Planning for Next Season

I am very pleased with the pantry stores this year. I think I am done with green beans:

Marcie is going to let me know what variety of beans these were as I would like to do them next year. They are a flat kind of pole bean and they grow very well here. Being flat, they went through the bean frencher perfectly. She and Tom brought some corn cobs over for the pigs yesterday. I told them they couldn’t leave with an empty bucket, so they took more tomatoes. I’ve got my jars labelled for fermenting and saving seed from each of my tomato varieties and plan to get those started today.

I pulled up the zucchini plants—always such a satisfying task at the end of the season—and some of the cantaloupe vines that were done. I’m putting everything in a pile to dry out, and I’ll burn it either some time this fall or next spring. Or start another compost pile.

Some time in the next week or so, I have to render down the lard that is still in one of the freezers. I need that space so I can move pork from another freezer and defrost that freezer. I play this game of musical freezers every fall.

I’ve started researching and buying supplies for next year. I don’t want to wait. I need new soaker hoses for a better watering system, and I am sketching out ideas for where I want to put different crops. I’ve also got to figure out a better way to stake the tomatoes. I have cages, but this year, the plants got so big and heavy with fruit that the cages were mostly useless. Heavy-duty tomato towers would work, but they are not cheap. I’ll see what the farm store has in the way of cattle panels and maybe I can rig up a system.

In terms of crops, I don’t experiment much. I tend to find varieties I like and stick with them. I’ve decided to switch to Black Beauty zucchinis, though. I have been growing a variety called Grey, but I’ve been disappointed with them the last couple of years. I ended up with six Black Beauty plants and two Grey when the rodent came through the greenhouse and ate the newly-planted Grey seeds. I had the Black Beauty seeds and planted them as replacements. (No, nobody needs eight zucchini plants, but I seem to forget that every year.) The Black Beauty plants produced heavily and consistently all season and I like them better.

My shelling peas are a variety called Alaska. The tomatoes were Dirty Girl, Amish Paste, Purple Russian paste, Oregon Star paste, and Cherokee Purple. I am more impressed than ever with the Dirty Girl tomatoes after two seasons. I want to start more of those next year for the plant sale, which we plan to do again along with the garden tour.

The cucumbers are a variety called Muncher, the cantaloupes are Minnesota Midgets, and the watermelons are Sugar Baby. Those won’t change.

I put in new Cortland, Winesap, Seek-No-Further, and Northern Lights apple trees last spring. We still have room for half a dozen more trees. I’d like to keep the strawberry variety we already have (Triumph) if I can move enough of the plants from their existing location. I’ll fill in with new plants otherwise. The only thing missing that I’d like to have is asparagus.

The end-of-season garden work is vastly different than what I do in the spring, but it’s necessary and enjoyable in its own way.

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Our homesteading chat group had such a good discussion yesterday. That group is an oasis of sanity for me, because it’s populated with people who know how to have a respectful discussion that doesn’t devolve into ridicule and name-calling. I think it helps that it’s got the underpinnings of a liberty-minded groups of individuals. Homesteaders are just as susceptible as everyone else to adopting a “my way or the highway” mentality—I’ve seen contentious discussions break out over something as simple as what kind of watering system is best for chickens—but this group has a fundamental understanding that two people can look at the same situation and come to two entirely different but equally valid conclusions about how to proceed. I wish more people were able to engage like that. I suspect that it’s just part of human nature to want validation for one’s choices, and to want that validation in the form of everyone else making the same choices.

This morning over coffee, that group debated the merits of pineapple on pizza or not. For the record, pineapple-and-ham is one of my favorite kinds of pizza.