Mysterious things growing in my garden

Our garden has been a little haphazard this year, but I'm proud because we actually HAVE one. This spring we had lots of greens, and this summer we've gotten tons of tomatoes (all volunteer plants that survived the compost process, no less). However, we had one odd plant that I could NOT figure out what it was.

 

Ginormous curcurbit plant that took over half the garden. It kept blooming and blooming but didn't produce any fruit at all.

Eventually it produced two small round green fruits. Hooray! Maybe they were cantaloup? They got bigger and stripey. Watermelon for sure! I couldn't wait for harvest time, and even Googled how to tell when watermelon are ripe.

And then the big one turned orange.

 Yep. I grew a pumpkin. IN JULY.

My experience is limited to pumpkins in the fall. You know, carving at Halloween? Pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving? Pumpkins are NOT supposed to show up in July. Clearly, my haphazard gardening skills are worse than I thought. I mean, we never even planted any pumpkins!

However, I worked hard to grow this pumpkin, so I figured I could can pumpkin puree and save it for the appropriate time. The seeds are edible too, if you roast them. So I spent some more time on Google, this time looking up pumpkins instead of watermelon. It turns out that canning puree is NOT  recommended for pumpkins, because they are very low in acid. You can do it if you have a pressure canner, but I don't have one, so I opted to go with the freezing option. 

 First, I sliced my pumpkin in half so I could remove the seeds. I sort of pulled the seeds out with my hands, leaving the stringy innards in the pumpkin.

 This pumpkin yielded about 1 cup of seeds, but many of the seeds were kind of withered and sad-looking. Not sure if that's normal? 

 Next, I scraped the stringy insides out with a spoon (this much I remember from carving pumpkins). The directions said to peel the rind, so I used a carrot peeler to do that. It worked pretty well!

I chopped the pumpkin up and boiled it until soft. I probably should have used a bigger pot!

 While I was waiting for the pumpkin to boil, I pulled all the strings out of the seeds and washed them several times in a bowl of water. This was actually pretty tedious and took several washings.

 The instructions said to dry your seeds in a warm oven, or with a hair dryer. Or, if you live in central Texas and it's 102 degrees outside (that's 40 for everyone else), just stick them outside on your garden table.

 Dry little seeds, dry! (Naturally, it rained for the first time in six weeks about an hour after I put them out. They are now drying in a warm oven. Sheesh.)

 After the pumpkin had been boiled until soft, we mashed it with a potato masher...

... and finally loaded it into jars to freeze. Notice we left plenty of room at the top (headspace) - this will prevent the jars from cracking as the contents expand during the freezing process.

We are DEFINITELY having pumpkin pie at my house this Thanksgiving!

Random weekend horse rides

Despite the heat, this weekend has been a good one for riding.

Saturday morning, I went out with a neighbor I haven't ridden with before and won't be riding with again. For starters, she was 30 minutes late and didn't bother to apologize. Her horse couldn't keep up with Oberon on the trail, and he's SLOW. Her horse is a 4 yo red roan gelding that she's been riding since he was two. He looks halter-bred... biiiig old muscled butt and shoulder, tiny feet, tiny head. He's probably 1300 lbs and is like 14.1 hh. Her farrier sold him to her but refused to tell her the horse's breeding or hand over his papers, despite saying that he's registered AQHA (can you register roans as AQHA? I don't know...). Are you shocked to hear that the horse is almost certainly HYPP+? She described muscle tremors down his back and flanks, and heavy labored breathing, that he does occasionally. Sounds like some HYPP attacks I've heard of.

The best part? She's taking him to a children's summer camp next week and hopes to sell him as a family horse to one of the children there... because his attacks "aren't that bad."

Yes, that's the sound of me smacking my head against the wall. Repeatedly.

Ok, on to better things...

Yesterday I rode Oberon and today Bre (from G is for Greta) rode him. He was a little looky for me but a tap or two on the butt with the bat, and a solid kick, gets him going again. He's learning to march on no matter what, which is really what I want him to do. His one big spook (big = he took three steps sideways and stared) was when a cicada started buzzing loudly in the shrub we were walking past. Silly boy.

 This horse-eating donkey, however, was apparently not scary at all.

I have no idea how Bre manages to ride in shorts, but she does... and makes the horse look pretty nice too!

Oberon's new bridle came in the mail Friday. I think it looks good on him, although white stitching is not my favorite. I'm waiting on his French Snaffle bit to arrive, but for now he's going in a kimberwicke, which will be his hunting bit. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find 6 inch bits that don't cost $200? Sheesh!

MC also came out to ride this morning, as she does pretty much every weekend. I must say, she's got Cash going fantastically well! I'm thinking they need to attend a dressage show or three this fall.

I found this enormous tomato hornworm caterpillar munching down my tomato plants. I think that's the biggest caterpillar I've ever seen... that's my hand holding that twig, and I don't have small hands! I fed him to the chickens after taking this pic. Yeah, revenge is SWEET!

 In other news, Saga is out of work AGAIN. This is what his hind legs looked like Saturday morning, the morning after our long walk. Um? He's not running a temp, he's not lame, his front legs are fine, he's eating fine, and he's turned out 24/7... he's just really really stocked up! Cold hosing and ice wraps don't seem to help any. Bre is loaning me her BOT wraps, so maybe those will make a difference?

 I hope everyone else had really great weekends for riding!

Garden bounty - come snack with me!

