Fall pictures and thoughts
Finally I remembered to take my camera to the garden yesterday. I wanted to share how the garden is progressing. We are all really enjoying the greens now. Turnips, Mustards, Tat soi, radishs, kohlrabi, beet greens, lettuces, arugula. I think the Misato Rose radish is so pretty I wanted everyone to see it before I put it in last nite’s salad. I also had to show you the beautiful immature pumpkin I used like zuchinni in last nite’s Ratatouille.
The stuff in the high tunnel is really taking off. We are having a problem with grasshoppers in there eating leaves. Does anyone have any experience as to what to do about that? We are experimenting with the little low tunnels too. Thankfully Bill and I got the plastic on wed before we had some really hard frost. Saturday morning was around 22 degrees. We didn’t loose any of our greens thank goodness. I’m really enjoying new recipes for using end of the yr produce abundance. My fav’s so far are Green tomato chutney, pepper jelly, and chicken stirfry with lots of peppers. I plan to try canning Pepper relish today or tomorrow. Sue at LMU
I never thought of using an immature pumpkin as a zucchini!
HI Sue. Have you tried hot pepper spray on the leaves? I am working on making pepper spray from the overabundance of habanero peppers we had at the BSCTC garden as an income generator project. It is supposed to deter leaf eaters without chemicals.
What a great idea, Sr. KC!
There are a lot of people who say it works and a lot who say it doesn’t. You could go ahead and make a powder from the peppers (very carefully!) and then add a little water, strain out the excess materials and freeze it through the winter so that it doesn’t lose any potency from sitting in room temperature until then. Then, you could thaw it out in the spring, add a little liquid soap to make it stick to the leaves, and bottle it! If you did try to sell it, I’d be very careful since those peppers can do a lot of damage to folks when they get in the eyes. Maybe big labels with warning signs would suffice? Hope this helps.