Saturday, September 18, 2010

My First Fall Garden

September has been a very tough month after my mom had complications from surgery, but things are finally settling down.

This is the first time I have seriously tried to have a Fall garden & I'm quite pleased with it considering it has had quite a bit of neglect.  Fortunately no weeding had to be done with Mel's Mix & I watered my seedlings as best I could.  The only thing I had that didn't sprout was a second planting of Brussell sprouts, they evidently didn't have enough water.

Here's the main section of my garden.  Maybe next year I'll have some paths & the area will be neater since I'll be retiring in February, God willing, & I can garden & make jewelry til I get sick of it.










The first bed has rutabaga, parsnip, carrots, onions from seed as an experiment &
cauliflower.



















The rutabaga's grew much faster than the others - the seeds were all planted at the same time, except the cauliflower.  The parsnips have been the slowest.  
















This second bed has the salvaged carrots that Kujo the wolf used for a bed, Bok Choy, one remaining tomato at the end.  I used a piece of vinyl lattice on inverted fence posts for my shade cover.  It's not much to look at, but worked really well.  The fence posts lying across the boards was to keep Kujo out.










This has been mainly my seed bed.  On the left is my last cucumber crop, on the right is delicata squash, underneath are some Romaine lettuce transplants & leek seedlings.  I used cattle panel fencing over the pipe to make a trellis for the vines & made a good shade panel too.   Then powdery mildew & aphids attacked & the vines are about dead.




 This is my amazing asparagus patch - first year & what a difference the Mel's mix & composted manure made.  I'll be able to pick a lot in the Spring.  The stalks were finger sized this year, but I refrained from picking any.  I probably could have without hurting the roots, but I didn't want to take any chances.






This section is the corner at the driveway & sidewalk.  This area has carrots, the smaller ones were just recentlyl planted where I pulled out some pepper plants.   










Garlic from grocery store bulbs at the end of the carrot bed.  On the other bed in the front are turnips & in the back I have planted garlic that I ordered from We Grow Garlic.  
A great site where you can buy garlic by the bulb, not the pound.  I was able to try several different kinds:
Shandong
Thai Fire
Vostani
German Hardneck
Red Toch
Persian Star
Krasnodar white
                                                                                    Italian mountain red
                                                                                    Italian late
                                                                                    Early Portugese


On the left are shallots from the grocery store & Egyptian walking onions from a friend on Square Foot Gardening. 










This baby box is planted with Cascadia sugar snap peas.













All in all it has been a wonderful gardening season and I wish I had tried square foot gardening years ago.  Several things I will do differently next year regarding plant spacing.  I didn't realize how huge things would grow.

I hope everyone else has had a successful gardening season.












1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just stopped to see your Fall Garden and its terrific. I'm sorry I'm late, but you know how busy gardeners can get and then when that stops, I'm into my quilt projects. I have 9 quilts to finish for Christmas gifts this year.
Love your garden and enjoyed my visit. You're doing great.
Congratulations!
Best of luck, quiltbea

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