My Chicago Garden

Actually it’s already fall, but we won’t bother with the details.  I took about 10 apples from the batch we picked at the U-Pick farm yesterday and made apple butter.

 While the apples were cooking down, I went out in the garden and ripped out the butternut squash.  I harvested another 8 squash off the vine.  That makes for a total of roughly 25 squash from 2 plants.  I’d have to say that’s down right the best squash harvest I’ve ever had.  The total area used by the squash plant was close to 300 square feet though!  And I had planned on putting it in a 2×2 foot square and a trellis.  Oops!  I don’t know where I’m going to put it next year.  I’m thinking I should eyeball the backyard again.  It just might get 6 hours of sun in the middle of summer, but I don’t know. It would be close with all the mature trees around.

I also took another look at those spare glass window things in the garden shed.  They look to be storm windows of some kind, but I don’t know how they would have been installed.  But one thing my wife noticed was that it looks like each of them is a two piece unit.  The frame has a gasket and channel that can be screwed/nailed into a piece of wood.  And the actual glass panel slides into a groove in the frame.  I did a quick eyeball measurement and 4 of them would cover one of the 4×8 raised garden beds.  If I use 8 of them, 4 on each side, I could build a small greenhouse or large cold frame.  It wouldn’t be big enough to walk into, but it would be tall enough to possibly leave it up year round using screens in the frame instead of glass.  That would resolve the squirrel, skunk and raccoon problem.  I’d want to make it portable, which adds some complexity to the design.  The idea being to build 4 sections that can be attached together.  Yet each of the sections can be carried by two adults.

 I don’t know if I’ll have time to take a shot at building the greenhouse so I put up the hoops for the low tunnel, just in case we get a cold night in the next few weeks.  The average first frost is only 15 days away.  I don’t expect the two tomato plants to survive but it’s an experiment. I’ll let them run on the ground and do what they can do in the time that’s left in the season.

Our family started a tradition of sorts last year of visiting a U-Pick Apple orchard at least once a year.  This year we visited Royal Oak Farm up on the border of IL and WI.  Holy Cow! That’s an orchard.  They have over 10,000 apple trees of over 24 varieties.  We spent the night up at a water park/hotel nearby and headed over in the morning to get a jump on the crowd.  Good thing we did.  By lunch time the place was packed and a steady flow of cars coming in to find parking.  We picked 1/2 bushel of Cortland apples and 1 peck of Jonagored for a total of $36.  I haven’t done much of the grocery shopping these days but my wife says that’s comparable to the local grocers.  I’m happy with that.  These apples are better, fresher, local so I’m willing to take a couple penny loss if at all.

 The Cortland’s are enormous and a very nice eating apple (I couldn’t help myself) but mainly used for cooking.  And the Jonagored is a horrible apple for eating (again..I couldn’t help myself), but it’s main quality is the sweetness that you combine with the Cortland for cooking.

We plan on doing some pie making and canning in the next few days that I’ll try and post about.

 We also picked up two pumpkins for carving later.

We fired up the fireplace for the first time since we bought the house.  We visited a fireplace company last weekend and priced out a new fireplace *sigh*.  $10,000 to rebuild our double sided fireplace.  It’s probably one of the best investments in a home in the current market (everyone seems to want a fireplace) but it is now very low on our priority list since it’s perfectly usable.  Instead we went to a big box store and bought the cheapest fireplace screens we could find and fired her up tonight!

  The only real issue we could see with using the fireplace in an "open" configuration (eg: without glass doors on both sides) is the potential for smoke in the house.  Well it did smoke a lot, but I mark that up to the horrible wood we purchased up the street at Jewel.  It’s practically green and smoked like the dickens, but we wanted to try it out tonight and didn’t have much of another option.  But that was a good thing after all.  With the air circulation running on the air-conditioner (it runs 24×7 since we have an air purification unit) it was causing enough "wind" in the house to draw the smoke towards the air intake in the dinning room.  When we turned the air blower off it drafted nicely up the chimney.  Looks like we’ll be able to put off spending $10,000 until some other time.  Yeah!

The girls had a good time roasting marshmallows. I mean…what else is a fire good for when you are 4 years old?

I’ve started a planting diary page.

 Beans and peas harvest has started.  I didn’t plant enough of them it looks like as I’m only pulling in a handful of either one.  It’s barely enough to snack on.  Which is what I’ve been doing.

  Squash plant is still going psycho!! I have 15 squash in the pantry and another 20 or so in various stages of ripeness in the garden.

The wife and I dug out the side garden that runs down the edge of the driveway.  Actually, it was more a strip of dirt full of weeds, Half of it is now going to be a natural area and the other half is going to be a berry patch next year.  Probably raspberries.

It’s with a sad heart that I say that I must discontinue the podcast. I’ve decided to switch to the less time consuming blog format. To get a perspective on the effort involved in doing a 10 to 15 minute podcast like MyChicagoGarden, I was finding that I would have to spend a good 2 to 3 hours of research and then about an hour recording the showing and another hour editing and posting. I simply just don’t have that kind of time. I’m going to focus on the research side of things instead of the publication of a podcast. Sorry all. Thanks for listening.