Fall photo tour
Words aren’t flowing but film is cheap. 😉
A “What’s growing now” tour follows:
Front beds, after the coup and occupation pulled by the basil collective
Back of the basil beds, Thai Thai and more Thai
Ridiculous peppers
Volunteer arugula in a bed that is under deconstruction
New Zealand spinach, transplanted volunteers that occupied a 2×3′ bed last spring. Now, at least 80 square feet all sprawling from the 2×3 area
Sugar snap peas using old corn stalks for support, sort of….
Chard – fordhook giant a little too close together. I’ll thin and add to salads. Bok choi to the left, with a dusting of BT for organic cabbage worm control.
The 3 beds I’ll attempt to take through the winter again:
kale with spinach backup with sugar snap peas thinking about the climbing the fine support I put in for them
Lettuce, bok choi, chard, spinach (and sprawling 9′ okra plants in the background, still giving a pod or three a day)
Lettuce horizon in a lame artsy-fartsy photography attempt
Same bed, with the christmas limas choking the fence behind.
The incomplete “cohutt taught himself to weld this weekend arbor / trellis/ garden gateway project” Note the back lit angle effectively concealing the low quality of my work. This was Saturday’s project, Sunday’s was using my new found “skills” to repair the bush hog decking up in the mountains.
That’ll do it for tonight
Ridiculous
The pepper fairy sprinkled magic dust over the yard this year; this was about half of what was ready this evening.
The larger ones are poblanos and their foundation consists of a few dozen jalapenos. The background in the picture is one of the multiple Thai basil volunteers that cropped up all over the place this year; this late in the year the bees are loving it.
OK one more picture:
Green greens
Water
+
Cool evenings
=
Healthy lettuce/spinach/kale/bok choi/chard
Last year I wasted a lot of grow time in September by not consistently watering the young plants in the beds. This year I admit that the well is still like a new toy and I have been finding things to water every day just to use it.
And it shows.
Everything but the spinach has hit the stage where the growth seems exponential. I’m not worried about the spinach though, as my experience is it will grow slowly but steadily all winter with just a modest amount of cover (and we still have spinach in the freezer from last spring)
Bed 1:
Bok choi “joy choi”
Swiss chard “Fordhook Giant”
Lettuces
Bed 2, brussel sprouts in front, sugar snap peas on the right, kale and spinach sprouting in the middle, broccoli in the rear (and a “take it all the way to frost” brandywine tomato plant in the far back, still putting out good tomatoes)
Kale, getting big enough to start the insane curling pattern the leaves will have when mature.
And a troublemaker, trying hard not to be noticed after doing a roll in dry grass clippings while soaking wet:
The “Name that Veggie” game
Earlier this evening I harvested these for dinner tomorrow.
What are they?
Hint 1
Family is Cucurbitaceae
Hint 2
Botanical name includes “aegyptiaca”
(Hint 2 practically gives it away doesn’t it?)
Soup? Stir fry?
🙂
Outtake:
(Don’t look at the tags, ok?)
September Peppers II
Last year I posted here about how well all the pepper plants did in September when things cooled off just a little.
Half way through the month it appears 2011 will be no different.
Example:
The jalapeno “twins” in one of the back beds are now 6+ ft tall and caged/staked to keep the branches from breaking. I have harvested around 150 jalapenos so far this season and my best estimate is that I have another 200-250 on the 4 plants right now.
The jalapenos are invisible to a camera during daylight so I tried a flash to bring them out yesterday evening; it worked a little better, so here is a shot of the bigger plants (the front one is the 6’+ one).
Nutrition in a capsaicin wrapper, what’s not to like?
Cool nights make for rejuvenated beans
I have two types of limas in the garden again this year:
Henderson, a bush type that yields “baby” limas
Christmas, a vine/pole type that yields very large cream colored beans with burgundy variegation.
The drought took its toll on both of these this year- the heat really moved in before the well was hooked up. The “Christmas” plants really didn’t flower much after the first wave in late July and sadly there are no beans if there are no flowers. I let the soil stay too dry and the plants stressed in the heat. Shoulda woulda coulda but in the end I was too cheap to put city water on them with the well so close to coming online.
The good news is the well came online just in time to salvage them, plus the 7 inches of rain dumped on us 10 days ago replenished the moisture in the clay base under everything. Lower night time temperatures finished the formula and both types have taken off again.
The second “Henderson” crop is beginning to come online now and it appears that an additional flush of blooms will extend the harvest into early October:
It is an understatement to say the “Christmas” vines look healthier; they have actually gone the kudzu route in the last 10 days.
The interior trellis (with turnip greens popping up at the base):
And the fence trellis.
From the inside:
From the outside:
My neighbors who use the alley are showing a great deal of patience. 🙂 They can still get by without sweeping the vines.
The bamboo leaning against the fence was an OK trellising idea, but in order to really get in, locate, and pick beans I have to stick my whole upper body up into the canopy. When it was 100 degrees this wasn’t much fun. The leaves are “hairy” and stick to any piece of clothing they come in contact with; on skin they aren’t too terribly bad but they really aren’t comfortable either. ( The vines themselves amazingly seem to be void of all bugs and related creepy crawlies.)
When I inspected tonight I got in pretty deep; fortunately the cooler temperatures make a huge difference. So much so, I believe Mrs cohutt will be eager to get a ladder soon and start daily harvesting swims through the vines.
heh…..
This season’s past, present and future
First, the past:
The 2011 Roma tomato harvest was at least as good as last year’s inaugural attempt. I think I had a total of 23 producing plants this year, mainly Roma VF but a good number of heirloom Martino’s Romas too. These are amazing; each plant produces as many as 85-100 of these little plum tomatoes. As a determinate variety, the Roma comes in one massive harvest over 3-4 weeks vs a couple of individual tomatoes a day for the better part of the season as with indeterminate varieties (like my big Brandywine vines).
Well, a few days ago I pulled the Romas and harvested anything that looked like it had even considered to ripen, so I had a couple of buckets to process this week.
So this was my last of the last bunch of Romas, now dehydrated and frozen as “sun dried”.
The present:
The loofah gourds really seemed to enjoy this week’s monsoon; all 56 I counted on the vines obviously gorged themselves on the 7 inches of rain and managed to double in size.
A couple of samples are below, with my standard nalgene 32 oz water bottle included for scale.
Big
Bigger:
The future:
The fall plantings are taking off with the cooler temperatures and a steady supply of well water/ rain. The sugar snap peas appear to have germinated at close to 90% vs the 10-15% I experienced last year at this time. All the lettuce and kale I seeded has done well as has the chard (including a few volunteers). I have an abundance of the spicy wild rocket arugula coming up, both volunteer and manually seeded from the spring crop left to flower.
Looking south over the 16×4 “greens” bed, with some healthy young chard and bok choi in the foreground
And back north over the same bed:
I’m considering my makeshift “greenhouse” plans for the winter; I don’t know exactly what I will eventually do but you can count on more grand scale than last year. 😉
Monster
(The gardening rain delay is still in effect.)
The monster kitteh has been featured here before, but these pictures bring out the scale of sheer monsterness he possesses.
The table is 30″ across.
(I measured it.)
We haven’t weighed him in years. The truth is we are afraid to try and pick him up.
Would you?
The bottom falls out. Finally…
Finally, some rain.
4-7 inches is forecast for N GA. No complaints, since the last time we got any measurable rain was July 13, then a passing thunderstorm on August 4.
I can give the RICU (Redneck Irrigation Control Unit) a rest for a couple days:
I did manage to get a good bit of the fall garden in over the last few days. More to follow…..
Behind cohutt's fence 