Fall garden

[plainolebill]

Kale is usually an easy one unless you've been getting those fat grey aphids. Some of the folks here have recipes for Kale chips that I wanna try. Supposedly everyone loves Kale chips!

Swiss Chard is usually very easy too. It's nice to thin them to a single plant every 8 inches or so. They'll tough it out all winter if your winter is not too long or cold.

Turnips are a good one to try. I just planted some "Round Red"....

We haven't had a lot of luck with chard because of leaf miners but kale does real well. We do get some aphids and maybe a cabbage worm or two before the weather gets cold but with Red Russian kale's flat leaf the aphids are easy to rub off and we can usually hunt down the worms. After October neither is a problem.

I love turnips but my wife has had some kind of prejudice against them until just recently. We stir fried some shogoin white turnips and the greens and she's now a turnip lover. She ordered some Shogoin seed.

 

[digitS']

Bill, much of the bok choy goes to the farmers' market.

It is a dwarf, Shanghai variety so it doesn't grow much larger than what you see closest to the camera. Of course, that depends on the time of year and it can be eaten at any stage of growth. That includes when it bolts to flower. At that stage however, the lower leaves are left for the compost.

Slugs? Yep . . . in fact, the plants closest to the camera are also closest to a couple of large bushes where the slugs like to hang out. They send nighttime forays out into the garden. Early in the season, they can be really bad but really, it is a combination of what they want to eat & cover. Not allowing the tomatoes to sprawl this year has something to do with the problems the slugs caused in 2011.

Steve

 

[Mackay]

IThe winter lettuce we cover with grow guard and harvest when the weather warms in the spring. We grow Kweik lettuce, a good flavored, dense butterhead that I highly recommend for cooler weather.

Can you please explain what grow guard is and where can I get Kweik lettuce seed?
thanks

 

[plainolebill]

Mackay, Grow Guard is just the brand name of a row crop cover like Reemay: http://www.territorialseed.com/product/1670/171

We buy Kweik seed from Nichols Garden Nursery locally but there are other sources too: https://www.nicholsgardennursery.com/store/product-info.php?pid1372.html

With grow guard I make low hoops of heavy gauge galvanized wire from the hardware store and clip the grow guard on with clothes pins to make a tunnel or just put rocks on it to hold the edges down. On sunny or warm days (rare) I open the side toward the sun and close it again at night.

I was really surprised how good kweik tastes, when I hear slow bolt or overwintering lettuce I think bland.