Hillbilly Potato Leaf

3 plants 

8 individual fruits

2.95 pounds

Berkeley Tie Dye

2 plants

14 individual fruits

2.45 pounds

All told, I ended up with 36.5 pounds of tomatoes! And that's not counting the one cherry tomato plant that's given us probably around 2 pounds of fruit (I didn't keep track of those)

Yesterday I also finished up some canning and preserving!  I'd already made 6 12-oz jars of salsa and 6 half pint jars of pickled mixed peppers, and I added 2 12-oz jars of pickled jalapenos and 2 12-oz jars of pickled cowhorn peppers. I also whipped out the dehydrator and made a big jar of dried tomato slices and dried cherry tomatoes. I also dried some tiny, fiery tabasco peppers and crushed them into a jar for pepper flakes.

Picked early to save from stinkbugs, put to ripen on the windowsill. 

In the dehydrator...

Hooray! Ready to squirrel away for winter!

Sadly, these are the last of my (homegrown) slicing tomatoes for this year, along with some zinnias I cut for a centerpiece. 

One of these tomatoes will be sliced within the hour to top cheeseburgers we're cooking on the grill.

Family ties

There's a small herd of deer that live in our neighborhood. Since we're close to a creek and a city-maintained system of hiking/nature trails, there's no shortage of wildlife to see, but the deer are the most familiar. They come out most nights as the sun is setting, and since we usually walk the dogs around that time, we see them pretty regularly. Usually they'll freeze if we walk past them and as long as we're not too close, they won't run. Even the dogs have learned to be very quiet so as not to scare them. 

Last year a female deer kept showing up in our front yard with two little fawns. It was the cutest thing, but I never managed to get a photo. This year, another female (or maybe the same one) has been coming around, but this time she has just one baby, and a young male is often with them.

The other night, I happened to look out the spare bedroom window at dusk and the little family was back! I grabbed my phone and took a picture, and although it's not very clear (taken on a zoomed-in phone camera, through a window and screen, at dusk...) I really, really like the shot:

Doesn't it look like mom and dad are kissing, with the baby between them? 

I sent that photo to my niece, Melissa. I knew she would love it. In return she texted me photos of an "owl family" who live near her home on Whidbey Island. 

We miss Melissa. She flew to the East Coast for a visit last fall and drove down from Raleigh to spend a day with us. We love her and it's so rare to actually get to see her in person these days, that I nearly cried when she had to leave after a few short hours. I'm grateful, though, that she makes time to see me and her "cool uncle Gregg" (her words) whenever she's on this side of the continent. We have so few family members left these days, and the ones we love best are spread out all over the country.

Getting the job done

I don't feel much like celebrating my country today, but I wanted to share this song with you from the brilliant Lin Manuel Miranda. 

THIS is a big part of what truly "makes America great".

In my summer kitchen

It's my summer vacation! I've been off since Thursday afternoon and I don't go back until next Monday. It's nice to have some time away from work, even when you like your job as much as I do.

I've been busy. I blogged about my new stainless-steel cookware the other day, and several of you asked me to let you know what I think of it. Well, I love it! I'm really glad I took the time to research how to properly use and care for stainless steel, because I've had zero problems! It cooks like a dream, and I've had zero issues with food sticking. The first thing I made was braised short ribs, and they turned out great but it's way too hot for such heavy food. Speaking of hot in the kitchen, and the new pans..

I've taken this from my garden:

 

And this:

And turned it all into this:

I'm ridiculously proud of these jars of salsa and pickled peppers!

Sweltering

It's disgustingly hot here this week. High temps around 100F with heat index (real feel) values of around 110F. When I got in my car yesterday afternoon at 3pm, this is what my dashboard thermometer registered:

The actual temperature wasn't quite this high. This is the result of my car sitting and baking in a mostly empty parking lot with no trees and no shade while I'm at work. I think it was really more like 101...still awful. The humidity makes it 1000x worse. Then there was today...

It's like getting into a furnace to drive home. 

Tonight is supposed to be the last night of this heatwave, and as I'm typing this at 6:30pm a nasty looking storm is brewing outside. There have been warnings all afternoon that there's lots of "storm fuel" in the atmosphere after three days of such heat. There's a threat of hail, high winds (that's already happening), dangerous lightning (I hope not), and torrential rain.

I'll be glad for the rain, at least, and a return to normal summer temperatures tomorrow will be most welcome.

Crossing my fingers!

Anniversary gift

My new cookware arrived yesterday! It's so shiny and pretty that I took a picture after I finished unpacking everything. It's not a great photo but I'll share it anyway.

Now it's time to actually use them and I'm a bit nervous. Cooking on stainless steel is going to be a learning curve, but I've watched enough YouTube tutorials on the subject that I feel like I can probably do okay. I'm hoping the quality of my cooking goes up with better tools to work with!

I debated about the first meal I wanted to make with them, and this morning I decided: braised beef short ribs in red wine sauce. I went to the butcher shop down the road and bought two pounds of beautiful short ribs. I sure hope I don't screw them up, because the price was eye-watering. :)  I plan to pair them with basmati rice, green beans from the garden, and slices of fresh tomatoes, also from the garden.

I'll report back tomorrow on how everything turns out! Wish me luck!

From the garden this week

The garden is in full swing, and it's turning out to be a good year for tomatoes. I'm glad I planted some sturdy hybrid determinate types, because they're early and produce a lot of fruit all at once. With the exception of one tiny rain-split Berkeley Tie Dye (middle top on the first photo) all of the tomatoes I've gotten so far have been determinates. But! My eight heirloom plants are also loaded with fruit but taking forever to start ripening. Soon!

Here's what I've picked over the last four or five days:

We've also picked a LOT of green beans; this is just a small handful I got the other day. 

Still going strong.

There are about a dozen cucumbers in the fridge at the moment, but now the vines are almost worn out. It's turning out to be a disappointing year for cucumber production, but I'd rather have a bounty of tomatoes anyway. Last year there were a ton of cucumbers, but the tomatoes did diddly-squat. Now that's disappointing.

So, on to peppers! I haven't picked any yet, because I like to wait until they're mostly orange and red, but there are tons and tons of Jalapenos, Serranoes, Cowhorns, Cayennes, Poblanos, Tabascos, and Giant Marconi peppers...

 

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These pretty Tabasco peppers are our favorite, just for the beauty of the plant. It's hard to get a good photo of them because it's such a low, compact plant. 

And when someone named these peppers "Giant Marconi", they weren't lying! Look at the size of those monsters!

Cowhorns.