Yesterday morning I awoke to the worst kind of weather, a couple inches of wet snow overnight followed by pouring rain all day long. It was a slushy mess. The ground is still covered with a few inches of snow leftover from the blizzard a few weeks ago, despite plenty of above freezing days since then. The seeds have been organized, charts and plans have been made, and the onion seedlings are coming along nicely, but it’s going to be a while before I’m able to dig in the garden. Continue reading
The garlic has been tucked in under a thick blanket of chopped leaves and hay and all is quiet in the garden. These days it’s dark by the time I leave work in the afternoon, so I only get over to the garden on weekends. Not that there would be much for me to do over there anyway, but I do miss my evening visits to the garden. Continue reading
As the end of October approaches, the garden has been more or less put to bed for the winter, but there’s still quite a bit growing.
The Friday before last a frost was predicted, so I went over to the garden and picked one last bouquet of flowers, big bunches of herbs, and most of the chard. I didn’t quite believe that we would really get a hard frost, but that night the temperature dipped down to 25 degrees.
The last of the chile peppers and beans and flowers were zapped, and even some of the kale had a little bit of frost damage. That weekend we finished clearing out the most of the beds, and prepared two big beds for garlic.
The garlic went in the ground last Wednesday, over 100 cloves of 4 different varieties. I may have gone a little bit overboard, but I don’t think you could ever have too much garlic. Maybe everyone will get garlic for Christmas next year.
Before the frost I put a row cover over the lettuce, and it’s nice and cozy under there. The lettuce didn’t seem to be bothered at all by the cold, and when I peeked under the fabric yesterday I couldn’t believe how much it had grown.
One of the new cold frames is in place over a bed of mustard greens, chard, tat soi, and carrots. The second cold frame isn’t quite ready yet, but when it’s finished it will go over another bed planted with lettuce, chard, arugula, spinach, and parsley. There’s also still plenty of kale and leeks, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to keep eating from the garden til it’s all buried in snow.
Fall has snuck up on me. All through August and September I had a list of garden chores in the back of my mind, things I wanted to get done before October. Even so it seemed very far away until late Friday night, when it suddenly hit me that Monday would be October 1st. That meant my seed garlic would be arriving in the mail this week and probably the flower bulbs I ordered many months ago too. There were beds to be cleared and bales of straw to procure and cold frames to build. Continue reading
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