Magnolia still flowering…
On Thursday morning I was up at 6AM and got my post up. I folded some of the laundry and then finally headed to the Big garden to finish the weeding around 7:30AM.
I tried to start cleaning out the zucchini, but the Big quince had sprouted so many branches, I had to stop and prune it before I could continue. The zucchini cleaned up well but I don’t know if I will get much more off it.
Then I moved onto the summer squash. It was looking particularly bad. But once I got the left side cleaned up, I could see that there was another plant or vine (hard to tell) off to the right. That had been trying to overrun the cukes all summer and I’d kept pulling it off them.
One of the vines broke in the process and it had 2 or 3 tiny squash on it. But there were other squash on the plant so it’s not done yet.
Once those were done, I weeded the rest of the section and I was done.
It was very humid (the office humidity reading was pegged at 80%) and the temps were rising. I only planned to harvest tomatoes but when I got in there, I kept seeing blight so I was pulling that off. The plants were still doing really well so it was worth the effort.
I also deadheaded the row of basil and ended up weeding the tomato/pepper area. But then I saw clumps of grass elsewhere and pulled those up. But I didn’t do a proper weeding. I was having too much trouble breathing in the humidity.
I finally made my notes and got my photos and cleaned up and went in for a shower. I had to sit down for a long while. Then I got up and got a load in the dishwasher and had to sit down again.
I eventually got up for some lunch and my #4 helper arrived just after 1:30PM.
The mulch hay guy called and wanted to bring a load and we finally settled on 2PM. I could send my #4 helper on the errands while I was at the barn. So she went out and harvested the small amount of broccoli and then headed out when I headed to the barn.
There’s still room for 2 or 3 more loads as he only brings 20 bales at a time. Doing just that little in the heat and humidity pretty much finished me off.
I had to close up the 1st floor and turn the heat pumps on so I could breathe.
I did some research on freezing tomatoes whole, unblanched, and apparently you can do it for a month before too much damage occurs. I had taken all the ripe ones off the windowsill and put the new harvest on.
I didn’t think the ripe ones would last until I had enough to do spaghetti sauce. So we washed the ripe ones, cored them, and put them into ziplocks and into the freezer. Amazingly, I discovered the big cubby in the meat freezer was mostly empty so they went there.
I showed my #4 helper how to clean the broccoli that we had set to soak an hour before then went and sat down. We got it blanched and into the freezer.
She went around and made sure all the house plants were watered. I had collected the simple ingredients for a summer squash/chicken meatball supper and had her cook it.
She left around 5:45PM and I ate supper, fed the cat and sat and read until 7:45PM. I got the house opened up as the humidity was to blow away in the night and it was to become cool and nice for the next 2 days.
On Friday I hope to get out to the Small garden and finish the weeding there. My #3 helper comes at 12:30PM and I have no idea what she will be doing. The parsley from 2 days ago is sitting in water, so maybe we’ll get that into the dehydrator.
