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Truth be told, my end of the month wrap-up postings and first of the month introductions often get written several days early, frequently on the same day. That's something that just works for me as a writer/blogger. I also get started early on some of our end of the year columns. Our annual review of our garden for 2015 is already complete through July, and I've got a good start on our best garden photos of the year column as well. Writing ahead can also work against you. I just checked and found that I started a column (document) about growing ones own transplants in 2011, moved it to a newer HTML format in 2014, but still don't have it done. It carries the initial projected publication date of December 11, 2011! I've put in about ten hours trying to finish the story over the last two days...and have a crick in my neck to prove it.
Besides the spinach, we have lettuce almost ready for early pickings. Our green beans are looking good and appear that they may mature a bit early, possibly by mid-month. Our broccoli and cauliflower will have to hustle to make it this month, but we should get a first picking of kale. Likewise, our row of Sugar Snap peas are a somewhat risky late planting that may or may not mature before frost takes the vines. And of course, we hope to continue harvesting peppers and tomatoes from our season long planting of them. As we do final harvests of crops, we'll turn to getting the soil ready for next year. That job usually gets done in October or even November, as we push the growing season as far as we can into the fall, sometimes using floating row covers and cold frames to get us past light, early frosts.
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Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - Pickles
We received a half inch of rain yesterday. That's definitely not enough to correct our current dry soil conditions, but it sure will help. With thunderstorms outside yesterday morning, I got busy making a batch of bread and butter pickles. I'd been saving cucumbers for the pickles for a week or so. It's a good thing I did, as many of our cucumber vines have collapsed. I used the same pickle recipe out of our old (©1969!) Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book that I've always used. The current BH&G online recipe for Bread and Butter Pickles is just slightly different. I added a red bell pepper to the recipe to give it some color contrast. I also used one Red Zeppelin onion along with the sweet Walla Wallas to add color. I cut enough cucumber slices to make twelve pints of pickles according to the recipe, but only ended up with eight pints canned. Maybe I squished the pickles into the canning jars a bit more than I should have. Of course, the real test for bread and butter pickles comes when I open a jar and sample some. Spinach
Bean Blossoms! When picking spinach this morning, it was impossible not to notice that one row of our green beans seeded on July 31 are beginning to bloom already. While a week of predicted hot weather with highs at 90o F or above each day may delay the plants setting pods, we're obviously going to beat the first frost with our green beans.
Since I'm not in any hurry to renovate this raised bed, and especially with tomato plants on either end of the cucumbers still producing, I'm going to let the surviving cucumber plants ripen as many cukes as possible. With a small batch of bread and butter pickles already put up and stored in our basement pantry, I can use any cucumbers we now get for occasional table use, but more for seed saving for next year. The raised bed the tomato and cucumber plants now occupy will be used for garlic to be planted in October. It may seem premature to have garden plans already under way for next season at this time, but it's essential for us to do so to maintain proper crop rotations. At this point, the plans are all pretty rough and are all tentative. But I've already mapped out our two narrow raised beds, our main raised bed, and even our East Garden for next season. I still have no idea what we'll be growing in our three outlying isolation plots. There almost certainly will be changes made to the plans along the way, but getting a general plan in place gives me an idea of what I can do with our garden plots the rest of this season.
Friday, September 4, 2015 - Hot and Dry
Our main raised garden bed is shaded at this time of year until noon. That may work for us in this dry weather, allowing the crops a bit of relief before the scorching afternoon sun sets in. I sprayed several crops Wednesday morning and again today with the biological, Thuricide (BT). The rain we had on Monday probably washed off any protection remaining on our plants from the last application. While our kale hasn't suffered any significant bug damage recently, our broccoli and cauliflower have a number of holes in their leaves from insects. I even found one worm visible on a broccoli leaf. A few white cabbage moths flitting about the garden triggered the second spray this week, this time including our rows of green beans that the moths seemed attracted to. While I'm not sure it will do anything for them, I also sprayed our lettuce and spinach plants.
