Author: Dackel Princess

I puttered. I worked for three hours solid in the garden.
I pulled weeds. I took dead plants out of the garden. I took dead leaves off of the plants. I filled three wheelbarrows with garden garbage! And in the process got a little sunshine on my pastey white skin. In fact, the old back is a tad red tonight, and a wee bit sore!
I won’t lie and tell you that the garden looks better. It looks like it’s been mauled and maimed.

However, at least the dead and diseased plants have been removed for now and I harvested more cucumbers. Yes, more cucumbers! I don’t feel the garden has been a disaster, even though it got this powdery mildew. Call that an act of God!
We have eaten a lot of summer squash, some zucchini, made a ton of pickles and eaten a bunch too. For a first garden, I’m actually thinking it was a rousing success. Of course next year I will do things differently and I hope to avoid some of the pitfalls I encountered this year.
I’ve enjoyed the gardening, and I’ve enjoyed learning to make pickles. Oh, and I have a new favorite pickle dish, Mustard Pickles!!!
I came in after working like crazy and found I’d been stung by some sort of Bee 3 times! The little bugger! I was also breaking out in a strange rash. So, I jumped in the shower with my brown soap and washed and rinsed away my garden sweat. Ooops, my garden glistening!
I felt a little like I’d been run over and decided to lie down after lunch. No sooner had my head hit the pillow, than there was a knock at my door. An old friend from my previous life stood there. She came to introduce me to the new man in her life.
We sat on the back patio enjoying the breeze and talking. A little about the old days and a little about the new. We showed them the fruit trees, which are doing far better than my garden, and walked around the yard some before they needed to head off to go back home.
After they left I went back out and took a few pictures of the fruit. It’s looking rather delicious now. Soon the peaches will be ready to pick, then the plums, apples and pears.

One of our Peaches

The Plums

A Pear
Ah yes, life on a farm. Well sort of. We’re growing some of our food, and we have two animals, so that’s close enough! Right?

Today I’m going to spend the day puttering in the garden. I bought some new work gloves and a kneeling pad, so I can work with ease. I need to clean and clear a good quarter of the garden where the powdery mildew has destroyed my squash. I was upset about it for a while, until I realized how truly sick of summer squash and zucchini I am. Before the powdery mildew hit, the plants were extremely prolific and we’ve been eating squash nearly every night. Cooked almost every way that you can imagine!
Next year diversity is the key. I will have maybe two zucchini plants and two summer squash. Then I want to plant eggplant, peppers, maybe some corn. Anything but hill upon hill of squash.
The cucumbers? Yes, I’ll still plant a lot of those. Making pickles, piccalilli and mustard pickles is fun, and we all know how much I love mustard pickles!
So I’ll be puttering in the garden. Maybe the dogs will play outside with me. The sun will shine and life will be good.

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I’m taking this week off from Saturday Scavenger Photo’s. I wracked my brain for an idea about how I could present the theme of “money”, but I realized that money is the one area that I’ve never been comfortable with. Money means very little to me, it just pays the bills.
I’ll be back next week…

The Pickle Lady here.

Today I made another batch of Mustard Pickles. I used a different recipe, just for the heck of it. I am not happy with the results. The first recipe was so much better, so that one will be the one I save and use when I make them again. Hopefully, next year. After canning all these pickles, piccalilli and mustard pickles, I am sort of all pickled out! Of course soon it will be time to do the peaches. We like to can some as well as make a peach preserve called Heavenly Jam. I hope the peaches are ripe before I have my surgery!

We’re at the end of my squash. The powdery mildew has pretty much killed off the plants. I may get a few more, but what I need to do is get in there and take out the dead plants, and then set up the Butternut Squash to flourish and grow. Next year I will start at the beginning of the season and use preventative measures to guard against the mildew.

The heat broke about 6 o’clock on Thursday night. It’s cooler right now than it has been in days. I’m thankful. I’m not sure I could take many more days of hot, humid and hazy!

My weekend plan is to putter around the house and to putter around the garden. Life is good and so it’s time to enjoy it a little, especially now that the heat has broken.

Stay cool and enjoy the weekend.

