Fall Garden Update

Let's check in on the garden.  After lots of rain throughout the late summer, the rains have been few and far between in October.  You can see how dry the ground is below.  It is starting to crack and I'm watering it every night now with the hose as my rain water I collected has long run out.  Oh well.  In the two photos below, you can see the garlic we planted is sprouting, sending green shoots up and out into the beautiful October weather we're enjoying now.


Garlic Sprouts

If we would get a rain soon, all of the garlic would burst out of the ground like this one:

Here are some mustard greens almost ready.  In fact, I think it's time to get out the cast iron skillet out and get a batch of homemade cornbread in the oven and cook down some freshly picked mustard greens with some bacon.  Can't wait.


Healthy plants - Healthy for you!

 Radishes ripe and ready to be sliced in a nice, fresh salad.
 

Radishes (with a healthy crop of weeds coming up, too)

Oak Leaf Lettuce that will be consumed this weekend:


Oak Leaf Lettuce

Once the rainwater has been depleted, it is back to watering the garden with a water hose.  This takes a while and the ground is so dry right now, the soil absorbs the water as fast as you can spray it.  The plants aren't in distress, though.  I still have some more sweet potatoes to harvest as you can see by the remaining "jungle" right past the freshly pulled/planted rows.  Those four rows were where the sweet potatoes were that we just harvested.  Now, in their place, I've planted garlic, spinach, blue-podded peas, cilantro and a second planting of mustard greens.  Once I've harvested all the sweet potatoes that you can see below, I'll probably plant that entire area in turnips for the winter.


Watering the newly planted rows.  Note the sugar snap peas really taking off.

We normally amend the soil by adding as much organic matter as we can: composted cow and chicken manure, coffee grounds and other composted vegetables, and as many chopped up leaves and hay as I can add.  We don't use regular fertilizer that most people use.  I like to use fish emulsion as a fertilizer sprayed on as a foliar feeding.  This stuff is made from dried fish, blood meal, bone meal, sulfate of potash and ferrous carbonate.  I mix about 2 tablespoons to a gallon of water and shake it up real good.



My cheap little hand pump sprayer

Make sure you use a dedicated sprayer for this job.  I only put sprayable natural fertilizer in this sprayer.  You don't want residue left over from other jobs to get on your crop and kill it.  Now if there is one down-side about using this stuff to spray on your plants, it is that it stinks.  It smells like dead fish, because, well, it's made of dead fish.  Remember how the Indians taught the pilgrims to bury a fish by each cornstalk?  That's essentially what you're doing.  And just in time for Thanksgiving!


Measuring and pouring the smelly stuff into my sprayer

 Here I am spraying it liberally on the all the leaves of the plants in the garden.  You'll note I'm doing it at night by the light of a lantern.  I spray it at night for two reasons: 1) It gets dark too doggone early now, and 2) If you do this during sunlight hours, it may burn the leaves or it may evaporate before being absorbed by the leaves.


Sugar snap peas getting a good dose of liquid fish.

If you look closely you can see the droplets of fish emulsion on the leaves.  The leaves will absorb the Nitrogen (N), Phosphate (P2O5), Potash (K2O), Calcium (Ca), Sulfur (S), and Iron (Fe) and get the plants a good boost and turn the leaves a beautiful, healthy, dark green.


Ready, Set, Grow!

As I was telling Tricia tonight, we have one more weekend of really hard work in the garden.  After that, it just involves weeding, harvesting, and eating.  Well, like Meatloaf sang, "Two outta three ain't bad!"