Behind our row of spinach is a small patch of lettuce, some of which is almost ready to pick. We have a few lettuce transplants in flats on the back porch, and our next seeding of lettuce is doing well under plant lights in the basement. Half of the half flat was seeded to sage, as ours all got mowed down this summer. Gloxinias After some rough times when I was only minimally able to care for the plants, our gloxinias are coming back into bloom. They didn't get watered as much as they should have during that time, and got really scraggly just as they were about to bloom. So when I was better and able to work the plants, I hardened my heart and pruned them back almost to the corm. We lost a few plants from that treatment, but most are now forming buds or actually starting to bloom. Yippee!
The pale pink gloxinia in the photo above is a decendant (or sibling) of the plant that produced my current, favorite gloxinia photo. Tidying Up the Site
I quickly found that my version of Dreamweaver wasn't capable of doing global site changes for many of the things that needed fixing, so I moved to working by site section. That, of course, allowed me to miss some things that needed fixing. I think I chased down the last pages that needed updating this morning. The Google search at the top of each page should now work properly, yielding search results from Senior Gardening.
Free shipping on any size order through Monday, September 7, 2015. Use promo code LDAY15. Saturday, September 5, 2015 - Chicken Broth
Despite the heat and dry weather, our main raised garden bed is doing well without much watering. It appears that more spinach and some lettuce will be our next pickings. I did bring in seven ripe tomatoes today, a far cry from the days in July and August when we often picked a half to a full bushel of tomatoes in a day. But with our vines wearing down, we're happy to still have fresh tomatoes. Gloxinias
Other than a half flat of sage and lettuce plants, all three shelves of our plant rack now hold gloxinias. When we repopulated our gloxinia collection after losing all of our plants a few years ago to the INSV virus, I went a little overboard in seeding. Then I didn't have the heart to cull the plants as I should have. So we're going to have a lot of pretty plants coming into bloom through the fall. I plan to share a good many of them with some of my wife's co-workers. Since gloxinias have pretty well disappeared from florist shops and plant racks at stores, they seem quite the novelty to folks unfamiliar with them. Quite frankly, I didn't know what a gloxinia was until we received one when our eldest son was born. That was forty years ago, and I've been growing the plants now for a little over thirty years as a wonderful hobby.
Spinach plus poppyseed dressing, mandarin oranges, feta cheese, and hard boiled egg slices make the salad. While tonight's salad was good, both Annie and I thought it a little inferior to what we had Wednesday night. I attribute that to the spinach picked today being the last in the row that hadn't been picked. It was also a different variety and had just a touch of bitterness in it, probably from the recent heat we've had. But oh, my, is spinach salad a treat. Monday, September 7, 2015 - Labor Day (U.S.)
Labor Day has always seemed to mark the end of summer and the last vacation day of summer. That's probably because of old, traditional school calendars that started school the Tuesday after Labor Day. With many schools now starting in August or even earlier, Labor Day becomes a welcome day off in the school year. The school for our youngest son's children in Minnesota still follows a traditional school calendar. His daughters start school tomorrow! With our reduced garden area this year and our current dry weather, we're in a holding pattern, just waiting for rain and stuff in our fall garden to mature. About a year ago at this time, we were very busy harvesting, drying, and grinding paprika peppers to make ground paprika. We fortunately put up enough of it that what we have should last us until next season, as we didn't grow any paprika peppers this year.
Elsewhere around our main raised bed, our row of kale is looking pretty healthy. Like everything else, it could use a good rain to help it produce some leaf size for our first batch of Portuguese Kale Soup of the year. Some of our snapdragons are now in full bloom. Our snaps always suffer from being co-planted with other crops, only emerging in full bloom after the companion crop is harvested and its plants or vines pulled. We have more snapdragons growing amongst our cucumber vines that should shine once the cukes come out. And I noticed a lovely bloom on our Sugar Snap pea vines this morning. That's a crop I worried wouldn't beat the first frost when I planted it. But with blooms on a few of the vines, we should get a few of the edible podded peas this year, if not a full harvest.
