The Mad Gardener of Bowlus

Two years ago the soil, that is now the South East garden barely supported weeds. Last year I barely got any produce from this garden even though I had added plenty of organic matter. This year I went all in. Two trailer loads of compost from the city compost and then an additional 3-4 inches of compost that I created and layered on the surface of compost mulch.

Took several days, this spring, to do all of that but barely had to do anything to the garden for the remainder of the summer other than pulling some weeds. Definitely happy with the results!

Looks like the pumpkins will be a nice size and there will be plenty of popcorn for movie nights!

Over the last few weeks I have started two compost piles. I will create an article, probably later in the winter, on more details but my goal is to use the compost as a mulch for weed control. I do not chop up the compost "ingredients" rather I just throw fully intact plants (often weeds), last years hay from the bale gardens, grass clippings, and any other organic matter I can get my hands on. In the initial stages I go for more greens than what are required as my goal is to kill as many weed seeds as possible.

Another new project this year is grain sorghum! Looks like I will have a nice crop but I will need to figure out how to best harvest, clean, and dry it. Then it will be time to grind into flour! Time to learn how to cook with another gluten free grain!

Looks like I will have plenty of sugar beets! First time I have ever grown them and also first time I will be making my own sugar! Will be a few weeks but rest assured I will be sharing!

The potatoes are finally harvested! Took a lot of work over three days but well worth it and the results were plentiful!

We have actually eaten a bunch of them but time to get them all out of the garden!

Today, when harvesting potatoes I found something I have never seen in my entire life! A fully intact seed potato (well a wedge) that not only supported a potato plant but produced potatoes as well! Proof that 2020 has brought us wonders, sometimes they are just below the surface!

I had a great crop for spaghetti squash this year! Like all gardeners, we receive our reward towards the end of the season. All the work we have done to improve growing conditions, plant the seeds, keeping the weeds at bay, making sure the plants have the required nutrients, and watching for disease pays us back in fresh food!

My favorite way to eat spaghetti squash is to use in place of pasta. Its a great replacement for those of us who need to adhere to a gluten free diet!

What you will need for this experiment is a small jar (a drinking glass will also work), a coin, and water.

While this experiment demonstrates how light waves bend when moving from one medium to another (air to water) the same phenomena happens with sound, water, and other waves. It is known as refraction. When light is moving through just air it moves in a straight line but once it begins passing through water it bends!

What appears to be magic is simply an optical illusion caused by every day physics!

Finally have a large quantity of tomatoes! Now its time to turn them into sauce and can them!

Our vegetable and fruit for dinner! Well technically tomato is a fruit but it counts towards our five a day!

I have a large quantity of maple syrup that came from a red maple. It definitely has a very strong maple flavor and I prefer the sugar from sugar maple trees on my pancakes/waffles/french toast. Realized it would make for a very good sugar for making BBQ sauce! Just whipped this up today and will try it for making pulled pork tomorrow!

I finally scored a box of canning peaches! Living in a colder climate I peaches are one thing that I can not grow in my yard but I still enjoy buying a box of canning peaches and preserving them for the winter months! Peaches, I find, are actually on the the easier foods to preserve!

Had a slight mishap the other day when one of the jars broke in the canner. I made the mistake of forgetting to put the rack in the canner before putting in the jars (so the jars were directly on the bottom of the canner). Just a case of too much heat being applied too quickly! Luckily there were no injuries and it was just tomato sauce, if it were something like maple syrup that takes several days to produce I would have been more upset!

There are multiple reasons why a jar make break.

I managed to can 24 quarts and I have another six quarts using the refrigerator method. I processed the refrigerator pickles in a similar manner as the canned ones except without the final step of heating, instead I just put the jars into the refrigerator. Pickles produced via the canning method will last much longer than refrigerator pickles. Canned pickles will easily keep a year or more (depending how well they were processed) whereas refrigerator pickles typically will last only 2-3 months.

Not long ago I had a hog processed and had the butcher keep the lard for me. I had the lard ground as it saves the step of having to cut it up into small pieces! The process of rendering is simply melting the fat so that it separates from the rest of the "impurities" (pieces of meat, bone, or whatever else was inside the hog). Also heating and melting helps remove the water - while technically you can never remove all the water you do want to evaporate as much as possible.

Found this in my garden in the spring and it is called a single tree hook. It is where a horse's harness attaches to a single tree which allows a horse to pull a wagon, plow, or other implement. It also hardly qualifies as coming from an ancient civilization as horses were commonly used, in day to day life, in the early parts of the 20th century! Just serves as a reminder that while today we expect our online orders to be delivered, from the other side of the country, in two days that it was not that long ago that visiting your nearest large city would have taken that long!

Armenian cucumbers are a type of cucumber that is closely related to a muskmelon. It is a long slender fruit (having them a yard/meter long is quite common) although like most fruits/veggies they taste better if picked earlier. Not to mention myself and two boys can't eat something a yard long! On Thursday evening I did not notice a single plant with fruit on it, a few days later (Monday) I found several growing with one of them being a yard long! Needless to say I was quite excited! I cut up the smaller one for lunch!