Over the past week or so I have been working hard to plant my fall garden and winter cover crops. Jonny has worked even harder, helping to prepare my beds for planting. Our garden has never looked this good (good meaning empty for the time being!) this late in the season. Removing the gravel from our paths and installing the raised beds made it so much easier to maintain the paths and mulch our crops heavily to help keep the weeds at bay. There were still weeds to deal with, but we stayed on top of them, not ever letting anything get too out of hand. And or course between the beds, all we have to do now is mow.
I think the old garden looked prettier, but we just couldn’t maintain it.
This was the view from an upstairs window this afternoon when we were almost finished for the day.
(You can see the view from early June HERE. And HERE is a post from May with garden pics including Trudy as a little puppy and our mama hen and baby chicks in case you missed them! And finally HERE is a post showing the installation of the raised beds. )
You can just barely see the crimson clover coming up in the four large central beds. I planted those about a week ago. We are supposed to get rain over the next couple of days, something we haven’t had in a long time. That will help all the other fall and winter crops that I planted today get their start. I planted more crimson clover, kale, collard greens, onions, and spinach in addition to the beets and lettuce I planted earlier this week. Every bed will be planted with some sort of winter crop.
I wish the grass wasn’t so brown. Maybe we will get more rain this fall and things will green up a bit before frost. My plan was for dutch white clover to grow in the paths between the beds, and I planted it thickly early this summer after the beds were installed. The summer was so dry though that it didn’t take hold and we instead have a ugly mix of dirt and grass between the beds. I planted more today and I am hoping that it gets the rain it needs to get established.
My favorite part of the garden right now are the two beds the kids and I planted with sunflowers in early August. They started blooming last week.
I usually buy lots of seed packets of different varieties of sunflower seeds, but for our late planting, I just purchased a big bag of black oil sunflower seeds for birds. I scattered the seeds over my heavily mulched potato beds after the potatoes were dug. This was such a minimal effort in exchange for dozens and dozens of beautiful sunflowers that will provide the birds with some winter food. This will be my easy and inexpensive (that bag cost twelve dollars) method for growing sunflowers from now on.
The tall varieties start looking soooo bad. I definitely prefer the dense planting of lower growing flowers. I can live without the different varieties.
I cut down all the tall sunflowers today that had gone to seed, and propped them all but this large one against the fence for the birds.
The kids snacked on these seeds for a little while, and then the chickens moved in to finish them off.
Speaking of flowers, our garden is full of morning glories. We consider them weeds and are endlessly battling them!
While I think they are pretty when people plant a single variety or two to grow up a trellis or something similar, in masses like this they look like the weeds they are! They are actually pulling our fence over and need to be cut down.
Isolated like this, they do look pretty, but I can’t even tell you how many I have pulled this year.
I planted about three pounds (150 feet or so) of onions today, hoping for big fat spring onions. We are just beginning to run out of the onions I planted this spring and harvested months ago.
The onions were planted in the former blackeyed pea beds which had been heavily mulched and of course hosted those nitrogen fixing legumes, so hopefully they will be happy!
Jonny pulled our okra plants today. They looked like small trees. We have eaten lots of okra this year, mainly breaded and fried. Maybe not the healthiest way to eat it, but it is only during one short season and fried okra is so good! We also eat it in various gumbos.
This year I interplanted our okra with zinnias and cosmos which was pretty stupid. They all competed with each other for light and grew tall and gangly. I am leaving the flowers for awhile longer so we continue to have something for Larkspur to pick as long as possible.
This year was my first growing sweet potatoes. Keats and Larkspur were excited to help dig them up.
I was impressed with the harvest, several basket fulls.
But, they are very dry, and not like the moist sweet potatoes I am used to buying at the farmer’s market or the grocery. I guess I need to do some research. I don’t know if it was the variety I grew (and I have no idea what it was, just grabbed a bundle of generic slips at the feed store), the dry growing conditions this year, or the soil fertility.
The hundred or so strawberry plants I planted this spring have done well and formed nice matted beds. I still have to get them ready for winter. I don’t want to skimp on anything, hurting our chances to have a good strawberry harvest next May. Our tomato plants are still in the ground (in the background of this picture), at that ugly end of season phase, but still producing some small tomatoes. We probably won’t pull them until frost.
That’s my crimson clover sprouting. I love crimson clover. I need to buy some agricultural mustard to plant with it.
The blackeyed pea plants were all pulled today (making way for onions) after I picked a huge bucket of them. They would have produced for a couple more weeks, but I don’t know that I will feel like dealing with them in a couple of weeks. Anyone want to come shell them with me? It’s going to take forever.
When we put in the new raised beds this year, some of the previous beds were rearranged. This left us with half an aspargus bed.
Larkspur claimed the other half today to plant a “bunny garden.” She’s going to share all she grows with bunny rabbits she says.
She planted onions from my bag, along with sprouted onions discovered in other places in the garden left over from our spring crop. She also “planted” a bunch of peas in the other corner. I am not sure what they will do, if anything. I think there is also spinach, kale, clover, and collards planted here. And of course even Larkspur’s garden needs a vase of flowers.
And while Jonny and I were working in the garden today, the boys were working on their fort in the woods. They were very proud to show us their progress. Today they dug a hole, and installed a hollow log to use for a toilet. A hinged lid was added along with a brick privacy wall. The assured me that this toilet is only for “tinkling” in. Larkspur threw a super awesome tantrum when I informed her that she is not to use it at all. I promise I am a nice mom, a pretty laid back mom even, but I have to draw the line somewhere! Am I terrible for telling her that young ladies use the proper toilet in the house, with the door closed ?” She sure thinks I am!
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