Great Way to Shrink Garden Waste

Since I don’thave a room or place for compost pile I have to dispose of all garden waste either at our town’s Transfer Station or in regular garbage. Lineups at Transfer Station are huge at this time of the year, 60 cars or more. You are looking at half an hour wait to dump few containers. On top of it, the Station is opened only 2 days a week for 3 hours. The smaller neighboring towns have dumps opened24/7! Go figure. Our garden end-of-season clean-up is spread over quite a few weeks so I came up with a good way to shrink the volume so that we can drop it in garbage bag with a regular household waste, no extra bag, and therefore no extra garbage tag (we have to pay user fee for every bag and with weight and bag size limitations). My way of shrinking garbage works even better if there is a stretch of couple of sunny days to dry up the processed waste. All you need is lawnmower that mulches and collects. Even though I have never composted, I am sure that this waste treatment would work great for composting.
Here is what I do.

This is all that was left, about 1/4 of what I started with...

and after 2 days of drying it shrunk even more. Ready for a garbage bag.

Middle of October Garden Update

Garden is slowly but surely coming to rest. Dahlias are still in full bloom and zinnias were replaced with fall mums. The grasses are now over 8 feet tall and sporting a gorgeous plumes. They are located south of our deck so the back-light shines right through them, just beautiful!

The roses are big surprise as they are all in full bloom and look better than in summer.
The Heuchera collection is still in full bloom and their coral bells really stand out.
Nasturtium and Hemerocalis are still producing flowers and so does Ozark Sundrops, Snapdragon and Trailing Alpine Geranium, The Gerbera is not at its best but still sending out new flowers. The Burning Bush is about 40% red so it will be few weeks before we will have a real red burning bush.
We will be enjoying our flower garden for a while yet.

 Front door with Mumms and pumpkins.

Dahlia, Snapdragon, Nasturtium and Mumms

Fall decoration.

Roses.

View from kitchen window.

Alpine Geranium.

Heucheras and Gerberas.

Back lit grasses.

Ozark Sundrop.

Burning Bush and my last pepper plant in container.

Marjo's last project - Alpine Garden.

Heirloom Tomatoes

Few weeksago I ate my very first heirloom tomato and I was hooked immediately on thetaste of this light yellow tomato. It was given to us by our neighbor who isretired farmer. Apparently, his friends found it among hundreds of plants theygrow for making tomato juice and since it didn’t look red they threw it out.Knowing that we will try anything new food-wise he brought them to us. I do notunderstand why I waited so long to taste these tomatoes since I do shop at localAmish farms and at our local farmers market and they were always available inseason. Looks like my plans for next year veggie garden are changing alreadysince I will definitely grow some heirloom tomatoes.

LastThanksgiving Sunday we went for a ride in the country and we came across a roadsidestand that was selling heirloom tomatoes of all sizes, colors and shapes. Sinceall of them are open pollinated varieties I will collect the seeds fromtomatoes that both of us really like.

Thismorning we did a little tasting and they are really good! They were nowhere assweet as some regular red hybrids, but instead there was nice balance betweensweet and tart. They will be great in salads and relishes, I think. So far Ipicked 3 (and counting) that I will try to grow. Over the winter I will try toidentify the varieties that I have collected seeds from; not an easy task.Maybe I will email pictures to some seed houses and ask if they can help. It isnot all that important to know the name but if somebody will taste my tomatoes,likes them and asks for the name it would be nice to know the answer.

Of course,if you know any of these tomatoes, please, leave a comment.

Here islink to interesting description of “Heirloom Tomato”.

Last Harvest of 2011

I have to admit that the end of my veggie garden season came much faster than I have anticipated. It was fun, though. Next year the garden will be very, very different, that much I know. Not only what I will grow but also how much. I do have a rough idea but nothing will be finalised until next spring.

Here is the last harvest of peppers and tomatoes. The green roma tomatoes at top left will be made into relish and some will be sliced and fried even though I have never done that. All the peppers and tomatoes will be cooked together with onions and garlic and frozen. The dish is a sort of casserole called Lecsó and is a popular Hungarian dish that rest of the countries from former Austrian-Hungarian Empire adopted as their own.
It was a lot of work to seed and slice the peppers but it was so worth it! The picture story will be posted next.

Changes to comments section on my blogs

It was brought to my attention that it was impossible to leave comments on all my blogs if signed in as Anonymous or other then Google account. I was using a form that switched to another Google web site and in the process the comments got trashed. I have switched to full page comments form that stays on BlogSpot and when tested it worked fine. My apologies to all that tried fruitlessly to leave a comment or to get in touch with me.
The fact that many bloggers had and still have same problem is not too much of consolation to me, I am sorry to say. I should have caught it long time ago.

Jerry