Industrious, and Overcoming Ignorance

Well, I am pleased and proud to announce that I do, in fact, have SPINACH!



I have 8 beautiful little plants which, now that I see them, I can clearly recognize as being spinach, as opposed to all of those ubiquitous little weeds that I was hoping were spinach. So I pulled all of those weeds out yesterday. One thing that I have learned over the past few months is how to recognize my most frequently appearing weeds. It's an interesting and useful bit of knowledge that quite frankly I didn't see coming.

On the subject of recognizing things, I think this is the kohlrabi. I do have a map of what I planted where, but things have gotten so mixed up from floating around in the rain that I am kind of confused still about the rutabaga and kohlrabi, and will probably remain so until they start to form thier bulbuous roots and the difference becomes obvious to me.



This is cabbage. Lovely. Although one of the plants looks like something is seriously eating it. I haven't been able to catch anyone at it though.

And here's a big beautiful collard plant. I took a few leaves off of one of these this morning and had them with jalepeno and onion in an omelette. It was delicious! I have also been harvesting lettuce.

Here's one of the easter egg radishes...it looks like someone's already had a bite...

And I do have carrots popping up in various places. Nowhere near as many as I planted.

But things continue to pop up. With almost two weeks of lovely moderate weather and intermittant rain, a lot of the seeds I put out seem to be germinating now. Interesting. Every time I walk out there there's more going on. Still no more sign of the Harlequin bugs. And no indication that anyone is eating the broccoli any more. That's it? 4 little bugs were doing all that damage? Must have been some hungry bugs.

The Official End of Summer

Well, this weekend I pulled out what was left of the tomato plants, and harvested what I think are the last of the sweet potatoes. It's possible that there may still be some sweet potatoes in the ground. I won't know for sure until I really start pulling out the vines.

This weekend I managed to get two bales of hay into the garden. I'm doing a much thicker mulch than last year. As my root veggies get a little bigger so that I can do it without squashing them I'll be mulching around them too.


Here's some sweet potatoes I prepared this weekend. I wanted to show you this because there are a couple of the potato ends that broke off during harvesting and I wanted to show you how they kind of scab over (the white part). I think it's called "corking". I was surprised at how incredibly easy it is to scrape and nick the sweet potatoes when getting them out of the ground. They really are thin-skinned. I've been "curing" them (I put that in quotes because I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. I guess time will tell by how long they last me) in the vestibule in cardboard boxes in front of the window because it's been both warm and humid in there. This weekend my Root Cellaring, Natural Cold Storage For Fruits and Vegetables book by Mike and Nancy Bubel arrived. It seems to be awesome and unbelievably comprehensive. After reading about sweet potatoes I decided to leave this weekend's batch curing where they were, but added a damp towel to drape them with for extra humidity. I have to redampen this towel every morning. But so far so good.

The verdict is still out about whether or not these green sprouts are spinach or weeds. If they're weeds, then not a single spinach seed sprouted. It seems reasonable to hope that it might be spinach, as I covered this area with spinach seeds. We'll see.

Here's a few tiny heads of red-speckled romaine lettuce coming up from seed.

Ah...and this is the piece de la resistance, my GRAND IDEA. I want to actually start composting, and I'm going to do it in this.

When I say "composting" I mean as opposed to what's going on above in the left of the picture. This is a dog kennel I bought last February that the dogs refused to be kenneled in. We've been using it as a double fence along one of our fence lines to keep our dogs and the neighbor's dogs from scratching and digging at the fence line and getting into a barking frenzy, and it's actually worked great, but it's in the way of the addition we're putting on the house right now and so needed to be moved. Since I needed a space big enough to build an actual compost pile this fall, and I also needed to keep the dogs OUT of it, this will work great. It's 10x10, big enough to build a 4 x6ish pile on one side, and have room to turn it to the other side. It's full of grass clippings right now. My next step will be to get out there and get all of the grass clippings heaved up in a pile in one corner, probably the front left one, so that I can start piling up other kitchen scraps in the back. I have found a "recipe" for building a compost pile in Steve Solomon's Gardening When It Counts, Growing Food In Hard Times so when I get around to actually doing that I will be sure to fill you in. That'll be great because it involves me getting a new toy.....a pitchfork!!!!!

