The October Garden

Here it was October, and I finally felt like I was in the harvest season. Tomatoes and summer squash were really coming on.  I had plenty to eat and extra to freeze and dehydrate for the winter.  

Picking summer squash became a daily event.

Tomatoes were getting ripe.  I was enjoying them fresh in salads and on tacos.  I had extra so I blanched, peeled and froze them to use in soups and stews.  I also dehydrated some.  

The broccoli plants began to bolt!  I tried to eat a few of the bolted stalks and flowers.  They were tough, fibrous and not very tasty. So I cut all the flowering stalks off and hoped that they would produce a few more edible heads before hard frost.  

If you look really carefully, you can see a tiny butterfly in there!

There it is!  Brephidium exilis, the Pygmy Blue!
(picture taken on October 10)

The September Garden

There is always something interesting about how the weather changes on September 1st!


It is almost like magic. 

The last week of August can be sweltering hot, and then... over night.. on September 1st... the weather changes and we have milder temperatures.  It happened just like that this year.  It was obvious that the garden plants were doing better in the more moderate temperatures!!  Finally, my summer squash began to do well!  

Benning's Green Tint, a patty-pan scallop-type squash, is ready to pick!

Yellow Crookneck, one of my favorite summer squash, is blooming and developing fruit like gangbusters!

Ronde de Nice, a french zucchini variety, is very tasty!

Sweet Mama, a buttercup-type winter squash is setting fruit.

By mid-September I could see that my idea for using the concrete reinforcing wire for garden fabric support was not the best idea after all.  The breezes caused the fabric to rub and snag against the wire.  Eventually, the fabric tore in multiple places and became almost ineffective.  I say "almost" ineffective, because it did offer some shade to the broccoli plants.  I realized that I was going to have to come up with another solution if I wanted protection against insects and cold weather.

The tattered row cover

At the same time, I had decided to try a fall crop of kale, chard, lettuce, carrots, beets and peas. 

The Swiss chard (Bright Lights) and kale seedlings ready to go into the garden.

I dug in about 2" of compost and then planted the seedlings.  Then I sowed lettuce, pea, carrot and beet seeds in between the rows of chard and kale. 

The seedlings looked very spindly.  I was not sure that they would survive.

I know that planting all of these things in September might be too close to the first frost date.  I had no idea if it would even make a crop, but I decided to try to extend the season with a better row cover.  I looked online and found that several gardeners in different parts of the country have used PVC pipe, bent in an arc, as the framework for low grow tunnels.  I decided to try that method.  

So I bought the 10' lengths of 1" PVC pipe from my local home improvement store. Then I dug holes, 5' apart, down the length of both sides of the garden beds.  I pushed one end of the pipe into the 1' deep hole on one side of the bed, then gently bent the pipe over to the other side of the bed, and pushed it down into the soil.   

I had to special order some frost blanket fabric, because the local garden store did not have the size that I needed.  Meanwhile, I had some of the other fabric leftover, so I just laid that on top of the seedlings and rows of seeds I had planted. 

The August Garden

Some Pictures From my August Garden

The garden looks pretty good!  Everything is starting to grow and recover from the heat we had in July!

At the beginning of August the broccoli was doing well under the row cover. 

The beans I had planted came up and were growing.  

Then we had another blast of heat.

 Then I noticed that something was eating the broccoli leaves.

It turned out to be hordes of earwigs munching away!  They would  hide under leaves and bricks during the day, and would come out at night and enjoy my broccoli!  I did not want to put insecticide on the broccoli plants, so every morning I would go out and pull back the leaves, lift up the bricks and scoop up the earwigs and go throw them into the chicken pen.  The hens loved to gobble them up!

Then, I discovered that the bean plants were slowly disappearing.  The earwigs were eating them, also.  However, I also noticed that little divots were appearing in the soil, and the beans were dug up and/or nibbled on.

Diligent observation revealed that the cute little quail that frequented my yard, were enjoying the garden soil for a dust bath, and also nibbling on the bean plants.  

 On a hopeful note, by the end of August my winter squash was beginning to thrive.  A small Delicata squash on the left, and an immature Spaghetti squash on the right.

June and July Garden

The garden in June and July

I finished constructing the raised bed frames and filling them with soil.  By mid June, I was picking broccoli, peas and radishes twice a week!















I planted the squash and cucumber seedlings that I started in May and hand watered them diligently.  Then we had hot weather!  Nine days of temperatures over 100 degrees.  

We had nine straight days of triple digits.  Yikes!

  

Everything in the garden suffered in the heat.  The cucumber and squash seedlings had looked good, and then began to wither away in the heat.  It seemed like every time I looked at the plants they were wilting!  I was hand watering everything in the garden twice and three times a day.  

The squash plants were hanging on, but most of my little cucumber plants that I had raised from seed just withered away.  I did not want to give up on cucumbers, but I knew it was too late to start more cucumber plants from seed.  I decided to buy transplants from the local farm supply store and try again.   And the heat of June segued right on into July!

That heat wave abated on the 4th of July.  The evening of the 4th was quite pleasant. Weather on the 5th of July was total overcast with a few rain showers in the afternoon.

I decided to plant green beans.  I had two variety of bean seeds leftover from 2012 as well as new seeds that I had purchased this spring.  I did not know if the older seeds would germinate, but I decided to give them a try.   I soaked all the bean seed varieties overnight in water.  The next morning I dusted them with legume inoculant before I planted them in one of the new garden beds.

I had some seeds left over from 2012 and I had the new ones that I had purchased this Spring.  

I made a furrow approximately 6" wide and 1" deep.  I sprinkled the inoculant-covered seeds in the furrow, allowing about 2" space between the seeds.  I used a popsicle stick as a label, and wrote the variety on the stick and placed it at the end of the row.  Then I covered the seeds with about 1" of soil, and watered them gently and thoroughly, with the hose nozzle on a fine mist. 

Bean seeds in the furrow.

Labeled row

A rainstorm on July 8th convinced me that the garden would survive!