Transitions

The transition from the overgrown summer garden of September into the more tame fall/winter garden is slowly taking place.

Overall things are still pretty shaggy, with lots of spent sweet potato and gourd vines stretched everywhere, browned tomato plants inside of cages overtaken by beans (and no surprise gourds too), and ground around and between some beds that appears to have been turned by a miniature disk harrow.

Sidebar: These chopped up patches of what before was level and packed clay deserves explanation here (but will not appear in any photographs.)   You may recall earlier posts about the sweet potato harvest and how a few were dug just outside of the bed where the original “hills” were planted.    Oddly, the far reaching spurs of these prolific vines did not wilt when chopped and removed from the hills as they were harvested.  Further investigation found that they not only rooted as they expanded, but in many cases developed harvest sized tubers several feet out from the bed. In all, another 20-something pounds worth were discovered radiating out from the source.  This pushed the total harvest close to 200 pounds, something we were definitely not expecting but are looking forward to consuming.   The outliers:

I won’t share the shaggier parts of the garden just yet, but I will share some carefully angled and cropped shots of some of the areas ramping up for cold weather harvests.

In these you’ll see broccoli, cabbage, kale, leeks, mixed greens (turnip mostly), lettuce, Chinese cabbage, kohlrabi, and a spot or two of some vigorously growing volunteer arugula.

The best of the year is yet to come.