What Did You Do In The Garden?

[ducks4you]

I attacked my main garden bed today. I pulled all of the corn stalks, found 6 edible ears! I piled them up mostly out of reach of the horses, bc I wasn't sure that should big on the whole pile.
This bed has been a MESS all season. I pulled up most of the curly dock growing in it. Should be able to attack it again on Thursday. I will mow it with my bag mower to clean up the odd weed and the crabgrass, then till it and plant the 50 pound bag of oats for a cover crop.

 

[Zeedman]

It looks like the hard freeze is coming either Thursday or Friday, so it was finally time to harvest everything still growing, and start putting the gardens to bed. Most of what remained was peppers which had been covered in last week's frosts.

Taltos. A very productive sweet bell, but late. I stripped the leaves for this photo. In its defense, it was growing in partial shade, 24" North of a row of pole limas. The extra 10 days beyond our normal freeze was helpful, and allowed me to replace my 2013 seed.

Bea. This is a highly productive, low heat pepper. It actually has a short DTM & should have had many ripe; but like many other vegetables this year, was severely stunted by weeds until mid-Summer. The plants are pretty sturdy, they just tipped a little under load. I use the ripe peppers for a low heat paprika, but since there are so many immature this year, I'll try pickling them instead. This is one of 6 plants.

 

[Zeedman]

More peppers:

Italian Cheese, a medium-hot pepper with a short DTM. I posted a photo of the plants earlier in this thread. It is incredibly productive - this is what remained on 6 plants after two previous pickings. Because these were the first thing weeded in the rural garden, they were unaffected by weed pressure. The peppers are 3-4 ounces, and very crunchy, so they are well suited to canned salsa.

PI 315008, Scarlet Lantern. The seed I was given was highly diverse in terms of pepper color & shape (among many other traits), I am selecting back to the genotype in the photo. For a Habanero-type, it is fairly mild. The DTM is still variable, but many plants in this generation were very early, and all were highly productive.

 

[flowerbug]

I attacked my main garden bed today. I pulled all of the corn stalks, found 6 edible ears! I piled them up mostly out of reach of the horses, bc I wasn't sure that should big on the whole pile.
This bed has been a MESS all season. I pulled up most of the curly dock growing in it. Should be able to attack it again on Thursday. I will mow it with my bag mower to clean up the odd weed and the crabgrass, then till it and plant the 50 pound bag of oats for a cover crop.

oats will not survive frost if you intend it to live past this fall. i've used winter wheat and winter rye (the grain not the grass) as excellent cover crops. just have to be sure to turn them under early enough in the spring, but they do great things to the soil here.

 

[digitS']

Gonna contradict you, @flowerbug . I hope that is okay .

Oats will survive some frost. Temperatures in the teens would probably do them in. They are a cool season, spring crop and you can risk some chance of a freeze.

Ducks' may want to think about planting them in the spring and turning them under where she has her warm season garden. Or, saving the seed until late season 2021 and planning to have them winter kill, a nice, trouble-free, green manure.

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

Gonna contradict you, @flowerbug . I hope that is okay .

Oats will survive some frost. Temperatures in the teens would probably do them in. They are a cool season, spring crop and you can risk some chance of a freeze.

Ducks' may want to think about planting them in the spring and turning them under where she has her warm season garden. Or, saving the seed until late season 2021 and planning to have them winter kill, a nice, trouble-free, green manure.

Steve

ha! you can contradict me all you want if you are adding further information or correcting me or even if you feel like it.

i only have the one experience and that was 7yrs ago. no memory of when the oats gave up for the season, but we must have had a pretty mild fall because the pictures i have of the garden where i had the oats, wheat and rye planted by each other shows all of them growing and nice and green and that was mid-November.

once we get the gardens ready for the winter we close up the gate and won't likely visit those gardens again until the snow melts off and there are some flowers blooming so that would make sense why i'd not really notice when they went kaput.

the pictures of the next spring are showing the bare spot where the oats were but that is way later and useless for saying when something happened other than the picture itself.

 

[flowerbug]

More peppers:
View attachment 37240
Italian Cheese, a medium-hot pepper with a short DTM. I posted a photo of the plants earlier in this thread. It is incredibly productive - this is what remained on 6 plants after two previous pickings. Because these were the first thing weeded in the rural garden, they were unaffected by weed pressure. The peppers are 3-4 ounces, and very crunchy, so they are well suited to canned salsa.

View attachment 37241
PI 315008, Scarlet Lantern. The seed I was given was highly diverse in terms of pepper color & shape (among many other traits), I am selecting back to the genotype in the photo. For a Habanero-type, it is fairly mild. The DTM is still variable, but many plants in this generation were very early, and all were highly productive.

you know you're a pepper head when you drool when you see pictures like these...

 

[flowerbug]

finished shelling some beans and took the pods out to bury, plus i got a three gardens more cleaned up than they were before and picked some gravel out of the dirt for a while. not feeling super inspired today to do a ton of work, but at least i made progress and got a few hours of exercise in.

 

[Zeedman]

We usually wait until the day before the freeze to harvest the chard, so that was today. Like many other vegetables, the chard sweetens when kissed by frost, so this is the batch we freeze. We had just finished when it began raining. The tubs are outside in the rain now, which will keep the chard fresh until morning.

We also harvested all of the Gigandes runner beans. After shelling, it looks like a couple quarts to freeze. There is also a bowl full of very small pods, which will be cooked tomorrow as green beans. There were even about 30 dry seeds - which at least replaces what was planted. That is a minor miracle, given that they didn't start climbing until late August.

I finally picked the ripe Diamond eggplant, which I was letting go as long as possible for seed saving. And with that, all of the gardens are now done for the year. Except for garlic planting, and as much garden cleanup as the weather allows.

Still a few things left to do though. I had intended to begin opening up the mature Tromboncino next month; but the two ends I had set aside cracked from the blossom end. Fruit flies were getting in the cracks, so I opened them up & scooped out the seeds. The seeds were fully mature, fat (for a Moschata), and surprisingly plentiful. Given that all of the squashes set within a week of each other, I may begin opening & dehydrating the rest.

DD had a couple trees removed last month, and the company did a good job; so I am trying to get them to take down one of mine. It is a large heavily-branched male mulberry, which leans too far over the neighbor's property (and their shed) for me to cut it down safely. A lot of good firewood there, and it would eliminate the roots which have been creeping into the garden. There are also a couple stumps I want removed, which I would try to do myself but... Both tasks will allow me to significantly expand one of the home plots, which will partially compensate for some of the space lost in the rural garden.

 

[flowerbug]

@Zeedman, i have had some of the red chard survive our winters here. if you left it you might get some new leaves here or there and it may regrow in the spring.