I really enjoy gardening. I also love taking pictures of pretty things. Publishing Senior Gardening lets me combine two wonderful hobbies. Hope you're having a great holiday weekend! Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - Growing Your Own Transplants
There are lots of good reasons to grow your own garden transplants, and possibly almost as many for purchasing them at your local garden store. Over the years, we've gotten to the point where we grow almost all of the flower and vegetable transplants that go into our flowerbeds and garden plots. (I did buy one marked down, nearly dead Hosta plant at Walmart this summer.) When all goes well, one may save a few dollars by growing their own transplants. But that isn't the biggest benefit of growing your own. Being able to choose from the amazing array of plant varieties from mail order seed houses opens up a whole new world of varieties that you'll never see at your local greenhouse, garden or discount store. Starting your own transplants also allows having them at an optimal stage for transplanting at just the right time. When I began the how-to story Growing Your Own Transplants four years ago, I quickly realized that one could write a whole book on the subject. The late Nancy Bubel did (The New Seed-Starter's Handbook)! So I've tried in our new posting to boil the process down to the basics for folks wanting to get started growing their own. Rain We're finally getting some much needed rain today. So far we've received a bit over a half inch of precipitation with a light rain continuing to fall. The rain is spotty, though, as one nearby area is reporting just a couple of tenths of an inch of rain. About 30 miles south of here, folks got over four inches of rain. Along with the rain, a frontal system is producing some very pleasant temperatures. We topped out at a high of almost 93o F yesterday, but should be quite comfortable with a predicted high today of 78o F. The forecast for the weekend calls for a taste of fall with highs of just 70 and 72! We're enjoying a stretch of cool weather that should last through the weekend. Our high today won't quite reach 70o F, which is about ideal for working in the garden. Peat Moss for Narrow Raised Bed
Besides the peat moss, I worked in some 12-12-12 fertilizer to help the buckwheat break down and a good bit of lime to neutralize the acidic peat moss. After tilling, I topped the bed with a sprinkle of Milky Spore, as I'd found a few Japanese Beetle larva when turning the ends of the bed by hand. Those larva seem to be a favorite food of the local mole population, and Milky Spore is a good, organic control for the grubs. The next time we mow, I'll rake grass clippings to mulch the bed for winter. In the spring, I should be able to just rake back the clippings to plant an early row of peas down the center of the bed. Around Our Garden
When I seeded our row of Sugar Snap peas in late July, I really wondered if the crop would make it before our first frost. A few blooms several days ago encouraged me, and today, I found several pea pods on the more mature vines. It will still be touch and go on getting a full harvest from the vines, as they're a 64-70 day variety. But even getting a few pods for the grandkids to pick and eat raw off the vine will be a minor victory. Having some for table use and freezing would be a smashing success!
At either end of the trellis are caged tomato plants that are still producing some good tomatoes. One plant is fairly heavily diseased, but the other is pretty healthy. At this point in the season, there's not much good to come from pulling diseased plants, as they've already spread whatever they're going to spread (in disease). I'll try to not leave any tomato trash on the ground when we finally clear the bed. For now, we'll continue to enjoy what good tomatoes we can get.
The sage is just a lark for me. If it puts on enough size, I may transplant it at the corners of our East Garden plot to replace the sage plants that got mowed off this summer. (When someone else is kind enough to be doing your mowing for you, you don't quibble over a few mowed down plants.) If it doesn't, I'll try overwintering the plants under our plant lights or on a sunny windowsill. If you can't tell, I'm absolutely thrilled with how our fall garden is doing. In the spring, I was either in too much pain or totally zoned out on heavy duty pain killers to really enjoy our garden. Now, I'm really on a gardening high. I missed what was probably a beautiful sunset last night. But I did catch a nice shot of the evening sky, using the night landscape setting of my backup camera (which was handy at the time).
