Fall Garden Clean Up

The garden has changed quite a bit in the last two weeks. Here's what it looked like on September 14th.
Two weeks later on the 29th, I had taken down the cucumbers, harvested and weeded the potato row, pulled the last of the winter squash, and brought down the tomatillos. I seeded winter rye in all those places, except where the tomatillos were.

Only a few days later on October 2nd, the tomatoes came down, the hoop house went up, the pumpkins went out, the cold frame windows went on.A few details.
Around September 20th, I dug up four pepper plants and put them in pots.
From Left to right: Habanero, Hungarian Wax, Purple Bell, Cayenne. I sprayed them daily with a soapy water solution. This past week we got some rain and then a bigger storm was forecasted with cold temps to follow. I brought them in on Wednesday because I didn't want them water logged when they came in the house. They are sunning themselves in the front windows and so far are doing ok. I'm continuing to spray hping that I don't have aphids with them. I'm hoping to overwinter them.

Tomatoes
Here's what the tomato support looked like after 5" of rain. It was worse, the metal props had fallen away and it was leaning even more. I propped it back up so that I could at least cut down the tomatoes.

Here's the after photo from the other side. I haven't weeded it yet, nor seeded it. The bed to the right is where the winter squash were and has been seeded with winter rye.

Here's how the winter rye looks in the potato bed, seeded a week before.

I also planted garlic in the former pumpkin bed. I ordered 6 heads of Red Russian and 3 heads of Music. All total it was 60 some cloves planted. It took up half of the bed.


So in all the garden is looking a lot more like fall. Many peppers and eggplant remain in the garden and that's the only thing I'm covering to protect from frost. We had a light frost in the back field again on Saturday night. Each time, it creeps closer to the garden. I'm sure it will get the last of the beans soon.

June Update: Alliums

Alliums are a short update. Most of them are in Bed 2. From one side of the bed, all you see are my onions. I mulched them last week with grass clippings. This would have been much easier if I had done it when they were smaller, but we were still working out the lawn mowing system then. Some are starting to fall out of the edge of the bed. Next year I won't put them so close to the edge.
I also have leeks that I bought as sets. They all transplanted well. It will be a while before we enjoy those.
My garlic is planted way in the back of the garden. It is not going to be much to speak of this year, but some is better than none. If you remember I found it spouting where the previous owner planted her garlic and transplanted it. Most is only as thick as a pencil. I need to trim the scapes.

Harvest Monday 5/10/10

This week we enjoyed our first garden fresh salad. It was wonderful to taste the different flavors of the oak leaf lettuce, tatsoi, arugula, and baby kale. We picked 3.5 oz.
I'm looking forward to many more fresh salads to come. We bought some bagged arugula at the store a week ago for a potluck meal and I think that's the last salad we'll be buying until fall. I hope I can keep up with succession planting the lettuces and greens.

This week I also got a tour of my own garden from the seller of our house. I'd offered to let her divide some of the perennials to take to their new home. It turned out to be a great deal for me because she let me know what all is coming up in the perennial and herb beds. She also mentioned one area in the back that had been her garlic patch. We noticed garlic sprouting that she had missed harvesting. It looked as though she had missed two heads because there were a cluster of sprouts together. So I got out my trowel and dug them up to spread them out. In the process I missed the roots on a few and harvested about 7 green garlic stalks.
About 14 others were separated and planted better spaced out in the vegetable garden. I may have home grown garlic after all this year!

Monday Harvest

Inspired by Daphne's Dandelions, here is a Harvest Monday post. Last week was a slow week and we didn't harvest anything except a few leaves of lettuce here and there. Today I harvested a lot in order to empty some squares for Fall crops.

1.5 oz of lettuce and beet greens for a salad for lunch.
11 heads of garlic.
Here they are cleaned up. 6 heads were medium and 5 heads were small. Now they are hanging in the shed to dry.

12.25 oz of golden beets. The mystery here is that the first set I planted still look like seedlings. I left them in the ground and harvested these. There were three of a nice size and the rest were small.
13.25 oz of Purple Haze Carrots. Most of these were larger than I thought they'd be compared to the size of their foliage. Most were long and nice sized, a few were strangely squat.
I'm looking forward to harvesting tomatoes and zucchini but so far there are only green tomatoes and male squash blossoms.

Planting Garlic

With the garden cleared of summer crops and treated with a layer of compost it is now ready for planting garlic.