Just to reiterate....

In case anyone needs a visual of why I'm leaving empty space in my fall garden this year, here's a few shots of my partner hard at work!

And the Harlequin bugs?

I forgot to say, that after discovering the Harlequin's on the broccoli, that I went out with an envelope and picked off three, dropped them in the envelope and gave them a smush. I've been out looking since but haven't seen any others.

Still Growing....

Here's a nice shot that shows that all the transplants are still alive and well and getting bigger. I'm still having seedlings popping up, but they're not filling in that long bed to the right nicely like I had hoped. We had SO MUCH hard rain after I planted them, that they kind of ran off all over the place, and I think a lot of them didn't germinate because of the heat.


These are rutabega I think. There are two big ones (below) and then some other coming behind them, probably from the second sowing.

This picture is pretty hard to make out, but because of all the rain I was talking about I seem to have a few big kohlrabi plants coming up in my chard bed. The rain must have washed thier seeds there.

Yesterday I picked up a bale of straw and did a thick mulch on the broccoli and brussels sprouts bed. I'll get another bale today (I can only fit one bale in my car at a time) and mulch the chard, collard, lettuce and cabbage. Possibly I'll have enough to also mulch the kale. But my daughter wants to "build a straw house" a la The Three Little Pigs, so I have ended up with mulch on the one bed in the garden that I never did plant, and I expect there'll be more mulch there later today. That's okay. Maybe it'll keep it from filling back up with grass. I had intended to plant that too, but things are less stressful for everyone if she has somewhere specific in the garden that she can play, so I think I'll just leave that one empty this go-around. Pictures of the mulched garden to come. My intention is to continue throwing in more mulch during the next few months so that I don't get those weeds!

What's Eating My Broccoli?

It's harder to see in this picture than I had hoped, but this little bugger (ha ha) is a Harlequin Bug, and he's feasting on my broccoli! You can check out the link below for more info. No pesticides recommended - not that I would use them anyway. Looks like I'm going to have to pick them off and crush them like I did with the potato beetles. Yuck.


And the good news?

I do believe that these two little sprouts are some spinach coming up....

Learn a little about Harlequin Bugs (besides how pretty they are) here:

http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/GARDEN/VEGES/PESTS/harlequinbug.html

A look at how fall is progressing...

Everyday I go out and look, and the tranplants are getting bigger and the little upstart seedlings are getting bigger, and if I look closely I can see that seeds continue to sprout. Suddenly we're having a LOT of rain, so the seeds are coming up all over the place, not necessarily where I put them. I think I may have spotted a few spinach seedlings today....

Here's the lettuce transplants.


Here's some Easter Egg Radish sprouts...

Daikon...

The red chard transplants getting big. I also have a TON of Swiss Chard seedlings coming up. Just a TON. I'm going to be eating and freezing a lot of Chard, which is fine with me.

The broccoli tranplants look nice and healthy and strong. I did notice that one of them had some bites of the leaves yesterday, and I picked a little black catapillar off of it.

I like this shot, because it looks so neat, and orderly, and you can't see all the un-decomposed grass. I want my husband to till next spring's patch now, so that all that grass can have plenty of time to decompose. As it is thought I think I'll have less trouble with weeds this fall than I did this summer...

Now these are either rutabega or Kohlrabi. Only 1 or 2 of each sprouted. I need to sow more seeds. Again, they may have all run off away in the rain...

Here's the biggest turnip plant. It's from the first sowing of seeds. I have a lot of turnip seedlings coming up from the second sowing. I think that all around I put the first sowing of seeds in too early.

Oh, and I had to show you this. Check it out. I am finally getting beautiful, unblemished, orange bell peppers!

A summer harvest basket. I'm still bringing in tomatoes and peppers. Soon I'll have nothing left out there in the summer garden but the sweet potatoes that are still in the ground.