vegetables – tierneycreates

AGRICULTURE REPORT

What is an “Agriculture Report”? Well I was inspired by @quiteayarnblog‘s ongoing series of posts titled “Agriculture Report” (and this title always cracks me up) that are actually updates of what is going on in her garden. I just had to adopt this same title for updates on what is going on in my garden/my “garden report“…

I figured I would get one more “Agriculture Report” in for the year now that the growing season in Colorado’s Front Range where I live. I think this is the only update I am providing since my July 19, 2024 post Agriculture Report: Plantings Gone Wild .

As I mentioned in the July post, the free seeds I got from one of my local libraries really took off! Here is what the plants looked like in the raised bed John built at the end of September:

I’d routinely been getting tomatoes from the upstairs porch tomato plants and I started getting tomatoes AND our first cucumbers from the seed planted crops in the raised bed!

John made a Cucumber Salad with our first cucumbers (which are the first cucumbers I’ve ever grown!):

We recently returned from a trip to the Oregon Coast and the weather at home had changed radically (getting colder and colder at night) and there is rumor of a big freeze and possibly snowstorm at lower elevations (we live at 6000 ft above sea level). It has already snowed at the higher elevations (we have a lot of 14,000+ ft above sea level mountain regions in Colorado). So it was time to shut down the garden for the season. Plus it was time to “blowout” our sprinkler system/winterize it, so the plants wouldn’t be getting any more irrigation and where going to die out.

We harvested a bunch of tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini (but only a little as the rest did not ripen they were planted too late) from the raised bed:

John made pickles with the cucumbers and so far they taste delicious (they are still aging in their “pickling”):

In addition to the cucumbers from our raised bed, John used a hot pepper (not sure what I planted) and fresh thyme from our garden.

Besides vegetables, we had some luck with free flower seeds we got from the library. It took awhile but the Cosmos flower seeds I planted really took off:

We plan to put in a couple more raised beds next season, and I will be more organized in my free seed plantings (I hope the library hands out free seeds again next year). I did overcrowd the one raised bed, and the carrots, onions and spinach I planted from the free seeds did not grow.

Oh and would you like to see some photos of real harvests? A couple weeks ago we went to the Sunday Farmers’ Market in Parker and the fruits and vegetables were bountiful!

They have one stand at the Farmers’ Market that allows you to fill a large bag for $15 with whatever they have at their stand (and they have a lot of choices). They are very liberal on how the interpret “fill a bag” and they let me balance a very large head of cauliflower at the very top of the bag! They were also giving out free acorn squashes with purchase (I made a nice soup from mine) – I think they had more squash than they knew what to do with.

CONCERT

October 12 we went to see an awesome outdoor concert by our favorite Icelandic band, Kaleo.

We did see them at Red Rocks Amphitheatre this summer, and it was wonderful to get to see them again but at a smaller venue – Breckenridge Brewery’s Littleton Colorado Campus’ Farmhouse Concert Venue.

Here is a little clip from the concert I took:

And here is the full performance of this song that made John fall in love with the band as much I did when I first heard them around 2016:

But our favorite of their songs is not sung in English, it is sung in their native Icelandic language – Vor í Vaglaskógi – and based on Icelandic folklore:

Hope you enjoyed the music! The lead singer, JJ Julius Son (Jökull Júlíusson) has quite the voice/vocal range, and we love the musicianship of the band.

Tomatoes, Tomatoes

I am on my 4th summer of growing tomatoes on my upstairs deck in Colorado. This year my tomato plants have GONE WILD and are the biggest they’ve ever been! I didn’t do anything different this season than previous seasons but the tomato plants are growing like crazy.

I hope I have a large enough tomato harvest this year to make a pasta sauce as well as salsa with my tomatoes!

Free Seeds Out of Control

In my April 2024 post Explored a new library, tried a new group I shared that a local was giving out free packets of seeds (vegetables and flowers) – 3 packets per library patron per day.

Well after John built me a raised bed (see post John gets “ScrapHappy” too – new raised bed) in June, I planted most of the vegetable seeds in the raised bed to include cucumber, squash, carrots, spinach and onion. However I thought it was too late in the season in Colorado to get a decent harvest so I thought the seeds would help “seed” my new raised bed with organic material as a base for next year’s garden.

So I haphazardly planted my seeds and did not label what was planted in the different areas of the bed.

And now I am dealing with SEEDS GONE WILD! Every seed seems to have sprouted and some plants are exploding everywhere…and I don’t know what they are as they are crops I’ve never planted before!

Yikes! At least I recognize the marigolds I planted for pest control! We put netting over the bed to help keep birds and squirrels out of the garden and so far it appears to be working.

I tried early on to thin the bed once I realized the seeds were sprouting and growing like crazy but the new sprouts were too delicate and some did not survive the replanting. So I just left most of it as a “hot mess”.

I guess I will have to wait until it is time to harvest the vegetables to find out what some of them are! Oh how sloppy my raised bed garden looks!