We began clearing out the garden about 2 weeks ago with the removal of the last of the zipper peas and the bell peppers that had overgrown their cages. We left 2 bell pepper plants (one yellow and one green) that still had room in their cages, along with the okra and hot banana pepper, which is still producing profusely! (If all plants produced like this one, there would be no world hunger!)
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| Our Prolific Pepper Plant |
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| Our Yellow Bell Pepper |
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| Okra cutting |
By yesterday, we could see that the okra was winding down. Leaves were dropping like crazy and there were no longer any blooms; two of the plants had dropped all of their leaves and were just stalks. We've had a couple of nights in the 60's and one night in the 50's, and that's just not okra's cup of tea. So we cut off all visible okra, broke out our mini circular saw, and cut them down. We fried the last okra for dinner today and finished it off at supper tonight. After cutting the okra and dropping the strings (our grids), we added compost and 3 month fertilizer to the beds, then Dean tilled them up using the little tiller. We couldn't do the bed the farthest from the house because of the peppers, but we were able to amend the soil without the tilling, being careful of the roots of the pepper plants.
As the evening began cooling down, Papa and Sheila came down and we began planting all of our seeds. We're going to put the larger plants such as cabbage & broccoli down the center of the first bed (closest to the house), with the squares to the outside containing our lettuces, carrots and swiss chard. We've planted seeds for 2 types of carrots, 3 types of leaf lettuce, 2 types of romaine lettuce, and rainbow chard. Papa laughs at me as I plant- I have a special pencil that I use with 1" increments marked off so I know how deep to plant. He says he never did any of that- he just put the seeds down and covered them up.
Today we went to Lowe's and found broccoli, cabbage & collard transplants in 9 packs, beet, radish, parsley & cilantro seeds. What we didn't find was mustard greens! After we got home we planted everything, rearranging my garden plan as we went. We originally hadn't planned on 9 broccoli, cabbage & collard plants, but whatever we can't eat, someone else certainly can. The original plan was to plant only the bed closest to the house- it's amazing how that changes with a couple of trips to Lowe's!!
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| Our winter garden, almost all planted. |
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