I could well be that in 50 years the World Thought Police will have determined that it’s disgustingly barbaric to put chickens anywhere near a vegetable garden. The girls and I will either be dead or too old to care. Right here and now, I get way too much pleasure from it.
The garden looks pretty naked now; just a giant zucchini plant that I really don’t need and some peppers that taunt me with impossibly immature fruits.
But what’s different for me this year is having tomato plants that are still kicking out in mid-September. Something about having a decent tomato crop makes all of the year’s other gardening mistakes recede into irrelevancy.
I really don’t want any more tomatoes. They’re coming out our rears and ears. But it’s so much fun just looking at them in September and hoping that they’re here because of something that I did.
If I were to wish for a glut of anything it would be, in this order: 1. Tomatoes, 2. Sweet corn, and 3. Raspberries.
Two out of three, high fives all around.
About a month ago I got off my rear for a second and planted a few six-packs of lettuce seed indoors. It somehow always seems silly planting a few seeds indoors when the whole garden’s bursting at the seams.
But now it doesn’t seem silly. The little seedlings would have had a rough go outside in the last month of dry, 90° temperatures. They should do fine now. The temperatures are gradually decreasing, and the grass-clippings-mulch should keep them happy. Later I’ll get out a little cloche, that should help them through some light frosts.
From experience I know that you actually have to think ahead sometimes. The cloche full of salad crops will be situated where I won’t grow melons next year until I change my mind.
The end of summer isn’t a time, it’s a process. Plants die off slowly, leaving harvest to stretch out over a period of weeks.
Although I’ve pulled two tomato plants and have a couple more on their last legs, there are still three or four producing. We’ve canned two batches of salsa, some whole tomatoes, and made tomato sauce. Now the shelf space is all used up, and the freezer is getting difficult to navigate.
Another weirdly big Amish Paste tomato to be used for next year’s seed
But I have trouble not putting produce to good use, so yesterday I made a final (?) batch of salsa for freezing, just for me, with plenty of hot peppers. Since the pantry wasn’t an option, I decided to freeze the salsa, first in ice cube trays, then putting the hot salsa cubes into freezer bags. Makes it simple to take out just the amount I need at supper time.
I just hope there’s still room in there for ice cream.
With gardening winding down, it seemed like a good time to take care of another project that’s been on the to-do list; a couple of drying rods in my grow closet.
In the past, our drying produce has hung in the barn, which isn’t ideal. It’s damp in there, and I always feel like I’m luring rodents to a feast.
With a couple of lengths of PVC left over from the chicken tractor build and a couple of pieces of scrap wood, it was done.
It’ll be easy to remove the rods if they get in the way, and there’s plenty of rack space for my needs. The only possible hitch might be the lack of air movement, but we’ll see.
There was a time when I would wait for all of my crops to be spent, till the garden and call it a season. Now it’s more of a piecemeal proposition.
With my garden’s size, I never have enough compost to fertilize the whole caboodle. Even starting with three bins full of waste materials, it cooks down by half or more.
I had enough compost to generously cover 4 1/2 beds, which are now a uniform 21′ x 3′. I tilled in the compost and then planted a winter cover crop mix in those beds. The rest of the beds will each get 7 to 8 gallons of fresh chicken manure before winter (I clean off the pop board every morning and store it in a covered 5 gallon bucket). Then they’ll be covered with shredded leaves.
In the piecemeal spirit, I’ve also started improving paths. It’s an uncomfortably big job to gather and spread wood chips on all of the paths at once, so I pick them off one at a time.
This year I had a big pile of willow chips from the ground-up stump of a huge willow tree that came down earlier. To keep weeds from getting a head start, I first laid down cardboard boxes or newspapers. These were actually from a stack of discarded voter guides that my wife picked up. The perfect place for politics…
…and done. Not a permanent solution, but good for a couple of years.
These chip paths just make it nicer to walk and kneel in the garden in the mornings and after rains. Here’s a path that I’d completed earlier, with the winter cover crop doing its thing…
Suddenly they’re almost over. Those months, May, June, July, August…do they really occupy the same amount of time as December, January, February, March? It’s got to be a trick.
