Thursday, September 29, 2011

One more day of summer

It is supposed to get really cold on Saturday night. This is good for the garden, but bad for hot-loving farmers like myself. Luckily, I love my garden and am glad that the cold should do in the bugs that are munching on my brand new Red Russian Kale seedlings and my chard. All else seems to be going well. Seedlings of all types are pretty well established, and it's supposed to warm back up to lows on the 50s after our little cold snap. Perfect fall plant weather!

One more big plant project is coming up before winter's onslaught; high tunnels for some of the seedlings. I want to see if 1. I can have them without their collapsing at the first snow fall, and 2. They help the plants grow more vigorously in cold weather. I'll keep you posted!


Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Fall garden time

It has been ages, blog! Late summer tends to get me down a bit. The corn didn't quite work out, the tomatoes died of wilt, squash bugs abounded and still abound, and the second bee hive fled the premises. It is too depressing to write about in the moment and the bad stuff manages to obscure the good.

And there is a lot of good.We put up beets for the first time, not all the tomatoes died (we have put up a bunch of tomato sauce and the tomatoes keep coming!), the green beans did well, the crowders are insane, and the edamame rule.

All that being said, fall is here! And I feel like I've earned some cred as a southern gardener because I am nine kinds of excited! Beans and peas are growing well, as is a TON of dill (I helped a few flowers self seed), and cilantro is up! I finally cleaned out the front yard garden and planted mustard, rape, Wong bok, arugala, lentils (we will see how that goes...) and fava beans. YAY!!!!!

There is still so much more to be done...more weeding out back, and taking up the melon/cuke patch and some of the beans so that more fall plantings can go in.

I'll wrap it up with a shout out of thanks to a storm named Lee who got me the rain I have been dreaming of for months. Thanks Lee! Now let's go fall garden!