Fall Garden Update

It has been a bit strange in the garden lately. The weather has cooled but there are pole beans blossoming. (These are volunteers.)

Volunteer bush beans forming tiny little beans.

With 6 weeks until our first frost, there's even the promise of summer squash to come. They'll certainly be from mixed parentage, possibly even winter squash mixed with summer squash.

I thought it was a little bee hiding in there, but I'm not so sure now.

The rapini needs to be thinned.

Mizuna might be big enough to harvest in a couple weeks.

And even mibuna is gaining some size, there's definitely some fast growing Asian greens out there.

You can see little tatsoi seedlings around the older plants, I just sprinkle extra seed down and tamp down with a rake just in case we want to harvest whole plants instead.

Choy sum grows really fast, right up there with turnip greens and rapini. The whole plant is eaten and they're especially prized for their succulent flowering stalks.

In contrast the sprouting broccoli is a bit slower growing, germination rates are lower, and the seeds more expensive. I'm really hoping they're the same thing I've eaten before at a relatives home.

I don't know if the beets are going to make it. It's really late in the season and they're still pretty small. They're going to get covered with agribon row covers and we'll see what they'll do. Either way, hopefully we'll get some greens out of it.

Red Russian kale are just too adorable with their long spindly stems and serrated leave.

I thought this was supposed to be a frilly leaf lettuce mix, but I can see kale in there and maybe mizuna.

Red Knight mizuna (F1) is a lovely russet color, these were direct seeded almost 3 weeks ago.

Peas had to be reseeded multiple times, but it looks like the older plants might actually produce something.

Turnips are seeded in the same beds as the peas. They'll get thinned once they start bulbing.

10 days ago I seeded more radishes and turnips. I'm really hoping for some delicious gigantic radishes in December.

And I've been, oh so diligently, keeping the carrot bed weeded. But they are incredibly slow growing. I might just have to consider it an experiment that's going in the negative column, and never again plant carrots after August in a north facing garden.

I'm not sure when to start using floating row covers. It's supposed to be in the mid-70's this week (21 degrees Celsius), which seems much too warm for them. I might wait till mid-November.

There's still some planting needing to be done like lettuce and spinach in the greenhouse, and fava/broad beans out in the garden. It's a much calmer pace this time of year, a very peaceful time to be out in the garden.