August Gardening

Here we are one week to go in August. The weather has been really hot and dry. The forest fires are terrible. Aprox 600 and they are all around us. The smoke in the air is so thick it makes it difficult to do anything outside. Yesterday was a good day and we could see the mountains. Not so much today. It has been a lot worse. Currently there is a fire burning at Deer Park/Syringa area they have been evacuated. Salmo/Creston Hwy 3 the Fire is burning along the highway and it closes intermittently. There is one burning at Kokanee on the New Denver side. They have closed Idaho Peak lookout and surrounding trails. There is one between Grand Forks and Trail that crossed the US border. A lot of these areas are really hard to get to and all the firefighters can do is protect people and buildings. The rest just burns. The smoke is so thick that visibility is limited for aircraft. It is supposed to rain this weekend and we need it, desperately. I've been stomping on spiders....it is a superstition that it will rain if you kill them! Lol..they're in hiding...

Aside from all the doom and gloom we did manage to harvest and clean up our garlic....18lbs!

5 lbs of spuds from volunteer plants in last year’s straw. Ate some for dinner and dehydrated the rest.

....and the question I have been asked is what are doing with all your garlic? So I took 3 lbs, peeled them and sliced them with my Bosch slicer and threw them in the dehydrator. Thankfully I did them in the garage as the wonderful smell was pretty strong! The next day I ground enough to make 2 cups of garlic powder and 1 pint of sliced. . 

Today’s harvest. Hate the wasps and the weeds, but love reaping the rewards. 

Cukes are late but if I get enough to eat it will have to do. I still don’t get zucchini. Everything I have researched has said these are so easy to grow....sure. They get to a certain size and then the tips start to shrivel and they die. I'm excited to be getting some carrots and oh the parsnips! This is a first! I planted beets twice and in the first planting were golden beets....didn’t come up ...but here is evidence of a golden beet. Did I replant too soon? Were they just messing with me? 

...started to harvest the onions too. Walla walla and some other “big” variety planted from starters. Still have a few more to harvest but the wasps were not happy with me....gonna send in Brent 😉

First Harvest

So end of July we harvested potatoes from the buckets and got under 1 lb from the first ...not bad for one seed...good experiment. Will I do this again? Not sure.

This was one pot so we decided to wait a couple of weeks before harvesting the second one

....and got way more...over one lb here!

....and then I dried some herbs...basil, thyme, parsley, rosemary



A few days later we harvested the top half of one potato tower...wow! Aprox 10 lbs

We have been enjoying steamed baby vegs lots...carrots,parsnips, swisschard, kale, lettuce and peas...yummy

Tonight  we harvested some beans that are just starting. The onions are awesome and the daikon radish too. I'm attempting to make a potato salad for camping this weekend. I really need to label things that I plant. I want to know what onion this is. I planted walla walla and some Russian onion which is supposed to get really big. Can’t remember...

Garlic was harvested a week ago and is now drying. Amazing 😉 

Will post pic later...

Bought me some blueberries and froze most of them but decided to try my hand at dehydrating....wow are they ever good! So I did some raspberries too...great in cereal...

Tomatoes are just starting to form, I see some little cukes, zucchini only get a couple of inches and then start turning yellow. Need to research why. Picked a Hungarian hot pepper...a bit small and not hot. Raspberries are still going, strawberries are done. Brent did  a great job picking while I was away. Managed to freeze a couple of big bags.