Tromboncino squash

The tromboncino squash are starting to come on strongly - just as the older leaves are starting to decline, first yellowing and then looking ratty, and finally dying. Most unattractive for a front garden trellis. So I've been spending some time 'grooming' the vines. Hmm. At least the scarlet runner...

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Weeding

Back home in the Piedmont for a couple of days, I devoted time to tidying the main vegetable garden and satellite garden for fall planting.  "Tidying" is a wimpy word for the weeding involved, but happily, enough recent rain has left the soil pliant enough for easy pulling of even the Italian dandelion volunteers (from an original plant that I had deliberately cultivated years ago).What was I...

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Tomato harvest

The freezer is starting to fill with roasted tomatoes.  It's a couple of trays each day.  It's maybe not the most energy-efficient way to preserve tomatoes, but they're tasty.  We came through this year with only two small bags remaining from last year's harvest, before the onslaught...

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Blogging with an iPad

No, I'm not on an iPad currently, but I'm interested in being able to travel with my iPad and camera on an upcoming trip, and doing an occasional blog post, without dragging along a laptop. I hadn't realized that the Blogger interface wasn't really iPad-friendly until I tried it.  It's not. There wasn't a way to upload photos via the browser interface.  Hmm. What's the point of that?That's...

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Cherry tomatoes

I've been harvesting tomatoes for weeks now -- big Cherokee Purple and Pineapple heirloom tomatoes, small plum tomatoes, and a hybrid Pompeii Roma tomato.  The Pineapple tomato is a yellow tomato, and quite tasty (MUCH better than the equally productive Garden Peach variety that I grew last year).But...

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Okra swales

I started growing okra a couple of years ago because it does so well in our summer heat. But it does best with some extra irrigation. To make irrigation (over and above the automatic irrigation) easy, I build swales just like I do for squash vines and plant the okra around the edges. First step...

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Heliopsis helianthoides

Hmm, this is a test post to see if traveling with an iPad, camera, iPad camera connector, Blogsy, and Picasa web albums might actually work. I don't know yet if my venerable Nikon D100 will work with the camera connector, nor is writing especially fluid on an iPad, but it certainly would be nice not...

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