Happy Halloween!

I am pleased to say that I have nothing scary to report - unless you think that miracles are scary! These slender red shoots below are what rye looks like coming up...


And this beautiful green grass is what it looks like when it IS up!





Success! Yeah! I have no idea what the heck I'm going to do when it's time to harvest it, how to do it, etc..... but that's for another day. For today, the rye is up!!!

I'm still harvesting, though I'm not getting out there every day or anywhere near every day.

I haven't lost any more broccoli plants, and it continues to come in nicely, though I'm not sure I'm going to have enough to freeze.

I believe this dude is one of the good guys....though a little far from home...hanging out around our soon to be new construction, and not in the garden doing what he gets paid for...Do you see how he's posing for the camera? I tell you, this little guy looked straight at me when I pointed that camera at him. I'm willing to concede that he wasn't actually posing for the camera, but I'm telling you, he knew that I was there.

And last but not least, a lovely spring color - a bulb on the new fig tree. I did tell you I ordered a fig tree, right? It's inside.

Next time, a pepper update. Not sure what to say about them today, the verdict is still out on whether or not they're going to make it inside. Though the serrano is still putting out peppers. I also have a new eggplant. Maybe I'll actually get to eat this one!

Cold, Rainy October Garden Update

Turns out I spoke too soon about the fungus gnats. They came back in force. I think I need to repot this in some new, dry soil, and maybe add an inch or so of sand on top. Right now it's just sitting on the back porch in the dampness (which I know isn't helping anything) but I don't want all those bugs in my kitchen, and quite honestly I've been in something of a funk this past week, so I haven't done anything about it

And since I seem to have a habit of leading off with bad news...

Today was my first day out into the garden in almost a week. It has been cold cold cold and wet wet wet. Today it was still wet, but at least there wasn't anything drizzling down out of the sky. So we ventured out, and got a good big basket full of greens, and a beet, and a turnip, and a rutabega, and I'm pretty sure I have one nice big purple kohlrabi that's about ready to come inside to be sampled, and all of that is good news of course, so wait a minute...what the heck?



Now as anyone who has been reading this blog for 6 months knows, I have done some battle with bugs. This is NOT the work of a bug. As you can see from the bottom front of the picture these two plants are right by the rabbit-guard fence, and this has the look of some animal that reached over the fence and just started a-munching. I would say deer, but that just seems awful far-fetched. I know that the rabbit guard wouldn't do doodly against a hungry deer, but you see I have a six foot high privacy fence around my whole back yard. I suppose a REALLY determined deer might, possibly, jump it, but I've had the fence for about 5 years now and have never seen a deer inside of it.

My second guess would be groundhog. We have a nice plump one living under one of our sheds, inside the castle grounds, so to speak. Is it possible that he's tired of eating grass and has only just discovered the buffet? We'll have to keep an eye on that. Up till now I've been pretty live and let live with the groundhog (giving him a running start before I let the dogs out, and all that). But I have my limits.

Below you'll see a smattering of turnip seedlings. (The big ones are the turnip seedlings; the little ones are weeds.) This is from my newly planted crop which I'm hoping to have for storage. I actually thinned them out a lot and then replanted about a dozen of the seedlings in new holes. I don't know if that'll take, but they seem pretty doggone hardly, so I don't see why not.

This little beauty is a volunteer hierloom tomato of as-yet-undetermined variety. It'd be nice if he lived.

You'll see my hansel eggplant is STILL blooming and still forming little eggplants, though I have yet to eat one.

And this...ah. This. This would be my nicely planted rye seeds after 5 days of rain have pounded the heck out of them. All right, so I wasn't THAT careful about planting them, but I did kind of hoe up rows and I did make sure they were covered with the requisite 1 - 2 inches of dirt, and then FIVE DAYS of relentlessly pounding drizzle. However, there is a bright side. Two bright sides actually. The first is that the birds haven't eaten all the seed. The second is that upon closer inspection, these seeds seem to have sprouted little white tails, so it would appear that all is not (yet) lost.

Among the good news is that my jalepeno plant, indoors for a week now, is still growing lustily, and we're still picking peppers. Hang in there, big fella. I can make it worth your while.

And we DID have broccoli for dinner a few days ago. Broccoli and collards, in fact, in a lovely fall pasta dish, with shrimp from the freezer, garlic I wish I'd grown, and plenty of hot red pepper flakes. Yum!

All's Well Again...

Less than 24 hours and there was no more sign of fungus gnats. How crazy!

Fungus gnats?

