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.