Last night we had the last ears of sweet corn. So good, and not to be tasted until those months have worked their way around again. Each year I appreciate more what real freshness is, how it’s an impossibility except in those months, and how special that makes a garden.
But do I ever wish that it could be summer all the time? Not on your life. It’s the renewal, the freshness, that makes life good. Moving through the season changes makes things endlessly interesting. Brand new but familiar.
My life has been a lot like those months; the freshness and work of raising children, the satisfaction of watching them grow and mature, and the ultimate delight of seeing that freshness renewed in the eyes of a grandchild.
I feel like a watermelon virgin. Oh I’ve been around the block a few times over the years, and even made it to home base on occasion. But I don’t feel confident around watermelon vines. They don’t naturally love Michigan weather, and honestly…I don’t really have a good understanding of what keeps them thriving.
This year I dropped the ball again. I figured I’d just plant whatever they had in stock at the local nursery instead of planning ahead and starting seeds of my own choosing. The vines grew fine for a while, but then got hit with something that caused patches of the leaves to wilt. In the end there were two melons.
The truth is that if I’m growing something the takes up as much space as watermelon vines, I want a seedless end product.
Seedless watermelons require planting a pollinating variety nearby, or else no fruit. A couple of years ago I bought a pack of seedless watermelon seeds from Burpee that came with seeds of a pollinating variety.
Unfortunately all of the seeds were in the same package, and I couldn’t distinguish for certain which were which. There wasn’t room to plant the whole pack in my garden, and I evidently picked the wrong seeds. No melons. And kind of a rip (in my view) by Burpee.
Next year (isn’t that a wonderful gardening phrase?) I plan to order seedless watermelon seeds and pollinating seeds separately. But first a long winter. Plenty of time to hunker down and focus on watermelon growing and culture. And hopefully to come out the other side a little bit better gardener.
Since last winter I’ve been preparing to permanently reorganize my garden beds into uniform 3′ widths. Until now there was no real system, other than trying to make sure not to plant the same vegetables in the same area in back to back years.
The 3′ beds will hopefully bring a host of benefits. My three stackable compost bins are 3′ wide, so they can be freely moved to the next new spot in the garden, giving me 9 fresh feet of super-fertile bed space each year.
My new favorite toy, the chicken tractor, is also 3′ wide, so it can ride along the beds fertilizing, cultivating and removing bugs while keeping life interesting and healthy for the girls.
The uniformly sized beds will also help with quickly planning crop rotations and make it easier to judge what crops need to be increased or reduced to meet our needs. Any cold frames or covers that work on one bed will work on any bed. And I won’t be walking on next year’s beds.
So a few weeks ago I drove in 12″ lengths of PVC pipe to mark each of the four corners of the new beds. They should be sturdy enough to last forever, and deep enough to survive a misdirected tiller.
That’s the plan anyway. My plans always work out.
(are they laughing?…)
With that said, yesterday it was finally time to start putting the plan into action, plant a few of the beds with winter cover crops, move the compost bins and spread the joy.
This years compost bins stacked to heaven. Next year I won’t be squandering the special spot on a zucchini plant.
Cooked and ready to serve
In their new home
I think I just experienced a Prince moment.
During the soul-sucking winter months, with garden related activities next to impossible to find, I took to collecting used Starbucks coffee grounds. A good portion of the grounds went on the compost pile, but I saved some for a liberal application on our raspberry patch.
It looks like the berries like their caffeine buzz (I know…it’s probably the nitrogen, but stop being critical and play along).
Yesterday I picked another pound of raspberries. You can only eat so many fresh.
The thought of fruit leather has intrigued me for a few years, but previous attempts at making it ended with a scorched, not particularly inviting product.
Back into the breach. I tried a 170° oven instead of a food dehydrator this year and it worked. Just added some lemon juice and sugar to the food processor-mashed berries, poured the stuff onto parchment paper and baked for about 3 hours. Dee-lightful.
Then you can just cut the berry leather, parchment and all, into strips and roll them up for storing.
The only thing I’d change is to spring for a fine sieve. The holes in our sieve are big enough to let small seeds through. There are a lot of hiding places in a set of teeth.
vegetablurb 
