What Happened or Weird Wednesday!

This has been such a weird year in the garden.  Everything started out so well even with planting late but then the nasty heat crept in….I’m blaming it on the heat.

A bit of What happened Wednesday…

My potato buckets…I dumped the second and this is the harvest from both.  That is a salad plate, not a supper plate.  Next year they will be planted in the garden or with tires.

The quart jar is 2 20 foot rows of red onion.  I love them!  But,this is it… they were all so tiny, about 1/2 the size of those I will have to purchase at the farmers market.  I loaded the Excalibur and had it running outside in the shade.  I could smell them clear down at the end of the driveway.

The banana peppers are about the only thing that took off this year.  I’ve had the dehydrator running for about a week straight full of batches of onion & carrots then celery so I’d been freezing the peppers until I found this wonderful recipe at Food.com 

Now, the recipe calls for celery seed and mustard seed which I realized to late I didn’t have….  So I used mustard powder and dehydrated celery I crushed into a powder….I also gave them a hot water bath when they did not seal after an hour.  They have to set for at least 2 weeks so I’ll let you know how the substitutions worked out. I will say those I nibbled on before I sealed them tasted pretty good.  These were made Friday and

this batch was done today using the proper spices.The scent while cooking the liquid was much more fragrant and stronger flavor than the previous batch so

in 2 weeks we see how they turned out

Looking to add another (as in 3rd planting) patch of peas I where I’d planted and had no germination of the cucumber….I found cucumber shoots!  Seeds I’d planted in MAY! If they fruit, I’m almost afraid to see what grows. A squashcumber or a cumbersquash?

Stay tuned as in this garden weirdness comes!

OK, here is some more weirdness for you.

  I planted Amish Pie Pumpkin from seed and Jack-o-lantern pumpkins from seed….so far, this is what I have!!! What the heck?  All summer the plants were loaded with blooms with no fruit, now this from the Jack-o-lantern seed pack! 

Spaghetti squash & what looks like Sweet Dumpling Squash.

I’m starting to think there is some hanky panky in the garden at night!  The pie plants now have a dozen or so pumpkin starting but on the other plants I have 3 more spaghetti and 4 more of the dumpling showing & I still can’t tell what is forming on the others.   I looks to me like some one scraped the bottom of the seed barrels to fill this packet! I’ll have to check and see if it was processed on April 1 st!

Now, here’s my question, is it possible to can the Sweet Dumpling Squash (if that’s what it is) the same as I would pumpkin?

What weirdness have you found in your garden?

Katie