Happy Cardiologist, Happy Senior Gardener A visit to the heart surgeon who inserted four stents into my heart last winter went well yesterday. He was very pleased with my progress, as I truthfully answered "no, no, no" to all the questions that might indicate problems with my heart or side effects from the medications I'm on. Since I was eight months past my stents, he did take mercy on me, taking me off the blood thinner, Plavix, possibly against his better judgment. I've always bruised easily, and with the Plavix, I bruised and bled profusely. Note that I had non-coated stents inserted because of my then, upcoming hip surgery. I guess with the coated stents, one has to stay on blood thinners for at least a year after surgery. And hey, I'm just happy to be alive and gardening. I give thanks to the Lord for each new day, especially now without blinding pain from my previously bad hip. Sunday, September 13, 2015 - Fall Lettuce
Having begun our lettuce harvest last night, I turned this morning to filling in the gaps I'd left in the patch. We still had five fairly healthy lettuce transplants left from our original planting, so I squeezed them all in where I could. We also have two fourpacks of very young lettuce transplants hardening off on the back porch. They'll go into the ground as mature plants are harvested (and devoured). Bugs on Spinach When picking the lettuce and a little spinach yesterday, I noticed lots of tiny hopping or flying bugs on the spinach leaves. Whatever the bugs were, the spinach got a good dose of insecticidal soap today. Cucumber Seed
Interestingly, a retest of a batch of JLP seed turned out far better than a previous test. I'd inadvertently done the first test on top of our new refrigerator. The old fridge ran hot on top, but I noticed that the new one is cold on top. With disappointing results from the first test, I did a second one, putting the test bag of seed in a dark drawer in our fairly warm sunroom. While it was really hard to count, I think we got 90% germination in the retest. Tomatoes In a year when many gardeners lost their tomato plants early in the season to damp conditions, we've been fortunate to have a good crop since mid-July. Our four open pollinated Earlirouge plants first gave us all the tomatoes for fresh use, canning, and sharing that we could want. As those semi-determinate plants declined for a while, our hybrid Mountain Fresh and Mountain Merit plants took up the slack. The Mountain Merit plant isn't doing so well now, but the Mountain Fresh tomato plant has been producing lots of large, tasty tomatoes.
Apparently not to be outdone, our Earlirouge plants, revitalized by some good rains, are now ripening a good many more tomatoes. We may be experiencing one of those lucky years where we have fresh, ripe tomatoes right up until the first frost.
Monday, September 14, 2015 - Making Garlic Powder
Turning cull garlic into garlic powder first involves breaking the bulbs into individual cloves. One saves the good cloves while discarding damaged or rotting cloves. And that's the easy part.
Interesting note from Wikipedia for Muppet Show fans: Chef Tell's "thick German accent reportedly made him the inspiration for the Swedish Chef, a well known Muppet character on The Muppet Show,1 although this is denied by Brian Henson." After peeling, there is the occasional bad spot to be cut out. But garlic is a pretty healthy crop, with probably over 95% of the cloves being perfect after peeling. It took me five days to get almost all of our cull garlic peeled. I stored the peeled cloves in a Debbie Meyer Green Bag inside a Ziplock freezer bag in our refrigerator until I was ready to process them. Even so, our refrigerator smelled, and our freezer absolutely stunk of garlic. The veggie bins must somehow vent through the freezer. I also had to move our compost bucket with its tight fitting lid outside, as the garlic smell still escaped the bucket.
The garlic goo got spread as best as I could on the four shelves of our food dehydrator. With much of the garlic being pretty sticky, it was difficult to get it spread in a thin even layer for drying. I had to go back and break some of the thick areas apart after the first day of drying. Kitchen cleanup after getting the garlic into the dehydrator was like a chemical spill cleanup. Every kitchen utensil I used got washed and scalded. Table and counter tops were washed, with the paper towels going into a trash bag that almost immediately went out to the trash cans outdoors.
The freezer space was enabled by a mini-project in 2012 where I insulated the west wall of our garage, covering it with plywood. It made the perfect space for our freezer, and also for the dehydrator on top of the freezer. Previously, the freezer was at the end of a bay on the east end of the garage where it was all too convenient to lay greasy wrenches and such. The long, round black bag beside the freezer contains a long (250') roll of floating row cover material. I'd bought the row cover last fall when it was on sale, planning to use it last spring to protect our young melon crops from cucumber beetles. Of course, with my hip surgery in May, the East Garden didn't get planted this year. But like the stuff in the freezer, the row cover won't spoil when properly protected, and should be ready for use in spring, 2016.
I scrape the dried garlic off the dehydrator shelves with a metal turner, as most of the garlic was stuck to the shelves. Then I load it by hand into a coffee grinder we use only for grinding herbs and spices. Just a minute of grinding reduces the dried garlic chips to a fine powder.
