Best & Worst of Fall Gardening

Zeke checks out the pea fence.



It's been a cool and rain filled September and much of my fall garden has been a bust.  The green beans were great despite the deer damage but only half the peas made anything and I had to plant them twice!  The lettuce has done very well and the pelleted seed I planted last weekend sprouted last night so I have hopes of lettuce into November. 

As of this morning however, all the broccoli and cabbage plants are gone.  What the worms didn't eat, the critters consumed. I was really  hoping for a good crop of fall cabbage and broccoli to freeze for the winter.  Ever since I read an article about a guy on Long Island who harvests big fields of broccoli in January I've been determined to have Cole crops in my fall garden.

Zeke looks for mice under the row covers. Little Joe waits patiently for some mouse action!

Next year (what a familiar refrain!)  I'll have to plant them under high hoops covered over with floating row cover if I want to remain organic. Otherwise I'll have to put up the electric fence around the garden - which is a pain to mow around, and dust the heck out of every thing with Sevin insecticide dust.  I keep Sevin around to dust the chickens for lice. It's the only time I use an insecticide and trust me, if you have ever been around a lice infested chicken house, you will loose all scruples against employing poison to kill the little blood suckers!

My three raspberry plants continue to give me a serving of luscious red raspberries every day. My brother gave me the plants last fall from his patch. I think they are the breed called Heritage. They are fall bearing on this year's canes and pretty easy care. So far the deer have left them alone. I'm placing an order this weekend for 25 more plants which I will split with my brother.  We both have visions of a raspberry cash crops in our futures.

Pipster is bored with the whole garden thing.

The sweet potatoes are coming along well. And the kale is looking super!! Now I have to decide how I'm going to eat the kale. I confess, I've never eaten kale in my life but it is suppose to be very, very good for you, so I'm going to learn to like it somehow.  Who knows, I might actually like it - I hope so anyway. I seem to remember kale in soup and something about fried kale crisps?  Any ideas out there?

Chloe Returns to the Chicken House

Chloe on the run

Chloe, my only Araucana chicken, had been missing on and off for a month.  She wasn't in the chicken house when I went to lock up one evening and I figured some coyote or Red Tail hawk had stolen her away.

Shortly after that, I was late letting the flock out of the house one morning and found Chloe waiting for me on the chicken house stoop.  That night, again she was not in the house at bed time, but the next morning when I arrived to feed the flock  she popped out from under the chicken house.  I decided she must have a nest under there.

Living under the chicken house, sitting on a nest of eggs is a very dangerous thing to do.   About three weeks ago I noticed green eggs - Chloe lays green eggs- spilling out from under the chicken house. Then last Friday morning I noticed green egg shells scattered on the ground in front of the chicken house.  I hadn't seen Chloe for at least two weeks and decided that she was probably dead by raccoon attack. Raccoons love chicken and eggs both and it looked like someone had had a feast.

But Monday evening when I went to close up the chicken house, Chloe was back on her roost.  She has rejoined the flock and seems to have given up on her nest. She's a very lucky little hen. Something obviously got her eggs, but luckily she escaped.

Araucanas are one of my favorite breeds of chickens.  They come from Peru originally and look a bit more like a hawk than a chicken.  They are very gentle, sweet natured birds and lay pastel blue, green and pink eggs which are said to be higher in Omega 3's and lower in cholesterol than other eggs.  If I decide to purchase chicks next spring as apposed to hatching some of the flock's eggs,  I'll probably order Araucanas. 

It's officially fall and I plant lettuce in celebration.

Here's the biggest of the fruit on the Cinderella pumpkin vine. If you look closely you can see the dark green beginning to change to a lighter color.  Hopefully in a week or so it will be orange!

We had an inch of rain last night so this morning was a perfect time to plant the lettuce seeds I'd just purchased from Cooks Garden's online catalog.  I purchased two red and green leaf lettuce mixes, one regular (what ever that means) and one Asian blend, both in a pelleted form.

Picture of Asian mix from Cooks Garden online.

I've never planted pelleted seeds before.  They came in a regular seed packet but inside was a little capped plastic tube with 20 yellow seeds about the size of a good sized tomato seed.  One package had exactly 20 seeds, the other had 24 seeds.  I planted them in two rows - one row for each package - in the 4 x 8 foot raised bed that had most recently grown green beans.

It's a beautiful fall day and I'm hopeful the seeds will germinate quickly and give me lettuce in about 35 to 40 days. Cooks suggests sewing the lettuce in large pots, like the picture above, or seeding directly into the garden and covering with floating row cover.  I've got plenty of row cover so I don't anticipate any problems other than deer. Last year I had good lettuce right up until Thanksgiving. That's the goal this year as well.



It's early morning so you get my shadow in the picture, but I wanted to show you the pretty flowers on the Siam basil. I think I will always grow this variety from now on. I love the flavor of this herb and I really like  its sturdy upright habit , It produces pretty flowers that are great in bouquets and very attractive to bees.