Fall Update

Haven't posted since the end of September, so I thought it was about time to do an update. Here are the latest photos of the garden.

November 3, 2012

This one was taken November, just after Dean set up the hoops to cover one of the beds. It is the bed closest to the house that has the lettuces in it, which is how our guinea pig, Bugsy, is getting her food, so it was outfitted for winter first. In the second bed, about 1 week before this, we took out the remaining 2 bell pepper plants. They still had small peppers on them and were full of blooms, but it was taking them too long to mature since the weather had turned cooler. One had 16 peppers, the other had 19 peppers (all of them smaller size peppers) when we cut off the pepper and pulled the plants up.

Whole Garden

 This is a photo of the entire garden, as viewed from the southwest corner. The third bed is difficult to see unless you click on the photo, as it is hidden by our banana pepper "tree". This is the first time we have ever tried to have a fall/winter garden, so this will definitely be a learning experience. At this point, we have about 5 varieties of lettuce, spinach, cabbage, broccoli, and collard greens. Note the pepper plants in the bottom right of the photo.





This series of shots is of the first bed, closest to the house. It has cabbage and broccoli down the center 2 squares, surrounded by carrots, lettuces, spinach & swiss chard.

Starting with the top left, there are 2 squares of spinach, then carrots in the 4 squares in the lower left. In the very center of the photo is arugula. On the right, top to bottom, are Beaded Simpson lettuce, cabbage, and  Romaine lettuce.







Again, there is Beaded Simpson lettuce across the top of the photo, cabbage in the middle, and, across the bottom of the photo, Romaine lettuce to the left and carrots and another type of Romaine to the right.

You really can't see the squares closest to the house here, since they are somewhat overshadowed by the broccoli! At the very end, to the far right, is the Swiss Chard. It's taking it a while to get started, but is growing better now. I think the heat was too much for it. Four empty squares run along the bottom of the bed, as it was too hot for the Romaine I had planted here to germinate. As you can see, April is on the lookout for my "Garden Friends", aka lizards!

 This is the side of the bed closest to the house, showing all of the lettuces. We haven't bought lettuce for Bugsy in about 3 weeks at this point. I hope this bed does well enough to keep her in lettuce for the entire winter.

Broccoli! By the time we had set up the beds last year, it was really too late to try to plant broccoli. We did manage to find cauliflower (we only got a small head off one plant) and cabbage (very successful for our first attempt- 3 3lb heads), but couldn't find broccoli to try. In order to get the cauliflower and cabbages last spring, we had to set up a shade frame to keep the temperatures down in order to get a harvest at all. I actually harvested them earlier than I wanted because, by the end of April, it was just too hot.

This head is about the size of a silver dollar at this point (photo taken 11/4), but has doubled in size in the 3 weeks since.








All of the cabbages are doing well, having all formed the inner head. We have 9 cabbage plants; 3 in the first bed and 6 in the third bed. The 3 in the first bed are slightly larger than those in the third bed.

 Ah, the infamous "Pepper Tree"! This is actually a Bonnie Banana Pepper plant that is actually larger than Dean's orange tree! If all plants in this world were as prolific, there would be no world hunger!! We finally removed it on November 18th, the Sunday before Thanksgiving. It was still full of blooms, but was taking forever for the peppers to get ripe because of the cooler weather. Not bad for a plant that was planted the first part of March!

 This is the broccoli in the second bed, just east of the pepper tree. The broccoli in the first bed is growing faster than that planted in the second bed, probably because we didn't add any compost in the second bed. We were worried about disturbing the roots of the pepper plants, so decided to just fortify the bed with bone and blood meal and let it go at that. Now that we have the pepper plants out, we'll side-dress these with the compost to give them a boost. At this point (11/23), there are small dime-sized or smaller heads on each of these.

 This is the third garden bed, which is the one farthest from the house. All four of the end squares contain carrots. Next to the carrots are 9 collard green plants, 8 of which are growing like gang-busters!

Papa and Mimi came down 2 days before Thanksgiving and harvested the lower leaves, just a couple of weeks after these photos were taken. They had a great lunch of greens and cornbread, according to Papa. The collards had a really good flavor and, the best part, were easy to clean!





 Here are the 6 cabbage plants in this bed. Notice the deformed cabbage farthest to the right, bottom row. Just after we planted it, I found a worm enjoying a cabbage buffet! He didn't survive too long after that. As a result, there are a lot of deformed outer leaves, but it has formed a good head, so we're leaving it alone.

 While Dean's fruit trees aren't in our garden area, they are in our backyard and get babied as much as my garden, so I thought it fitting to add some photos. This is his Fruit Cocktail tree, which contains branches of Meyer Lemon, Ruby Red Grapefruit, Navel Oranges, limes, and one or two other varieties which escape me at the moment. By far, the majority of the tree is Meyer Lemon. At this point, there are 6 lemons on the tree; the 4 shown in the top photo, which are in the process of turning yellow, the smaller green one shown in the second shot, and one brand new one, shown at the very bottom.




The lemon branches just bloomed last month, and was completely covered with blooms. Dean, who was scared that the branches would be overwhelmed should even a portion of those blooms become lemons, took the scissors to it and removed the dying blooms. He missed this one, however, so we now have a new lemon growing.

These photos were taken in October, when it was in full bloom. As you can see, this tree was VERY popular with our winged friends! These are two of Dean's favorite shots. These were taken by Leah to use in her photography class.

We're not real sure what this is- it looked like a hummingbird, but wasn't as colorful. The body stayed very still while the wings flapped.