It's an amazing time of year here for the garden. Everything is ripening all at once, before the heat sets in for good. Although I didn't get a huge amount planted this spring, our fruit trees and grape vine are going crazy. It's a ton of fun to go out in the garden when I get home from work, pick something for dinner and dessert, then go make something tasty with it.

Well, ok, except for the blackberries. There aren't many of them on our single blackberry bush, so they don't even make it in the house *nomnomnomnom*

 This year we didn't actually plant any tomato vines... all of our tomatoes are volunteers from the compost we mixed in with the garden soil (yeah, I'm cheap). Over a dozen vines survived, and we have Romas, some grape tomatoes, and some sort of medium-sized eating tomato. Yum!

 These grapes are tiny but super-tasty, and there are loads of them! I think we might have to get another grape vine or two... maybe we could make wine?

Sometimes is really haaaard waiting for things to ripen!

Today's haul. The tomatoes went into a nice insalata caprese, and the plum got eaten for dessert. 

One of the benefits I have noticed of having the outdoor cats, Maddy and Artemis, is that they like to sleep hang out in the garden during the day. This means that produce-thieving birds do NOT hang out in the garden, really at all. Which means there's more produce for me.

Totally win-win. I gave the kitties an extra treat for their hard work. :)

Spring cleaning continues

It seems like we've been doing spring cleaning/tidying since, like, February. Mostly because it got warm then, so we've been outside doing yard stuff ever since.

With the warmth and the rain (we're still in drought, just not as severe), it seems like we can't keep up with mowing, and the horses can't eat fast enough either. To make matters worse, we managed to shred the drive belt on the mower, and naturally we have to order a new one online since Lowe's and Home Depot don't carry the belt for our model tractor.  So, hubby finished whacking down some nasty thistles (before they went to seed) with the bushhog attachment on our weed-whacker. Not the most efficient method, but it works.

Picture it like a light saber, killing giant weeds.

We still have a bunch of other places that we need to trim, mostly around fencelines and such.  We're hoping to get it done before a massive storm system hits, but who knows if we'll make that timeline. There are so many other things to get done!

The composted manure has almost all been spread - I've got about 6 more wheelbarrows to go. The stuff we spread a couple of weeks ago has almost all been grown over, which is awesome! Tomorrow we're going to take the last of the uncomposted stuff to our friends who take our manure, and then we'll be able to start a new big pile to compost for next year. I just wish I had a better, less labor-intensive system for dealing with manure. I don't have a place to store manure for four horses for the 6+ months it takes to compost, and it's really quite time intensive to spread it, one wheelbarrow at a time, once it has finished composting. On the other hand, I really want to use the manure to put nutrients back into the soil. I've considered trying a couple of different options - manure spreaders (REALLY PRICEY!), using the chickens to speed up the compost and spreading process, etc. - but haven't gotten around to trying them. Maybe soon.

Speaking of chickens, we cleaned out the coop today. We spread the used shavings all over the back pasture, aided in part by very gusty winds! We used the spent hay that the horses have left around the track to re-bed the coop. We have quite a lot - apparently the boys have been picking the alfalfa and tastier bits out of the hay and leaving the rest. It's annoying to have so much wastage, but I guess we are reusing it as chicken bedding, after which it will go into the compost pile, so it all gets used eventually.

We also FINALLY pressure-washed the trailer. With the water restrictions for the drought, we haven't been able to wash any vehicles for over a year. While we're still under restrictions, we were able to quickly wash the trailer. Yay!

 Dirty vs. clean. Makes a huge difference, no? (PS. My husband is awesome and I love him very much!)

A friend of ours had some volunteer cottonwood trees, which he very kindly gave us. The trees are native to Texas, grow very quickly, and are one of the largest North American hardwoods. We really wanted to plant some trees for additional shade, as well as to replace several trees which have died since we bought Wyvern Oaks. These guys should be 30 feet or so within 2-3 years, which will be fantastic!

 Already 6 feet, and it just sprouted this spring!

 We also ended up with a few "blind" (that is, no spines) prickly pear cacti. They're a good start to our succulent planting!

 Maddy spent quite a lot of her day supervising.

 Today I also *almost* finished the never-ending weeding project that is our patio. I keep weeding... and weeding... and weeding... and then new weeds start growing where I already weeded. Dammit.

 But it's looking better.

I also spent some time working on the garden. The onions were a big fail this year, only producing tiny bulbs. The broccoli grew really well, but produced tiny florets that promptly went to seed. However, we've had a bumper year for lettuce and spinach, so much so that we're pretty sick of salads.

Lettuce, lettuce, and more lettuce. Good thing I have an excellent recipe for a homemade balsamic vinaigrette dressing!

I had planned to purchase some tomatoes this year, but ended up with over two dozen volunteers and decided to go with them instead. Today I tied up the largest ones and moved some of the smaller ones around. It's a little challenging since I'm planting around the lettuce, which will soon go to seed when it gets a little warmer.

 I also dug up the potato plants that weren't doing to well, and found 16 potatoes!!! Not too bad. I ended up replanting the potato plants in another bed, since each plant still had a number of little thumb-sized potatoes on it. Maybe they'll grow with a bit of TLC and more water (the original beds dried out too quickly).

Tomorrow we are supposed to go joust, but we've got severe thunderstorms, high winds, and hail forecast for the day. Somehow sitting in a thunderstorm, in metal armor, while riding a horse just seems like a really bad idea. If we end up staying home, it'll be more spring cleaning... inside, though!