Gardening Interlude

A reprieve from heavy newz

Oct 13, 2023

[post too long for email, mostly pics]

Quite a few new subscribers since I last posted a garden update. Welcome to my garden. It is my first year gardening here. It was a sheet of turf grass. It has gone just about as well as I imagined, if not quite. It has been harvest time in earnest for a month, though there is a slight pause in that of late, while I prep the garden beds for next spring - the bulk of the potatoes, cabbage, carrots and squash can wait until the days before a hard frost.

Heavenly Blue morning glories Sept 24th.

The vines cover half the fence, but this is the only spot where the flowers are abundant. It is the highest and likely the warmest spot in the garden, the north side with the pump house behind it. The soil is lighter here too. In this rich soil the vines just want to grow and keep growing. One of the reasons I love this plant is, the seeds are hallucigenic. It was Terence McKenna’s first trip. I have never tried, and they don’t flower this far north soon enough to set mature seeds.

Harvested this Sept 24th. That cabbage weighed about 20 lbs.

Oct 05. That was most of the last peppers, as frost approached. Tomatillos. Some surprise watermelon. The tiny dark green ones were surprisingly tasty. There were a few smaller harvests in between I didn’t photograph.

A very late season Monarch. More monarchs this year than the last few years, but still nothing like when I was a kid.

Flowers around the pond.

Oct O8. That was one row, about a dozen Upstate Abundance potatoes planted, so about 10-1 harvested. Late season tomatoes, later than I have ever harvested them, and it looks like I will for another week at least. Basil and cilantro for canning things. I have a lot of zucchini I wasn’t sure what to do with, so I spent an evening using the basil, making a green hummus that turned out a little like pesto. It works best with large, older, tougher Zucchini that don’t have much of a use otherwise.

L the homeowner made a couple of bouquets for my mom.

Oct 08 I planted some garlic I bought at the farmers market. I probably should have planted garlic about 2-3 weeks ago, but the forecast 10 days out shows no hard frost, so hopefully it works out. Garlic will put down roots until the ground freezes hard.

I have plenty of wood chips from work that was done on the property this spring. I will cover all the beds gradually the next two weeks.

I pull all the weed roots out of the bed, plant the garlic about two inches deep, then fill the holes and then some with compost. This is one of the potato beds, the potatoes harvested where I planted garlic, the bed extending to the fence, covered now with weeds. Cabbages to the left.

This is a sorghum plant that showed up on it’s own. A source for natural sugar, though I know little about the plant. Brussels upper left. Peppers left. Behind Ganesh and the garlic bed are some celery plants I have not sampled yet.

Cabbages. We have had two nights of light frost. I covered them the second night. As soon as I put them in the root cellar they will start to degrade, so I don’t want to pull them out of the ground until I have to. Same for the potatoes and carrots. These are all storage cabbages, so should last a few months in storage.

Winnipeg Parks rose.

About a five foot zucchini plant, killed by the frost.

I am prepping the beds for next spring. A few commenters questioned planting beds in the grass. I weeded a few times but let it go in August. It looks worse than it is, the grass grown tall and falling over the thin trellis beds. More of a problem than the rhizome grass, Creeping Charlie. It can cover a bed in a hurry.

It is a fair amount of work, clearing the beds pulling out all the roots. But it is like sacred, spiritual work for me, the weather is perfect for it, and I very much love my hands in the dirt. It takes about an hour to clear a bed, as I am expanding each a bit. It is about staying strong and in shape too. The foreground trellis was cukes, the trellis behind was melons.

This bed was seasonal herbs, extending to the zucchini, which are in a pile on the left. kale lower right, and a second planting of beets that will not likely mature into bulbs. There are peonies behind the bed, which need further weeding, but not really a priority now.

These pictures were taken before the frost. Frost has killed most of the leaves two feet off the ground, but none of the leaves above. The squash can hang and cure until a hard frost. I will harvest the ones on the ground. I don’t love squash, but my dad does.