I gathered 4 cloves from one of the varieties we grew this year. Unfortunately we ate all the variety we liked the best, the one that had small to medium cloves and purple skin. The variety on the right with purple skin is one we had this year, but the cloves are too big to fit in the garlic press without cutting in half. I bought another variety at the coop from a local farmer. The cloves are still a little big for my liking, but it will do.
I laid out the garlic roughly 6 inches apart. I had 13 cloves so one got stuck in the middle.
I dug down a few inches under each clove and set it in, tapping the soil tight. And that's it. We had an inch and a half of rain over the weekend so I didn't feel the need to water.
While I was out in the garden, I was thinking about how the Swiss Chard has been my best crop. It has constantly produced all summer. I was lamenting how I'll miss it, when an idea struck me. Why not transplant some inside? I had two plants that were later transplants and never quite got enough sun to take off like the rest. Whereas the other plants are so large you can see a beet-like root emerging from the soil, these are still small and tender. I got two pots that held jalapeno plants this summer (the potted jalapenos never amounted to anything) and transplanted them. Here's the yellow one. The other plant is red, but a bit more spindly. I'll put them on the windowsill by the radiator and when we get around to turning on the heat, they will have both warmth and sun. We'll see how it works out.

Tomato Haircuts

After comparing my tomatoes lacking maturity to those of bloggers in the region, and the peeks I get into neighborhood gardens as I drive, I decided I needed to act. I did some research about the proper pruning of tomatoes and found a article on taunton.com.
I had to wait for the tomato plant to dry, which has been a difficult task this week, but finally Saturday we had some partly sunny weather and the plants dried off. I took a knife to them, chopping off all the tops of the growth and pruning back any suckers that did not already have fruit on them. The picture above is after the haircut. I hope this will cause the plants to ripen the fruit a little faster. They are still quite large plants. In observing others' tomato plants on a walk afterward, I noticed many have a lot less foliage than mine. Currently there are 3 paste tomatoes that are beginning to ripen, and this one is the farthest along. Maybe by the end of the week we'll have our first tomato.
While pruning, I found this guy hanging out. I know it's a tomato hornworm caterpillar but I didn't have the heart to crush him. I really couldn't see any evidince of his damage. Cabage moth caterpillars are another story. I don't have any trouble getting rid of them.
Also, as a result of the very wet weather I found that my last bunch of garlic was molding on the outer layer rather than drying. The leaves were molding too so I decided it was best not to braid them. I stripped the outer layers and chopped the stems, and the most convenient place I could find for them to continue curing was this blue vase. I think they look quite nice.

Return from Vacation

Despite my fears, my garden survived my week absence on vacation. If fact it did perfectly fine. We had over an inch of rain while I was gone, and I had left the bottle feeders just in case. We returned to find these gigantic zucchini. Last night we used half of one in a Corn and Zucchini Soup. Maybe I'll post the recipe later. We'll have to be creative with the rest and a batch of Zucchini Bread may be in order.
Since it's been so wet, my onions were beginning to show signs of rot. We've been slowly pulling some to use for meals, but today I pulled the rest of them. There are so few and they are tiny so there is no use drying them. We'll use them in our cooking over the next few days.
I also cleaned the two smaller types of garlic. They both show purple lines once the outer paper is pulled off. However, they are different varieties because the slightly larger of the two has 4 large cloves around the center, and the smaller variety has 6-8 small cloves around the center core. Now they're braided together to hang on my kitchen wall. I didn't think the third variety looked sufficiently dry to braid so I'm leaving it to cure another week or so.
Also today I harvested the rest of my Romano Green Beans. They were very large and there were a lot more than I expected (again!). This was the end of the crop so I pulled the plants. I decided not to can these since the Dilly Beans made with these weren't as crunchy as I like them. Instead we'll have them with dinner.

More Garlic

Today as I pulled the dead vines of the mystery plant of the tepee, I decided to go ahead and pull the rest of my garlic. We have gotten a lot of rain in the past few days and and showers are predicted for the rest of the week. I was afraid that the ripe garlic might begin to rot in the ground. I harvested 6 heads of the large variety and 5 heads of my medium variety. You can see the big difference in size. The larger variety could have probably stayed in the ground a little longer, but the medium variety had soft necks and layers of skin brush away with the dirt.

I found some notes from when I planted the garlic last year and found that the variety I harvested last week was purple skinned. The head of it I have hanging in the kitchen is turning purple as it dries. The rest in the barn doesn't appear to have that color yet.

Here are all three varieties hanging in the barn. The one in the middle is the purple skinned that I harvested last week.

Garlic

This morning I pulled one of my three varieties of garlic. It was the last variety to put up the garlic scapes (blossoms), so I had thought it would be the last variety to be ready. However, it was turning brown faster than the other kinds so I decided to pull it rather than risk it rotting. I pulled 6 heads. They're a bit on the small size but I remember that it was a rather small head that I planted them from.
The first head got damaged as I dug it up because I didn't realize how deep the garlic heads were. They were 4 to 6 inches below the ground and I mistakenly nicked the head with the trowel. Since the head was damaged, I didn't hang it to dry with the rest. Instead I brought it into the kitchen to dry so we can use it soon. I peeled off the outer layers of skin to see the size of the cloves. The other 5 heads were hung in the barn to cure for a few weeks.
Of the varieties still in the ground, one seems close to being ready to pull, while the largest variety is still on the green side. I'll be keeping an eye on them in the coming week.