Unlike many places in Vermont, we were fortunate not to suffer any damage from the visit of the remains of Hurricane Irene. Our power company had warned of possible outages, so we made sure our candles and flashlights were ready, stocked up on bread and milk, and ran some extra water into buckets. We tried to explain to Ellis that we'd use the water so we could flush the toilet even if we didn't have power. I think a bit of this was lost on him, though, because he later stated that, if we didn't have electricity but we wanted to watch a movie, we could just use the water to power the TV. If only.
We did get strong winds and lots of rain, which pushed our already sagging tomato plants closer to the ground. They've already started dying, so it's the typical end of summer race between the tomatoes ripening and the plant totally crapping out. Trey helped me get a batch of tomato sauce canned this week. This is the first time we used the pressure canner, which should be safer for lower acid foods (such as "mixed tomato products"). However, this was used canner that Mom sent us last year, and the helpful extension site informed us that we should definitely test the gauge on all pressure canners. Did we do that? No. So that will give me botulism to worry about this winter. Whee!
Also, the devil's edamame plants were knocked over. I call them this because they seem to be the most spiteful plants in the garden. They grew preposterously large and shaded everything around them. And, throughout the summer, we couldn't find a single bloom. About 2 weeks ago I got so angry I was ready to rip them out when what did I see? Loads of tiny white blooms. After the storm, I found the rest of the garden looking fairly good, but the edamame was lying on my tiny spinach plants. Again today, I was ready to rip them out since it didn't seem possible that we'd get any soybeans before it turned cold. And, you guessed it, teeny tiny little pods had appeared.
We did pull out the corn stalks and feed them to our compost pile. As we did so, Ellis (mostly whining about how bored he was) and I were chatting about our experiment growing sweet corn this year. He's been pretty interested in how the ears developed and about a month ago we watched a short you tube video on the topic. Today, Ellis suggested that since our corn grew well, we should try growing popcorn next year. I said that would be fine, but then Ellis informed that we'd have to use bags. I asked him if he meant plastic bags to collect the popcorn kernels, since we'd frozen some sweet corn in Ziplocs. Exasperated, he informed me, that no, we needed to paper bags to keep out the pollen. He was warning me that we'd need to cover the ears to prevent cross-pollination! At least someone around here is thinking ahead.
