October Garden Tour

Things have changed in the garden. There are a few summer hang-ons and a lot of new tenants.
The boys garden has not changed at all; so I won’t include it…still over run with gourd vines.


Bed 1
The collards are growing slowly…things grow noticeably slower with the shorter days. You can see the radish (bottom right) starting to emerge.

The garlic has also emerges as well.



Bed 2 still has the peppers in it. The fall planted peppers are still rather small (you can see them on the left of the bed). They are flowering again (since the heat is gone) and

have several peppers on them.



Bed 3 is a cover crop of vetch and oats.



Bed 4 has turnips and cabbages.

You can’t see them above, but the turnips have emerged.



I don’t feel so hopeful about the tomatoes in Bed 5. They just seem to small to give me any kind of crop before the frosts begin. I may need to start the fall tomatoes a month earlier next year; as I should really be harvesting some about now.

I do have plenty of flowers and

even a couple of small green tomatoes. But I am not hopeful. They have about a month; so we’ll see.



Bed 6 is green beans; Kentucky Wonder on the poles and Blue Lake and Tendergreen as bushes. I think they will be fine. The weather is cooling to highs in the 80s; they have grown to near full size and are flowering. So we should have beans shortly.



Bed 7 is cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower. Most are seeds that I just planted this weekend, but a few were transplanted a few weeks ago.


This bed has a resident living in one of the hoop holes:



Bed 8: The potatoes have put on lots of growth…above ground anyway. No flowers yet, so we have a ways to go.



Bed 9 has more beans; cannellini, Cherokee trail of tears, and pinto.

They have great growth and flowers, so I should get a crop before it gets too cold. Well, I should get a crop if I can beat these creatures to them:



Bed10 is the bed of mystery brassicas. My labels washed off, so I had no idea what-was-what when I planted them.

Now they are older and I can tell the cabbage from the broccoli (but not the broccoli from the kohlrabi yet or the cabbage from the cauliflower). Looks like I ended up with two cabbage next to each other in rather close quarters; we’ll see how they do.



We had a cool front come in for a few days and I believe that is just what we needed to cool the soil down enough for our seeds to germinate. So in Bed 11, I added celery, celeriac, and spinach seed to the lettuce and spinach transplants that we purchased at Home Depot.

Last year, we left our lettuce uncovered with no problem, but this year…all of my lettuce disappeared overnight. This is why I had to go buy transplants. We have a family of rabbits living in our yard. They’ve been here for years – almost as long as we have. They haven't bothered my garden before; but I am sure that they ate all the lettuce seedlings. So we covered the new transplants.



The melons have been removed from bed 12 and it now has a cover crop of crimson clover.
I am really hoping that this year’s fall garden is more successful than last year. I tried to direct seed everything and learned very quickly that the soil is too hot (here) to direct seed in September. The days are too short to wait till October to direct seed. So this year I started everything indoors. I have direct seeded for succession sowing. I don’t worry about our winters; we don’t (typically) get many freezes here, so I think the hoop houses will get me through the few freezes that we get.