Status of the Skeeter Nursery

The relatively cool and wet August has brought the mosquito activity to torturous levels at certain times of the day.

Unfortunately, these times are at dawn and then the couple of calm hours before sunset in the evening, which happen to be my only times to get into the garden during the week.

So I head out in the evening with deet cologne wafting along with me; the only real inconvenience is that I can’t deet my eyeballs and the mosquitoes seem to know that.

Sorry for the digression, but you will observe from the pictures the calm, humid, overcast conditions from this evening that made me a walking bag of blood aka mosquito food.

Anyway, the pictures.

Fall is looming and I’ve been prepping beds and planting my fall and winter fare.

These two beds will be covered this year (vs the 3 last year) and I’ll give the lower bed a rest. The short one on the right will be my salad bowl for the next 8 months as well as a host for some kohlrabi and rutabaga.
The one on the left will have kale and brussel sprouts along with the artichoke. (Do you know how absolutely awful a covered bucket of bad tomatoes and other rotting produce smells if you leave it sitting in the yard for 5 days? I do now. I took the top off of the bucket in the picture after snapped this. Barf. Note to self- empty the culling buckets daily.)

And the jalapeno plant will be held over until it freezes.

A few cabbage and broccoli plants are coming along in the middle section; disregard the tired beans, tomatoes and mini-corn that I should have done something with by now).

I just figured out something about my mystery onions. I thought these were from the sets I planted nearby in the spring, but as I type this I have solved a mystery. They grew along with the set onions but never bulbed up. I wondered why, but now I realize these where from the root ends of green bunching onions I used in a gumbo or etoufe last February. No wonder they didn’t bulb, they instead looked like they were going into decline but divided and have perked up substantially this past few weeks.

Duh. So the next time you purchase green onions, cut the root end off with about 1/2 of onion on it and plant them. Yes, they actually will grow back into a full onion then will divide like crazy. For life.

TIP: Plant flat leaf Italian parsley in the fall and let it go to seed in the following spring/summer. Apparently, if you do this, you will NEVER be without parsley again. When I pulled the last of the tired 1-year old plants from a bed, look what was waiting in the shade underneath: One Meelion Parsley babies.

heh…

And finally, in the previous post a spoke of the “bush” varieties of sweet potatoes and how their “vine-less” traits were relative at best.

I rest my case; the lighter leaves are the Porto Rico and the darker purplish leaves are Vardaman:

That’s all. More from mosquitoland soon.