My garden is growing. And growing and growing. I really can’t take much credit now. It’s all in God’s hands. In fact the garden is still producing at this point despite the fact that we have “powdery mildew”. I wasn’t sure at first what this was, but after reading about it I have learned that A) It’s too late to do anything about it now, and that B) Next year we will need to use a fungicide right from the start to keep it from happening again. Good thing Hubby has his Pesticide applicators license. I knew there was a reason I kept him around!
Meanwhile, I am still able to enjoy a harvest and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it won’t affect my huge crop of Butternut Squash. I must have a dozen babies that are easily seen. There is no telling how many of those little buggers are hiding under plant leaves.
I was looking for cucumbers and squash today under all the leaves and look what I found:

This one weighs 2 1/2 pounds!

Far too big to slice and eat, but I figured I could do something. I raced up the hill to my neighbor’s house. She knows everything about vegetables and how to get the most out of your garden. She gave me two recipes to use to make pickles from over ripe cucumbers. I will start that tomorrow. Who knows I may have another couple of monsters to add to the pot!
I’m really getting into this canning thing. In fact I have already found ways to eat mustard pickles with almost every meal! I just love them!!! My neighbor also told me that she liked them very much. I’m thinking of canning some in half pint jars for Christmas presents. At least for people who like mustard and pickles!
Maybe I could become the “Mustard Pickle Queen of New Hampshire”!

Piccalilli! Yes, today was Piccalilli day. As you know, I chopped up all the cucumbers, (6 pounds of them!) onions and peppers yesterday. Everything soaked overnight in a heavy salty brine. This afternoon I drained the vegetables, and then cooked it all up with the vinegar and spices.
It took a while to simmer the pickles until they were tender/crisp.

Then Hubby came in and helped me with the canning. He is a master! I present the hot sterilized jars to him, he fills them, and then I seal them.



After we were done, I did up the dishes, and Hubby came into the kitchen, hugged me and said, “Well, look at this! Maribeth’s Piccalilli! Maribeth’s vegetables from her garden! And you’re doing all this canning!” He was smiling and I knew he was proud of me.

I am sitting here thinking back to when I was in High School.
Back then, I really wanted a home in New Hampshire, a vegetable garden, and to learn to can the stuff I was growing. It seemed so romantic and so wonderful.
Fast forward 30 years. I have all of the above, but I have learned that it isn’t quite as “romantic” as I thought. I remember the digging of the garden in the heat and getting sunburnt, I remember planting everything the day before Hubby’s surgery and hoping I’d done it all right. I remember doing the “cultivating and weeding”.
I remember watching over the garden, thinking it would never grow. Now. I go out each day and hope upon hope that I won’t have too much produce. My neighbors now pull their shades down and pretend they aren’t home when they see me coming with more summer squash!
I have to say that the joys of gardening are many, even if the work is tough. I will be doing it again next year. I’m already planning it…

I just sliced 6 pounds of cucumbers, 5 large onions, 3 large green peppers, salted them all and set them to rest overnight. What am I making now? Cucumber Picalilli. I had all these cucumbers, (I still haven’t used them all up!) and I knew if I didn’t do something now, they would simply rot. Tomorrow is the cooking and canning. I can hardly wait to see how this comes out.

The children left Saturday morning. It was sad to see them go. They had to cut their visit short this year because their father has accepted a new job and they are moving to a new town. The kids were a little nervous about the move, but we all told them how great it was going to be. Matina picked up Greta and hugged her and said, “I wish I could put you in my suitcase and bring you home with me!” and I could hear her voice crack. It’s a beautiful thing, the love between a child and a dog.

Today was a Greek Festival in a town near-by. We drove down and enjoyed a lunch full of Greek goodies. Hubby had a lamb shanks meal and I went A La Carte with Lamb Kebabs, and stuffed Grape Leaves! I also tried something new this year, Pastichio. It’s sort of the Greek equivalent to macaroni and cheese, but it also has meat in it and in many ways is creamier and finer. Yum!

I was lying in bed last night thinking of my Uncle George.

He is my cousin, Janet’s father. He was probably the single most important male in my life growing up. The one that showed me what a real man could be.
He taught me to swim, to dive and to do somersaults off his shoulders. He would play games with us in the water, watch over us if we got in over our heads, and above all he made sure we always had fun.
When I was maybe 6 or 7 years old I stepped on glass at the beach. My foot was bleeding pretty badly. He wrapped it in his T-shirt and then carried me the 5 minute walk back to our house in Falmouth. He sat with me while I got stitched up and then carried me around the beach so that I wouldn’t get sand in my stitches afterwards. I asked him about that recently and he’d forgotten, but I’ll never forget it, because he was so kind to me.

How lucky we are to have these special people in our lives. Young and old, they add so much.