[gardeners] Friday in the garden
George Shirley (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Fri, 04 Jun 1999 19:53:46 -0500
Went out to the garden for a little while about 6:30, still pretty hot
out there but a cooling breeze came up. Picked a nice mess of green
beans, a few cukes, and some NZ spinach which will get cooked for dinner
tomorrow. Grandson who is visiting is out mowing right now and then will
be hungry again. Luckily he will eat anything we will which is a lot of
veggies and very little chicken or fish and the occasional small serving
of red meat.
This kid is a worker, we've been stripping the vinyl floors in the
master bath and the foyer and he did all of that by himself. Both floors
had either two layers of tile or vinyl sheeting over tile and he got
them up with no problem. The wallpaper in the foyer came off pretty easy
and it will be painted tomorrow and then the new floor laid in there.
The master bath wallpaper is turning into a real chore, soak a small
area, wet it again and then scrape, wet it, scrape it. In two days we're
about half done with getting the stuff off. Never saw wallpaper that was
stuck so good.
It has been turrible hot here, nineties and about the same in humidity.
Tomatoes are rotting on the vine and I'm thinking about putting up a
cheese cloth shade over them to see if it will help. The chiles, hot and
mild both, are loving the heat and humidity so we will be getting into
bumper crop season on those pretty soon. In the meantime we harvest
enough along to keep us chomping on them. Been eating a lot of paprika
and pimiento chiles in the green stage and they are excellent, thick
meated, sweet, and tasty. Gonna be hard to leave some to ripen red for
preserving.
Tomorrow morning I will harvest basil, thyme, Mexican Mint Marigold,
winter savory, parsley, oregano, and two kinds of chives. Time to run
the dehydrator again except for the chives. I learned to chop them and
freeze them on a cookie sheet for later cooking use, better flavor and
more handy for use that way. Think I saw it on one of the shows on HGTV
but not sure.
Luckily we can stay in the air conditioning to do our remodeling and
then get out in the garden early and late when it's cooler. Hope all are
doing well and getting into the gardens.
George