I think that's what they are. I woke this morning to find that my habenaro pepper plant in the kitchen was just crawling with tiny white insects, and covered with pink specks that must be eggs. A close look at the soil reveals that it was alive with little black gnats. What a mess! I tried to get a picture, but it was all just too small. My husband has been on something of a watering spree the past few days, and I think that he really pushed that habenero over the edge and the fungus gnat population exploded - literally overnight. I wiped off everything that I could, and have been making a trip by the plant every half hour or so and wiping the little white bugs up as they reappear along the rim of the black planter. I think things are getting back under control. But we definitely need to let that soil dry out. I'll be chatting with hubby about that later!!!!

Things Are Coming Along....

We've been very busy with fall clean up projects around here; among other things, trimming low branches off of long-neglected trees. In the front of this picture you can see our big, lovely jalepeno plant on its way indoors for the winter...


Here's a recent harvest basket.

And the Daikon that's probably going to eat Southern Maryland...

Broccoli - that seems to be doing well despite the cabbage moth carnage going on earlier this month. I haven't seen any more larvae out there.

Last but not least, this lovely flower is in bloom again. I bought and potted this back in April and have pretty much ignored it ever since. From time to time it blooms. It's always a pleasant surprise to me.

Sheet Mulching

I learned a new vocabulary word this weekend – permaculture.

A friend invited me to join her in doing some sheet mulching and I eagerly accepted, not even sure, at first, what that meant, except that it has to do with preparing a patch of nutrient-enriched soil, free of weeds, that will be easy for plant roots to penetrate, and which will not require tilling or digging come time to plant in the spring. It turns out this is a lot like the lasagna gardening that Teresa wrote about this spring.

I wasn’t sure where to do this in my yard; I had a spot picked out that I thought would get sun all day but as it turns out, it won’t, so I ended up doing it right in the middle of the spent summer garden. One advantage to this is that the area is already fenced (to keep the dogs away) and also it will kill off a bunch of the insidious weeds that have quite taken that area back over since everything was harvested. I’m thinking right now that I might finish off that side of the garden with sheet mulching, and then plant cereal rye in the other half as a winter cover crop, with the plans of harvesting the grain mid summer next year. That way, we’re using all the space that we have for something useful, without over-using and exhausting the soil. I ordered some cereal rye seed this morning. As far as the sheet mulched side of the summer garden space, I’m thinking right now that I might be able to plant some things there in the spring after all, as long as I’m not planting the same things that were there before. More on this later.

Anyway, my friend arrived with bales of straw (half for her and half for me), which we unloaded out of a borrowed pickup truck into my back yard. Then we set out on our collection adventure. The first stop was to bag up dead leaves from a donor’s yard. We collected 4 big bags; two for me and two for her. Then we headed out to get the manure. We went to a local horse farm that was happy to have us fill up the back of the pickup truck and haul it away. It had actually been sitting out in a pile for some time. It was pretty much already composted, which was nice – no smell.

When we got back to my place we did the following:

1. Put down a thick layer of cardboard and newspaper as a weed barrier.
2. Wet it down.
3. Put a layer of manure on top of this a couple inches thick.
4. Put a layer of dead leaves a couple inches thick.
5. Covered the whole thing with a thick layer of straw.

And that’s it! Apparently now I just wait, and let nature do its work. Come spring I’ll have a nice spot of rich, workable fertile soil for planting. I’m going to finish up that half of the garden in this fashion and we’ll see what happens!

Stay tuned for the sowing of my first cover crop…

Peppers in Pots

It's been getting a lot cooler at night, though you wouldn't know it today. It's the 3rd of October and it's 82 degrees outside!

I wanted to show you my Serrano pepper, the larger of the two plants to the left. It survived the transplant pretty well and has been steadily putting out peppers ever since. And guess what that is there beside it? My habanero plant! Remember the peaked-looking yellow freebie that I got back at the end of July? Well, it recovered. It bushed out, and greened up, and is covered with little white blossoms and with little green peppers!

Surprisingly enough, the anaheim and carmen are both still alive. The anaheim is still putting out peppers at a decent rate, though they're about half the size they were when it was in the garden. Boy, I really blew it digging those up when I did.. That was really dumb. The carmen plant I swear has been dead but today I noticed it seems to have some new growth on it. So I brought them both inside too, along with the eggplant, which seems to be setting up another fruit. I'm going to see if I can't rig myself up a tiny greenhouse for these things in the vestibule on the south side of the house, where there's a lot of light. Eventually I might have to put a little heater in it, as it doesn't get enough light to keep it that warm. We'll see. I'm hoping that by the time that's too much of a probem that we'll have more house!