July 9, 2012, Isle of Man's Senior Race Day

Home from Tahoe today. And out to the garden.  There were nectarines, zucchini, tomatoes and green beans to pick.  The nectarine is a dwarf tree and is just three years old.  Last year  there were four nectarines and this year, with a good spring I picked these:

 I gave the tomatoes a good deep watering and as the tomatoes have grown so tall I  had to tie them again. While working on them I found this bugger:

 Yep. A very hungry tomato hornworm. I luckily spotted it after seeing a couple of stripped leaves. Got 'em!

I also discovered the first of my winter squashes, Galeux d'Eysines. Hard to believe it will be ten to fifteen pounds and warty come autumn.

This is a copied image of the full grown Galeux d'Eysines from http://eatingtheworld.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/ftc-galeux-d-eysines/



The warts come from all the sugar that migrate to under the skin as the squash ripens.

The Hike to Lake Shirley

Whew! A nice five mile round trip hike to Lake Shirley.  It said moderate. Yeah right. Took us about four hours to get about 3 miles, maybe longer. Yep, I am out of shape but that is no moderate hike either.  The entire hike was absolutely beautiful but lots of rock face to hike up. We had our lunch beside Shirley Creek. 

And then there was Shirley Lake...

Like I said, a beautiful day, a wonderful, tiring long day! Once we got up to Shirley Lake I took a fabulous, wonderful swim. It was about 40 mins to High Camp and the tram back to Squaw Valley.  We were some 6 hours. Still and all, a wonderful, beautiful day to remember.

And it is Friday

I've come up to Lake Tahoe for the weekend and yesterday morning I put together a basket for the kitchen  here. I love harvests! I brought potatoes, cherry and yellow tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, padron peppers, eggplant, shallots, garlic, dill, basil, oregano, thyme and rosemary, oh, and the last of the apricots. Shhh...I ate the apricots on the drive up! I just love the feeling of satisfaction I get from harvest.

The cabbage in last Friday's photos, shown here again, is now a quart of curing sauerkraut.  The lovely weighed 2.75 lbs. The cabbages all look like they will not be harvestable together.  This was the only one full-grown. Guess I will have to make several very small batch kraut this year.

I learned last year when the whole lot was ready at the same time how easy it is to make sauerkraut. And it was the best ever. The ratio is 5 pounds of shredded cabbage to 3 tablespoons of sea salt. That's it! Here's a link, rather than rewriting what is already so clearly written: http://boingboing.net/2009/01/12/making-sauerkraut-is.html .

My total apricot harvest has yielded enough apricots for 7 pies (5 frozen) and 3 batches of apricots  ready for jam-making (6 cups of apricots a batch). The spring just had to be perfect for them, just had to be, because this is a very young tree. I planted it as a bare root in January 2008.  This first photo is this past January after pruning.