GOLDENROD AND A VEZINA

This is my favorite time of the year. Asters and goldenrod are just starting to bloom. The end of garden chores is in sight.  Every year we vow to plant fewer tomatoes, etc., but maybe we are getting better at growing them or found better varieties.  This year we grew Brandywine for the first year.  Their growth was rank, quickly erupting out of the tomato cages, swarming over the peppers planted nearby and swooshing out over the ground.  We only had two plants, thank goodness!  They make very large, meaty, sweet tomatoes, but maybe just one of those will do for next year.  As Riverrim said, they give a whole new meaning to indeterminate.  We also grew Moreton and a tomato we had saved seeds from plus two others I forgot the names of – so a total of six plants.  Yikes.

We didn’t get any pears or grapes this year.  The pears didn’t get pollinated and the grapes were apparently not all that happy about being pruned so heavily.  The deer are getting what few apples there were.

I saved seed from the Turk’s Turban squash realizing they may have been cross pollinated with the buttercup or another C. maxima from last year so I got some interesting ones.  They all should be very tasty.  Last year’s Turk’s Turban squash lasted well into the spring which I thought was very impressive.

 

This lovely Vezina CPW will be going to a new home in a few days.  It is completely original except for new hooks and new bobbins.  Thanks to Caroline Foty’s (fiddletwist on Ravelry) new book on CPW’s and their makers, we were able to quickly identify it and then Jerseylightning on Ravelry found the  Vezina “muffler-strap” patent so we were able to date the wheel to around 1880.