Cleaning out dehydrator trays involves soaking them in hot detergent water for several minutes before scrubbing them with a stiff vegetable brush. The garlic chips bake fast to the trays, making the option of drying garlic on a cookie sheet seem more attractive, although I've never tried that method. Tuesday, September 15, 2015 - BLTs
While out in the garden taking photos this morning, I noticed an awful lot of bugs on our plants. Squash bugs, denied their favorite crops in our garden this year, were on many of our ripening tomatoes. I also spied several moths fluttering about, and more holes in the leaves of our brassica plants than I would like. So after photo time, I filled up our organic sprayer with a mix of insecticidal soap and Thuricide (BT) and let the plants and bugs have it. I'm not sure if the insecticidal soap will interfere with the BT, but what I really wanted today was a knockdown spray for the bugs I saw. Note that I keep three hand sprayers available. One is used only for organic and biological products. Another is just for Roundup. And a third is used for non-organic pesticides and fungicides. There's actually a fourth sprayer in the basement. But it's reserved for bleach solution, as our cats sometimes have some bad toileting habits in the basement. As long as I thoroughly wash out the sprayers each fall, they last for years. And keeping separate sprayers relieves me of the worry of possibly having Roundup residue left in a spray I put on our garden plants. Kale Plants from Burpee
I didn't plant our kale for this year until July 31, planning on a fall crop to use in our annual batches of Portuguese Kale Soup. With our reduced sized garden this season, there simply wasn't room for a spring or summer crop of the delicious vegetable. Started in hot, dry weather, our kale has grown slowly, only now being ready for a light picking and final thinning of the plants. One of the large leafed varieties, the Red Ursa that supplied our best garden photo of 2013, will probably be used this weekend for a batch of kale chips to please a granddaughter. But it should quickly regrow to contribute to our later soup and boiled kale feasts. Since kale is pretty frost hardy, we usually count on being able to pick it through October and much of November. Late fall crops such as lettuce and kale can interfere with getting ones soil ready for the next season. Our tentative plan for our main raised bed for next spring doesn't include any of our super early spring plantings (such as early peas). If the weather cooperates and we can fall till the area, that will be great. But if not, we should be able to do our soil preparation in the spring without holding up any of our spring plantings waiting for good weather. Gearing Up
Also for our potato patch, I'd previously bought a small bag of garden sulfur Next Gloxinia, Please!
Downstairs under our plant lights, all three shelves of our plant rack are almost totally filled with gloxinia plants. Most of them are just coming into bloom, although there are two trays of plants that have finished blooming and are headed into their annual, required period of dormancy. Our Gloxinia blog and our Gloxinia Photos pages remain two of the most visited pages on this site. While we've lost our gloxinia plants twice in the last ten years, our photos of them remain. More importantly, seed saved from the 1990's and later still remains viable in frozen storage. Every few years, I get busy hand pollinating our plants to replenish our seed supply, as Saving Gloxinia Seed is a pretty easy task.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - Hummingbirds
The birds visiting now are too shy to perch on the feeder when Annie and I are present. And soon, they'll all be gone. We'll miss seeing them, but also will appreciate the savings in our grocery bill from not having to buy so much sugar each month to make nectar for them. Monarch or Viceroy I saw either a Monarch or Viceroy butterfly this week in our back yard. I'm not good enough at identification to tell which is which, and was too far away to tell, anyway. But the sight reminded me that I had wanted to plant some milkweed this year to provide food for the endangered butterflies in their migrations. Like a lot of other stuff this year, the planting didn't get done, but the sight this week made me firm my resolve to use one of our outlying isolation patches next summer for milkweed. So I ordered several packets of native milkweed seed late last night. If you order milkweed seed through Amazon Milkweed seed seems to require some stratification to germinate well. Here are a couple of links that describe how to start the seed:
Burpee Contest
Since Burpee is one of our affiliate advertisers, I'm not eligible to enter per contest rules. Come to think of it, The Garden Tower Project is also one of our advertisers. But it still looks like a pretty cool sweepstakes. Thursday, September 17, 2015 - Green Beans
A side benefit from picking the beans quickly became apparent. Our first row of bean plants were overgrowing our carrot rows and some of our lettuce plants. During the picking, I was able to roll the bean plants away from the crops they'd been shading. While we've cut back many of our plantings in recent years to reflect just Annie and I being home now, I still planted our traditional two rows of bush green beans. I had the space and really wanted to go with the six bean varieties we've used the last few years. I think canned green beans taste better with multiple varieties included.
