O/T How your gardens doing and your canning going

Well a lot of my garden has just plain burned up dried out or slow way down. I do have some tomato plants that I started in late July doing well and hope to keep going way past the first frost by having them in my cold frames.
I did can up 6 qts of tomatoes sauce last evening and have a bunch of sweet peppers to freeze in the next few days

Put up some green peppers, waiting on the hot ones. Beans never amounted to much. Potatoes baked in the ground from the 110 heat. picked onions in time to have some and everything else is being ate up by grasshoppers. Feed em Sevin dust and the use it like cocaine.

Our garden is doing great UP this way. We have made somewhere around 40 quarts of pickles and relish. Made 10 quarts of dilly beans and have a freezer full of the rest of the beans and some peas. Our sweet corn is just starting to be ready and tomatoes are starting to turn as well.

Thats just what we have kept, we sell weekly at the local farmers market as well.

Corn was doing fine until the horses got into it. Beans are OK, chard is getting eaten alive by grasshoppers, I think- and you can't dust it, because you eat the leaves. Tomatoes are so-so- its been too cold for them, I think. Not my best garden year, by far.

We've put up 67 pints of bread and butter pickles, 30 pints of relish, 24 pints of pickled okra. A lot of blueberries, corn and tomatoes in the freezer. Just a few tomatoes coming in but the okra still going strong.

Making apple pie filling and pizza sauce today.

Been a tough year (super dry) on the garden.

Deer have eaten the sweet potato tops off, but they have re-grown, thanks to an electric fence. Time will tell. . .

First time I've ever had to fence my sweet potato patch.

Paul

Things are still growing great here. My wife has made 2 batches of salsa so far, there are lots of tomatoes (cherry, roma and some other larger variety) still green so in the next couple weeks there should be lots more ready. She has also done a batch of pickled carrots and a few jars of dill pickles. We have a number of huge bags of swiss chard frozen. The beets have been good and they'll be canned soon. We pulled all the potatoes as the tops were dying and the squash are needing more room and did well there. Deer haven't been a problem in the main garden as I put electric fence up around it during the growing season. I'm trying to think of what else we planted..........peas were done early this year and apparently a lot of tomatoes in the area were killed off by blight this year but ours are doing fine. Onions did well, the garlic drowned I think. We did get some but not nearly enough.

Doing good here in northern MN. Have done up about 20 quarts of green beans, still coming on strong. Been eating zuchini squash like they are going out of style. Snitched some red potatoes for some creamed peas and potatoes-yummy. Have some nice sized russets too. Peppers looking great. Plenty of tomatoes coming. Corn is looking to be ready this weekend, sad thing is we will be down in Iowa at a reunion, bummer! Hoping to freeze at least 75 quarts this season. We have had so much rain this season I have not had to water once and we live in a sandy area. SHON

Worst garden I've ever had. Had no rain for at least 6 weeks and constant heat. I watered but did little good. 2 rows of beans never made it-turned yellow and died-never got to freeze any. Summer squash-had 2 meals-got the mildew and died. Pickles the same. Powdery Mildew killed all my curcurbits. Corn was half size ears. Tilled everything up last night except peppers and tomatoes. Oh, I do have nice orange jackolanterns way too early.

Garden didn't do well this year. started late and heat got it. Still getting a lot of green limas and speckeled butterbeans. This is my Okra and still doing great. have to pick twice a day.

I quit growing gardens years ago. I can buy it from the locals for about as much as I can grow, if I count my time. Plus, too may critters get it! I have like 40 qtrs of creamed corn, probably twice that much of corn on the cob, wife has made 45 quarts of pickles, 60 qrts of maters, 30 pints of pickled okra, I have about 2 gallons of strawberries, about the same in oeaches and apples with more apples on the way. I have 45 quarts of greenbeans and sweet peas. I have a bull and a pig going into the freezer next month, and some of each in Nov going in. We dont worry about chicken, since the local chicken farmer will be giving them away this winter, I think we have 7 or 8 out there now. My uncle usually gives me a couple bushels of butterbeans and collossal peas, so I dont worry too much about food, or the grocery store. I very seldom go tothe grocery store except for like laundry detergent, and bread. I get all my milk and dairy from the local dairy. Nothing like "real" milk! They also do cheese and ice cream, man I got to go get me some ice cream right now!!!

Hello old,
40 qrts of tomatoe juice/sauce, 4quarts of veggie soup, 2.5 quarts, butternut squash, 2 quarts of pepper amd tomatoes, and about a dozen 1/4 bags of peppers some hot.Some egg plant also.
Not dome yet!
Guido.

Rich, I wish I could have given you some of our rain to help you out. Our garden isn't very big but it outdid itself.

Planted six rows of sweet corn maybe 300' long way too thick, 6-7 iches apart in 30" rows and we had more sweet corn than you can shake a stick at. Froze 15 gallons, dad picked a bunch, then the gals from the place where Marilyn used to work filled the back of a pickup after that. Marilyn is still bringing in bags of cucumbers, string beans and tomatoes so I have a hunch we'll have pickles and canned tomatoes to last us a long time. The green beans will be frozen. She's making apple sauce too but I didn't spray the tree so the bugs are beating us to it.Jim

try again

I don"t really grow a garden but I plant some tomatoes along the fence and the garage and put some squash and beans in.

