Fall Peas
My fall peas are just reaching the point where they’re starting to fill out the pods. Truth be told I should have planted them a few weeks earlier, but I couldn’t since the garlic wasn’t ready to be harvested yet.
When it comes to fall/winter gardening, the cool weather isn’t quite as big of a deal as the reduced daylight hours. Things are much slower to mature since they’re getting 3-5 fewer hours of sunlight. That’s definitely something to remember when sowing for a second harvest.
I’m crossing my fingers that they’ll survive long enough to produce a decent crop for the freezer.
Do you have any fall/winter crops that are ready to harvest?
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Nearing the End
Over the past few weeks I’ve been slowly gathering the last of the harvest for the season. Winter squash and pumpkins have been tucked away on a shelf in the office, green tomatoes are sitting on a table on the back porch. Giant zucchini are resting in a cool spot to be fed to the chickens when the snow flies. As the harvests grow smaller and smaller the compost pile grows larger and larger with the remnants of this year’s garden.
The last of the tomatoes were picked yesterday, along with a few other edibles that lingered in the garden. Strawberries are being moved, fall lettuce is planted, winter hardy arugula is being sown. There’s definite comfort in the end of the season, there’s no hurry like there is in spring, chores can be done slowly and methodically instead of hurriedly. There’s a deep sense of order that comes from clearing the garden for the season, because there can only be rebirth after death.
How’s your garden season coming along? Is it winding down?
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Fallow
fallow [fal-oh] adjective – 1. (of farmland) plowed and harrowed but left unsown for a period in order to restore its fertility as part of a crop rotation
Fallow is a word we don’t often hear when it comes to gardening, especially when it comes to the home garden. Yet it’s a word we should be saying and something we should be doing. Our gardens need rest because the soil needs time to rebuild. Ideally, it should be covered with some form of organic mulch and left to rebuild for a season. Even better is planting with a cover crop, cutting, then allowing the soil to rest for a season.
Two years ago I planted a fall green manure on half of the main garden out back (covering a section about 20 x 70 ft). The pigs worked the cover crop into the soil and added manure last summer, in the fall I covered it with cardboard and a foot of chipped wood.
The soil in this garden needed rest, it’s structure was gone from overfilling and too many years in service growing vegetables. The result was soil that doesn’t hold water very well and crops that don’t grow as well as they could. My goal is to rebuild structure and fertility.
Now it’s like night and day when you look at the soil in the side that has been cultivates the last two summers and the side that has been allowed to rest and rebuild. The soil food web is clearly visible in the fallow side, there are worms, mycelium and other tiny microbes. There is structure, it’s no longer dry and sandy, it will hold together when I lift a shovelful. Not only does fallow apply to the garden, but also to the gardener. We often need a season away from the garden to rebuild and rest. We come back to our gardens renewed, ready to grow once again.
I encourage you to let your gardens be fallow this winter, add rock powders and mineral dusts this fall, cover with a nice layer of organic mulch (grass clippings mixed with chopped leaves is my favorite), and be amazed at how a time of rest improves not only the soil, but you as well.
Do you allow sections of your garden to go fallow?
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Picking Pecks of Peppers
This year I had a bumper pepper harvest. I could have left them on the plants longer, but I wanted to clear out that spot in the garden to move the strawberries. Thus I ended up picking mountains of peppers. Most of them will be roasted over a fire and canned, some will be stuffed and frozen (here’s my recipe if you’re interested).
Some of them were given to neighbors, others have already been used for delicious meals. There are still a good many to process, looks like I’ll be busy tonight!
The small peppers are the Mini Bells I talked about last week, I’m thinking I’ll make mass quantities of bite sized peppers stuffed with sausage, onions, garlic, herbs and cheese. I made a batch of ricotta earlier this week just for them. I think popping a few of these beauties out of the freezer for a quick breakfast or dinner will be so convenient.
Do you like green peppers? What’s your favorite way to enjoy them?
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Small Wonders
One of the things I love about gardening is that it make me very observant, when I’m out I see all sorts of lovely things, often tiny things that are barely noticeable. Perhaps it’s that gardening keeps our eyes keen to see insects that we label as pests, or perhaps it’s that we learn to look for small details in flowers. Whatever the case, I notice so many tiny things that I’d probably never see if I didn’t spend so much time outside in the garden.
Yesterday I spotted this little guy while I was mowing. I like to push mow, partly because I like the exercise, partly because it’s therapeutic, partly because I can scan the grass in front of the mower and slow down to stop to rescue snakes, butterflies, lightening bugs and other insects.
I rescued him and moved him somewhere so he’d be safe from the mower. What a sweet little guy this was, I haven’t had time to Google an identification yet, so if you know speak up.
What tiny wonders do you notice when you’re out in the garden?