With flowers at the ends of the bean rows taking up a little space, the planting comes in at 28 feet of green beans, easily enough over three pickings to produce the 14-21 quarts we hope to can. One downside to our bean harvest this year is that all of our Walla Walla sweet onions that we usually can with the beans have already been used. Our yellow storage onions and several reds should fill in nicely, though. Sage and Lettuce
The lettuce that was seeded the same day as the sage got thinned to one plant per cell of fourpacks or moved to deep sixpack inserts. The Crispino, Skyphos, Winter Density, Defender, and Red Lollo I moved today will probably be our last lettuce planting of the year, as these transplants should mature sometime in October.
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to supplement what I'd picked. I couldn't pick the rest of our row of spinach, as I'd just sprayed it. Even with biologicals, one needs to leave a day in between spraying and picking.
I've been stocking up on a few supplies that I hope to use yet this fall. I picked up a bag of 
for our potatoes and garlic yesterday. A friend at our local garden store put me on to it last year. It's pretty strong stuff (0-0-60), so I like to apply it to our potato area in the fall so that it can mellow out a bit over the winter. Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (potash - K) don't leach out of the soil as badly as nitrogen (N) does, so they can be applied in the fall. (See Wikipedia's description of 
Saturday, September 19, 2015 - Kale Chips
I began the pleasant task early in the day while it was still cloudy and cool outside. Our row of kale was ready for a light picking and also needed to be thinned. In some areas, I just picked, or rather, snipped the kale stems with a good pair of sharp kitchen shears. In other areas, I took out whole plants, trimming their leaves into a 12 quart kettle. It didn't take long to fill the kettle, and I later went back and half filled it again. After the picking and thinning, I sprinkled a little 12-12-12 fertilizer along the side of the kale plants and worked it into the soil a bit with a garden scratcher I was pleased to find only one cabbage moth worm at the bottom of my kettle after soaking, cleaning, and stemming the kale. I did, however, find several small, white egg cases on the bottoms of kale leaves. It would appear that the application of insecticidal soap and the biologic, Thuricide (BT), I made on Tuesday was effective.
Broccoli
I'd been a little concerned that our broccoli might go to seed or be bitter because of the high temperatures we were having (upper 80s, low 90s). Overnight, a cold front came through with a little very welcome rain. Our daily high temperatures are predicting to drop 10-15o F for the next few days. Since we have a lot of cool weather crops maturing now (Sugar Snap peas, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, lettuce, and spinach), the cooler temperatures should help things along. Our remaining warm weather crops (peppers and tomatoes) will just have to make do in the cool weather.
On our last visit to Effingham, we arrived an hour early and had plenty of time to enjoy touring the Firefly's garden plots just outside the restaurant. The Firefly rightfully prides itself in using local meat and produce, some grown just a few feet from where it is served!
I'm not sure I would really appreciate Senior Gardening being anything more than a niche site. I enjoy being quietly retired, gardening, writing about it with no deadlines, and trading emails with my many gardening friends. Have a great weekend!
