Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 380
Still haven’t had to water my garden and it keeps producing. My tomatoes taste so much better than the hot house ones from the store. I’ve had hundreds of cherry tomatoes. The little tear drop ones are so much better than the round ones. The skin on the round ones is tough to chew; they taste ok but don’t compare to the others. My zucchinis keep producing, it is amazing how one that is foot long can hide in those big leaves. Same with the cucumbers which are trailing all over the place and growing up my green bean vines. It is amazing what you can grow in a six- by three-foot space. Next year I’m planting a second row of radishes a couple of weeks later than the first as they are so good. The green beans are going to produce right up to the first frost which is fine with me. With the Swiss chard and beet greens I haven’t taken out a frozen veggie all summer. Checking the roots on the beets and carrots they are looking good for a fall harvest. My sun flowers are about ripe as the Goldfinches and Black Capped Chickadees have been checking them out while I have been picking beans. It has been a fun season in my little gardens. It took a while for my two little flower plots to take off but they have produced plenty of cut flowers to share.
The Old Forge Garden Club had the annual fall flower sale last Saturday and sold lots of deer resistant plants to locals and some out of towners here for the weekend and events here. The leaves as you went up in elevation like Twitchell Lake have changed to their beautiful fall colors. I’ll be the steward in the Stillwater fire tower this weekend and I’m sure the colors up that way are peak or about peak.
The bears have been active along the Limekiln Road pulling down the choke cherries right into the road. They also got into the big apple tree and broke down a few branches where they could eat on them from the ground. One big black cherry on the golf course side didn’t hold the weight of the bear and it is hanging over the road. They climb up in both the American beeches and black cherries and harvest the bounty before it falls to the ground. Sometimes in the bigger trees as they harvest the nuts and cherries, they pile up the cleaned off branches and build themselves a platform to work off called a bear nest. I remember one time working on the trail into Cedar Lakes late in the fall and there were several big Beech trees along the trail and they all had nests in the tops. You could see the bears claw marks into the smooth gray bark where they had climbed these trees. I took pictures of these and they were big bears. I showed a couple of ladies hiking the Cascade Lake trail the other day some claw marks in the trees along the trail so there must have been some nuts in these trees this year. There are going to be some fat bears this fall before the den up. When there are lots of beech nuts, they will sometimes come out of the den if they are in an area of beech trees and paw around in the snow after more nuts.
The deer on the other hand must wait until the cherries and nuts, both beech and oak, fall to the ground so they can get them. I saw the deer in Old Forge eating the acorns off the main street the other day. The wild turkeys harvest both in the tree tops and off the ground. Many other wild birds feast on these as they travel through the area putting on some fat for their flight south. The wild raisin, mountain ash and red elder berry are their favorites, but they will tackle some of the smaller apple varieties. I know they clean mine off as they come through.
The 90-Mile Canoe Classic started in Old Forge last Friday and the lakefront was covered with canoes of all sizes and people more than I’ve seen there before. I think they had three great days paddling as it just rained in the overnight hours. I heard a couple tipped over coming into the channel in Inlet as the waves get you from both sides for which they aren’t prepared. It is a good thing they didn’t have the winds and waves of the day before or many of them would have been swimming.
I hope you can get out and enjoy the fall colors but that’s another story. See ya.
Photo above: 8 person canoe getting to the starting line
