Today I will be juicing the last of the grapefruit from the Schaefer's tree. I pulled them out of the garage frig to warm up. I am going to try my centrifugal juicer instead of my hand juicer and see if it will give me more juice. We had eaten a ton of the grapefruit and I had cut up a ton and froze them and we had one more bunch left that I plan to juice for my drinks. If you have never tried grapefruit juice with blackberry vodka, you should. It is so tasty! But be careful, they are very easy to drink fast.
I was having a bit of a dilemma trying to figure out how I was going to bury my potato plants. If you recall, I bought 2 bags of dirt at the garden center for $20 and it barely 1/2 way covered all of the plants. As plants do, they are growing and it was time to bury them again, just leaving the tops sticking out. I had read not to use too rich of soil because it can cause potato scab disease. I'm not familiar with that, but I didn't want to be, so my dirt under the rabbit hutch was out.
In the past I have read how people use hay to bury their potato plants. Sometimes they use garbage cans, sometimes they stack tires, sometimes they build potato boxes, but I didn't want to get into all that. As hot as it gets here in the summer, I thought being buried under dirt would most likely be cooler than sitting in a can, but the price of that dirt. Ay yi yi! Since I have a big trash can overfilled with hay for the rabbits in the garage, I have chosen to go this route and I can only hope it will be cool enough for them.
Here is a photo:
If you click on the photo it gets huge. You can see the onions behind the potato plants, the tomato plants to the right and peas to the left. If you look real hard, you will see my squash in the back right corner, the cucumbers to the left of the squash and the jalapeno pepper plants, which are starting to bloom, in front of the squash.
Here is a photo of the whole garden as of this morning:
I am hoping we will have some great eating out of here this year. So far we have only had asparagus. I doubt I will can or freeze any of that because it gets mushy. Actually, I could probably freeze a bag full and use it in lasagna or soups where it doesn't matter. Hmmm. Maybe I'll freeze some today for that purpose. I will need to blanch it for a bit, stick it in cold ice water, dry it and then put it in the coldest part of the freezer to freeze as fast as it can, then I will vacuum seal it for later. Yes, it's a plan if I get off of here in time before Kimbre's polo game at Lake.
One other project I have been working on is the grapefruit trees.
The 2 black pots with plants were from the Schaefer's from their grapefruit tree. Bill brought them over already sprouting, but they kind of died during the hard freeze we had even though I tried protecting them. As you see they have come back to life with some nurturing. The little pot in front is grapefruit from the Rissky's tree which I believe is Ruby Red grapefruit vs. the Schaefer's pink grapefruit. Both are fantastic. I planted the seeds in the dirt and they wanted to live, so there they are. The Black pot with nothing has two huge mango pits in there.
I read a book called After Dinner Gardening by a guy named Langer and am following his instructions on how to grow mango trees, but while I was searching the internet, I came across another article and it said completely the opposite of what Langer said. Where Langer said to soak the pit for 5 days in warm water, the internet article said to let it dry out for 2 days. I have tried Langer's way once before and it didn't work, so if this time is a wash, I'll try the other method. Nothing lost, only knowledge gained.
JR is calling for me to walk the dogs before Kimbre's polo game, so off I go. Can't keep the man waiting.
Off I go,
Pam
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