Well, the plants in field "A" are almost totally dead. That's a good thing! That means we can go in and gather all the winter squash & put it up in the greenhouse to dry! We had a Labor Day volunteer work party all morning, and with lots of hands, we got the work done relatively quick.
Step one is to walk the entire field with long-handled pruners ("loppers") and cut the squashes from the vines.
Step two is to gather up all the squash into rows, where we can easily, (step 3) put them into big wooden bins on the front of the tractor, counting out loud as we go! It was pretty fun.
Step 4, lay out the squash on tables in the greenhouse. Or the floor when you run out of tables.
We have Sweet Dumplings:
Butternut:
Delicata:
And Sugar Pie Pumpkins!
The 3 Sisters Garden is huge & tall as ever, but starting to die back a bit-- the corn is all turning yellow & drying. The squash plants are dying, leaving their big fruits on the ground to harvest soon. The sunflowers & amaranth are getting mature seeds.
This amaranth is so huge, I'll have to stand on a ladder to harvest the seeds I think.
The beans are maturing too. Broom corn is a successful trellis I will probably grow more of next year.
The small corn plants (the dwarfed ones that never got tall) are collapsing under bean vine pressure. It's becoming total chaos.
The ears of corn on the larger plants are looking great. Some of them are popping out of their husks.
Which is a bad thing, because it leaves them vulnerable to all sorts of other creatures that want to eat it-- I think some kind of larvae has been boring into these kernels:
I'm not sure what's happened with the corn... the ears look different than what I thought they would look like. My guess is that the Hopi Blue Corn cross-pollinated with sweet corn or maybe pop corn too that was grown on the farm in California I worked on last year. So I will probably not save seed this year, unfortunately. I'll have to buy more for next year if I want to grow corn. So I will probably try grinding these ears into a flour somehow.
Step one is to walk the entire field with long-handled pruners ("loppers") and cut the squashes from the vines.
Step two is to gather up all the squash into rows, where we can easily, (step 3) put them into big wooden bins on the front of the tractor, counting out loud as we go! It was pretty fun.
Step 4, lay out the squash on tables in the greenhouse. Or the floor when you run out of tables.
We have Sweet Dumplings:
Butternut:
Delicata:
And Sugar Pie Pumpkins!
The 3 Sisters Garden is huge & tall as ever, but starting to die back a bit-- the corn is all turning yellow & drying. The squash plants are dying, leaving their big fruits on the ground to harvest soon. The sunflowers & amaranth are getting mature seeds.
This amaranth is so huge, I'll have to stand on a ladder to harvest the seeds I think.
The beans are maturing too. Broom corn is a successful trellis I will probably grow more of next year.
The small corn plants (the dwarfed ones that never got tall) are collapsing under bean vine pressure. It's becoming total chaos.
The ears of corn on the larger plants are looking great. Some of them are popping out of their husks.
Which is a bad thing, because it leaves them vulnerable to all sorts of other creatures that want to eat it-- I think some kind of larvae has been boring into these kernels:
I'm not sure what's happened with the corn... the ears look different than what I thought they would look like. My guess is that the Hopi Blue Corn cross-pollinated with sweet corn or maybe pop corn too that was grown on the farm in California I worked on last year. So I will probably not save seed this year, unfortunately. I'll have to buy more for next year if I want to grow corn. So I will probably try grinding these ears into a flour somehow.
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