Saturday Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Nov. 26

We don't have as many places in the USA with flowers blooming as we did a few weeks ago, so we are turning to Neal in Israel for some photos:

Peanut: My son's startup is doing some work on peanuts, and he brought me a few seedlings in 2021. The patch regenerated on its own this summer. If you think that you have followers who assume, as I did, that peanuts grow out of the plant's roots, rather than from its flowers, you might want to includes these shots: 1 - flowers, about the size of a dime; 2 - the spike which grows out of the fertilized flower and burrows into the ground.

Those flowers look like they are in the legume family, don't they. So do the leaves. And it's fascinating how the flowers send out spikes that burrow into the soil to form peanuts!

Thanks, Neal!

Farming, Edible Gardening/Putting Things By

Olives on the tree and in jars: I didn't pickle olives in 2020 or 2021, because the yield was scanty and the flies (olive flies, fruit flies, Mediterranean fruit flies - whatever they were) what little there was on the tree. This year the tree was covered with fruit, and so I decided to invest in pest control in order to guarantee a harvest. Early on, I hung three bottle traps, and a bit later I began weekly applications of Dow Success. The stuff is a poisoned bait, which you spray on a number of spots around and on the tree. The effort helped, but the results were far from 100%.

Since I haven't yet installed my conveyor belt-fed electro-optical quality control system, I had to inspect the olives one by one, cutting out fly-damaged parts to salvage as many olives as possible. After that, I had to hammer them one by one (to split them in order to help the bitterness leach out), since hitting a number of olives with the schnitzel-flattening hammer always led to some of them flying off in random directions.

Those olives were definitely a labor of love!

Limes on the tree and lime marmalade: The lime tree also had a great yield. In addition to distributing fruit to friends and relatives, I squeezed for juice and made two batches of marmalade. I changed the recipe I found a few years back, reducing sugar by about 15%, adding an additional liter of lime juice in place of a liter of water, and using the peels of the additional limes I used to increase the amount of juice. I also learned how to use pectin properly. The result is marmalade with a darker color, which looks a bit murky, but which also tastes much better.

Lime marmalade is distinctive. Good tips!

Mango: The tree yielded about 15 large, tasty fruits.

They look great, Neal!

Niece and nephew bought and moved onto a small farm this year. Raised, butchered and ate a Thanksgiving turkey.

Curious turkey:

Full-grown turkey:

Roasted turkey:

Could you do it? Should you do it?

And here's a pig with a punkin.

Puttering

Still got leftovers? Anticipating more holiday guests? Cooking up some frozen produce?

Gardens of The Horde

From Eromero:

Mrs. E's Easter Lilly sprouts to new life, on the kitchen counter!

Wow!

From Jake:

Flowers blooming in Murrieta, CA

This group of flowers started blooming on the first day of fall and haven't stopped yet.

Beautiful.

Hope everyone has a nice weekend.

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Week in Review

What has changed since last week's thread? Saturday Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Nov. 19

Any thoughts or questions?

I closed the comments on this post so you wouldn't get banned for commenting on a week-old post, but don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 01:23 PM

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