Deberosa

As you are travelling around Saturday stop by the Deberosa Gourd Patch for some great scenery and cool gourd crafts!

Open 10 AM till Dusk (we watch fireworks from the farm).   Lots of gourds, crafts and garden and homesteading books.

Like my new facebook page!  https://www.facebook.com/GourdCrafts

The weather has been perfect for the gourds so far this year:

Gourd mushrooms treated with spar varnish for use as garden décor.

Bird house gourds, the dipper gourds make unique houses and birds love them!

Swallows in a dipper gourd house along the driveway.

Bright colors in this batch! All have a coat of spar varnish.

Wild flower garden in front of the store to enjoy while shopping.

It’s been a busy fall with the gourd harvest and sales in Floyd.   Success means more gourds need to be processed!   The store is filling up for the Christmas season when the trees go on sale and the store is open every weekend.

Much more is coming in the next few weeks so stop on by and do some gift shopping while picking out your tree!

2014 is he first “serious” year of gourd cultivation on Deberosa and it has been quite successful.

Many people do not succeed with gourds due to impatience.   Gourds must suffer a killing frost before harvesting or they will rot.  Some will rot anyhow if they came on the vine late in the season so the longer the season the better the gourds!  This year the killing frost did not happen until Halloween so the gourds kept growing thicker shells.

The next step in harvesting is to let them sit outside all winter!  Well, for here there was a middle step – moving them all to an area for the winter.   This first year the beds were not in the best places so the gourds had to move to enable making permanent beds in the future.   It’s good because it took 6 people all day to move all of the gourds.    They were put in a fenced in area because as they dry the wind blows them all around by the time spring rolls around.

6 Trailers later the gourds were all located in their winter fence.   They will stay there until spring, turning moldy and ugly and drying out to be light as a feather.  They certainly were not light for this harvest day!

In the spring I’ll post about the next step in processing.

Christmas Trees go on sale soon – $10 or buy two get one free!.

The sale season will start weekends beginning after Thanksgiving and going through Christmas eve.   We will be open from 10 AM to dusk every Saturday and Sunday or by appointment, just send an email or call.

THis year Andy will cut and load your tree for you and he will do some delivery in the Christiansburg Blacksburg area.   You can select a tree in the field or one that’s freshly cut on display.  Spend $30 on crafts and gifts in the new store and the tree is free!

It has been a very dry summer here on Deberosa.   All of June and most of July involved hauling water to keep the gourds alive, but this weekend the rain has returned and plants are very happy.

I’ve learned that Southwest Virgina can have just about any weather imaginable from the soggy summer last year to the drought like conditions this year.  Nice pleasant winters or snow so deep the area is paralized for days.  It’s never boring that’s for sure!

It’s a good time to start canning those tomatoes I’ve been freezing and make more gourd art!