I have relized after years that my Minnesota born habits of planting in April or May don"t work here in Savannah GA- by the time the tomato plants began to bear the consistnat high 90"s hit and they just quit. They get blossoms that wither and die, I have a Big Boy plant that is over my head tall but has not born a single tomato. My Kentucky Blue Runner beans sprouted promisingly, then either had too much rain or not enough compounded by the heat and they died.

I need to get stuff in soooner next year. I have some "seasoned" horse manure to till in to the soil as well. I won"t give up though. At least the morning Glories I put in have done well

Mom and Dad"s garden is doing well in central MN but the deer and coons have taken a hit from it.

Just started gardening again after taking several years off.

Last year it all rotted in the ground due to 3 weeks of cold and rain after planting.

This year has been very good. Not even any potato bugs and I'm usually up to my eyeballs in them. In fact, that's one of the reasons I quit.

Wife flat refuses to can (scared of botulism) and I don't care for frozen veggies, so we only plant what we can eat or give away fresh.

String beans were just nuts, wound up feeding a bunch to the sheep as we had more than we could even give away. Cukes are coming on strong, but I could eat cucumber sandwiches for lunch every day so I don't think they'll get ahead of us. Need some rain to get the beets to fill out.

It's a toss up between the garden and weeds, especially crab grass. Have an excellent crop of cukes and squash are running everywhere. A doe knocked down and ate six, 40-foot rows of sweet corn before it got filled out. I saw her one morning. I have potatoes to dig yet and tomatoes are producing. My July planting of green beans are just getting beans and look to be loaded. Already have 60 pints on the shelf. These are for my daughter. I planted too much stuff for the space. My watermellons aren't growing very well. My basil stands around four-foot tall. All in all, I've enjoyed my garden and already have plans for next year.

Larry

I had Fawteen's experience last year. Three plantin's of beans rotted in the ground. Had a few pepper but nothin' to boast about. The sumer was so wet and cold that I never had a tomato ripen until September and the frost got the plants with more green 'maters still hangin' on 'em than ever ripened, and they were puny.

This year things are goin' great guns. Everything flourishin'. Beans are gettin close to run out, but we've got a pile of 'em laid back. Peppers? There's one plant that has never shown so much as a blossom, the rest are boomin'.

'Maters? A couple things goin' on there. It's been as ideal tomato weather up here as a gardener could ask for this year, but somethin's got goin' on around our neighborhood that they grew and grew, but set there for the longest time before they finally started to ripen. Everybody's been complainin' about it.

Bigger issue around here is what happened (and we don't know -- he ain't talkin')) at the greenhouse where folks have been gettin' their plants for years. Nice plants. Whatever went on(seed supplier messed up, disgruntled employee . . .???) it's more than one single or simple mistake.) I usually put out just six tomatoes - two cherries, two salad size and two beefsteaks. Well, I got tomatoes. All one variety, on the large end of the salad-size range. A fella at work buys squash plants there, bought two each of five different varieties. Out of all that, what he got out of what he wanted were two plants, Hubbards, and they were each labeled as someting else. All the rest grew up to be zucchinis.

They've been around so long and have always sold great plants, most folks (at least us home-size gardeners) are willin' to give them a try next year. We can only hope they fixed whatever happened. But I got an idea his commercial folks may be lookin' elsewhere.

Old, we tried two of those upside down tomatoe plant things this year just to see what happened and it really surprised me. They produced very well, no stakes, and no weeding. Lazy mans garden LOL. We used regular plants and potting soil.

Everything got off to a good start but then it got terribly dry in late June and we never got any significant rain until the middle of August. By then, it was too late for some of the stuff to catch up. As usual, lots of zucchini and summer squash. Good cukes because my wife grows those in a raised bed and some good tomatoes from there too. The other tomatoes in the garden are kind of sitting there.

The dry spell also did bad things to our second raspberry crop.

You know you go to a country church when.....
You roll up the windows and lock the doors in the church parking lot, not because you're afraid of somebody stealing something, but to prevent the other parishoners from putting bags of zukes and squash in your car.

Eggplant, peppers, zucchini, onions, beets, string beans all did extremely well this year. Had decent cukes until a week ago, dead now. Spinach a total waste. Tomatoes did good and broccoli was just OK. Potatoes and cabbage look good but not harvested yet. We had a warm wet June with a short dry spell in July. South Central Michigan, ome stuff does excellent, other not so good like every other year.
Paul

Put up 16 pints of salsa froze 12 qt bags of yellow squash, 37 qt bags of okra last week. More salsa this weekend. Dug about 75 lbs of yukon gold and white potatoes 2 weeks ago, digging the reds tomorrow. Still getting 3-4 tomatoes, a 10 qt bucket of okra (it's over 7' tall), and 2-3 yellow straight neck squash daily. We mix the okra with onions, tomatoes, and corn. Daughter calls it goop, and she'll eat it every night. Be planting a fall turnip patch for the deer and me in a couple of weeks or so. Mark