September garden photos

A friend of ours shot a few quick photos of our garden this week. It’s amazing to me the bloom of life we’ve seen since digging up the grass and planting a wide variety of plants. I swear, on any given day we have 5 different bee species, 5 different wasp species, several dragonfly species, many spider species, all sorts of no-see-ums, and one squirrel. OK, sometimes two squirrels. On this particular day, the squirrel was sitting atop the porch columns, bitching at our friend to vacate the porch. The nerve.

A moth (right, since it’s fuzzy?) enjoying a plumbago flower:

Bees on the Autumn Joy sedum (they’ve been absolutely mobbing these blooms):

A blue rose of sharon (that I sent away for – I love these):

September planting list

Well, since I was early with the August list, that bought me an out for being late with the September list. Sorry.

There are three references I’m using:
Texas Organic Vegetable Gardening, J. Howard Garrett & C. Malcolm Beck (he’s in Dallas)
Dallas Planting Manual, The Dallas Garden Club of the Dallas Woman’s Club (Dallas, again)
Collin County Master Gardeners

I’ve put an asterisk by the ones I think I’ll be planting.

DPM
“Cold hardy varieties, both seeds and starts as onions.”

CCMG (I just love how specific they are with the dates.)
cabbage (1st – 15th)
carrot
chard, swiss (1st – 15th)
collards
garlic* (15th – 15 Oct.)
kale
lettuce*
onion*
peas, English*
radish
rutabaga
turnip

TOVG
beans, snap bush
broccoli
brussels sprouts
cabbage
carrots
cauliflower
cucumber
kohlrabi (10 Sep.)
potato
squash, summer (10 Sep.)

It’s interesting to me how much the Collin County Master Gardeners and Howard Garrett differ.

An update on my August plantings and harvesting:

OKRA – We’ve been harvesting okra for weeks now. I made two plantings, and we’re eating from two mature plants from the first round. The burgundy variety (Red Burgundy) fruited much earlier, by weeks, than the green variety (Clemson Spineless). It’s prettier, too. We’ll probably shoot for four plants next year, as it takes a few days to get enough pods for a meal.
WATERMELON – These vines (along with the cantaloupe vines) have completely taken over one third of my front beds. Out of control. We had one early watermelon that exploded when we got our first big rain a few weeks ago (another hurricane, as I recall). We had about 5 more melons set after that. I harvested one, trying to get a feel for when to harvest these darn things. It was totally white throughout. So now I’m sitting, not-so-patiently waiting for them to ripen. Apparently, I’m waiting for the little tendril nearest the stem of the melon to turn brown. Hasn’t happened yet. And with all of the rain currently falling from Hurricane Ike, I’m worried the rest will explode. Watermelons don’t ripen once they’re harvested, so I have no choice but to wait it out and hope.
CANTALOUPE – Crazy, crazy vines with huge leaves reaching for our cars and threatening to engulf them. But until today, I didn’t see any sign of a melon. Finally, I think I see one a’comin’. I’ll keep you posted.
PEPPERS – We have three poor little pepper plants that have been totally engulfed by the melon vines (along with an oregano, three basils, a cool volunteer, a full-size nandina, a pomegranate, and I believe several small dogs that wandered too close to the garden edge). Finally, the peppers got tall enough to rise above, and there are a few little peppers that have set. By this time, I have no idea what they are, though.
TOMATOES – While the plants are technically still producing, they’re petering out and performing poorly. I’m going to pull them all out, as soon as it dries out, and make room for the incoming garlic (LOTS of garlic this year).

I completed the August seeding, and the cucumbers and corn are up and looking pretty good. I lost a few corn seedlings when I left town for four days over labor day and forgot to ask Jan to water. The cauliflowers have just sprouted, and I’m waiting for the carrots, broccoli, beans and edamame to come up. Mmmm, edamame. Ella will love me for that.

Chamber Floor

Here are the first, second, and third posts in this series (you can also go to the “bread oven” category, in the lefthand navigation menu).

I’m falling behind on my oven posts. Oh, the horror. I’ll try to catch up this weekend.

After completing the floating slab, next comes the oven floor. The entire oven chamber is built of refractory bricks.

This stage of the process was stressful and tedious. Apparently, Jan leveled each brick, one at a time. I suppose you’ll be pretty annoyed with yourself if you build a several-ton structure, and screw up the part of the oven that you interact with the most: the chamber floor. Besides being level and smooth, there aren’t supposed to be any gaps between the perfectly square edges of the bricks. Here you can see the vermiculite/concrete layer, the concrete layer above that, and the refractory brick layer. Like some really heavy cake.

After such a tedious step, you can imagine Jan’s feelings when he checked on the oven the next morning and was able to easily pry loose the bricks from the slab. Argh! After discussing the pros and cons of full disclosure, we decided it was best to share the pitfalls, as well as the successes, of our journey to brick-oven pizza heaven. Lucky you.

Apparently, Jan had used too much mortar. So the bricks didn’t make any contact with the slab. I suppose that’s why tiles and such are applied with wavy-edged trowels, to avoid applying too thick of a layer. Jan has one of those trowels now. Have I mentioned all of the new tools acquired for this project? I don’t think I have. Not only has Jan added all sorts of masonry tools, but he has also “had to” upgrade several of our more general tools, driving up the total cost of this project beyond mere materials costs.

So he pulled the bricks off, scraped the mortar, and started again.

All of this drama really did little to dampen the spirits of the peanut gallery:

This time, Ken was here to help. So the company and inevitable alcohol made the time pass more quickly. Here we go, from the top (er, bottom):

It was a mental threshold, building out part of the actual cooking chamber. I’m starting to think about the plants I will install around the finished oven. That’s definite progress.

I make cheese

OK, I made cheese. Once. And I’m making some right now. If I finish two batches, can I say, “I make cheese”?

Our local rancher, from whom we purchase all of our meat and eggs, also makes raw goat milk. So I drive to Greenville every two weeks to pick it up. (Texas law apparently prohibits them from bringing the raw milk to the farmer’s market, where I could very conveniently acquire it with the rest of my Saturday morning shopping. Grr.)

Ella loves this goat milk. I have to admit, it’s not like any other goat milk I’ve ever come across. It doesn’t have that musky goat-ness. They say they taste the milk every morning, and if it tastes “goat-ish”, they feed it to the pigs.

Ella also loves goat cheese. She has since she was a baby. So Jan ordered me a goat cheese making kit from Nichols Garden Nursery (they have veggie rennet, for the squeamish, like me). So I grabbed a gallon of raw milk, and gave it a go.

It was insanely easy. I just poured a gallon of milk into a pan (I didn’t pasteurize it, per the instructions, as that would defeat the entire purpose of using raw milk), added the chevre culture, and left the curds and whey to separate over ~24 hours. Then I drained the whey, put the curds in a bowl and mixed with salt, poured it into cheesecloth, and hung to drain for ~12 hours.

Voila! Raw, organic cheese. One gallon of milk (grass-fed, free range) made a little over 1.5 lbs of cheese. It’s supposed to last about two weeks in the fridge, and they say you can freeze it.

And it was good! But a little dry. I’m making a half-gallon batch right now, and I plan to drain it for only 6 hours. Ella likes to spread the cheese on toast and sandwiches, so creamy is better. Once I’m happy with the consistency, I’ll start experimenting with additions: herbs, flowers, kosher salt, yum. But of course I’ll have to keep making plain batches, for the kid. She’s not so adventurous with the cheese contaminants.