Note: The Firefly Grill is not a Senior Gardening Affiliated Advertiser. We just love eating there. Monday, September 21, 2015 - Picking Green Beans Again
Checking Onions (and Garlic) We always can our green beans with a good bit of chopped onion for flavoring. So along with my picking, snapping, and canning chores, it was time to check our onions again. It's important to check onions in storage at least once a month for spoilage, as one bad onion let go for a time can cause a whole bag to rot. When I check our onions (and garlic), I pour a whole bag of them into a seed flat or tray. I then return them one at a time, trusting sight, smell, and touch to reveal rotting or softness that indicates an onion is beginning to go bad. And each time I go to the basement for an onion for cooking, I gently squeeze the onions in the bag I'm accessing to check for rot. We didn't grow potatoes this year, so we don't have them to check for rot. The process, however, is the same, and possibly even more important than checking ones onions. A whole bag of potatoes can go bad in a real hurry from just one bad spud. Our stored garlic is more prone to simply dry out than rot, as I'm pretty tough roguing out bad garlic before we put ours into storage. That's possibly why we have so many cull garlic bulbs each year, using the still good cloves to dry and grind for garlic powder. I ended up pitching several bad onions. I also found several onions with soft spots that indicated problems to come. Those onions got used in the canning of the green beans. I only had to cut off a couple of layers of bad outer wrappers. First Frost It seems hard to believe, but we could be within ten to fifteen days of our first frost that could end the growing season for some of our garden plants. Over the last seven years, the occurrence of our first frost has varied from October 5 (2010) to October 30 (2008). The Senior Garden is located pretty close to a dividing line on climate charts for the first 32° F frost, but generally, we expect our first frost to arrive sometime in the second half of October. When I began gardening in Indianapolis in the 1970s, a county extension agent there gave me an easy to remember rule-of thumb for frost dates. He suggested "5/10 and 10/5" (May 10 - October 5). We now live a bit further south, so we have a little longer growing season, but not much longer. I basically rely on the extension agent's saying now, although our we usually get a week or more on each end of our growing season in our current location. Currently, the easiest way to find ones frost dates, both spring and fall, comes from the Dave's Garden site. They have a page where one only has to enter their zip code to get a range of dates for first frosts at various temperatures. Pea Blossoms Eventually = Peas I'm adding this section to today's posting with the sweet taste of a Sugar Snap pea in my mouth. We grow most of our peas in the spring, and they're all shell peas for freezing. But I was able to work a row of Sugar Snap peas into our fall garden plan. I say that I grow the Sugar Snaps for our grandkids to eat fresh right off the vine. That's partially true, but Annie and I also love Sugar Snap peas. When I went outside to grab a photo of our rows of green beans, I also snapped a few shots of blossoms on our Sugar Snap pea vines and some mature Sugar Snaps. I also picked, removed the strings, and popped a sweet pea pod into my mouth.
Like a lot of the rest of our fall garden, our Sugar Snaps were a bit of a risk to plant. We just barely had enough growing days left in the season when I direct seeded the tall peas along a trellis on the south end of our main raised bed on July 24. Having soaked the pea seed a bit, and with daily waterings, the peas emerged somewhat irregularly from the soil. The row eventually filled in with pea plants, but it took several weeks. Even so, it appears we'll be able to satisfy the grandkids' love of Sugar Snaps and possibly freeze a few pints for winter use. Germination Test
I'd started the germination tests late on September 17 and would normally not look for results until the fourth, fifth, or sixth day of the test. But I'd peeked at the bags of seed yesterday and could tell that we were getting some germination in both tests. As it turned out, our good seed, the heavies that sank in the jar tested at 80%. I'd dumped so many floaters onto the wet paper towel for the test that I hadn't even bothered to count them. So I can only estimate that we got between 20-30% germination there. But any seed sprouting from the floaters is a bonus. That seed can't be used for sharing, but it adds a bit of insurance in case something goes terribly wrong with the other batch of seed in storage. Interestingly, I'd washed the goo off some of the cucumber seed before starting the fermentation process and ran a germination test on it. It wasn't a fair test, as I only used fat seeds, ones that were pretty sure to end up being heavies instead of floaters if fermented. That test produced about 92% germination, suggesting one could skip the fermentation process and just thoroughly wash saved cucumber seed. Of course, the fermentation process not only helps separate the goo and cucumber flesh from the seeds, it can also kill off bacteria living on the seeds' surface. Taking It Easy Today After picking beans yesterday and lugging heavy canning equipment up and downstairs, there are few muscles and joints in my body that don't hurt today. Instead of sucking down some pain killers, I'm just going to be lazy today, other than already having gotten in my first set of hip rehab exercises this morning. Gardening really is one of the joys of retirement. Being able to pick your spots and days to do chores may be another. The only lifting I'll be doing to day is of my glass of iced tea!
For gardening, the current weather conditions make working outside in the cool mornings delightful. On the other hand, our soil is very dry right now. Nothing has started to wilt, but there's not much chance for rain in our extended forecast, either.
After a first picking a few weeks ago, our row of spinach filled back in and was ready for another picking yesterday. It only took a few minutes to pick the entire row, nearly filling a five gallon bucket. Cleaning the spinach took considerably longer than the picking. I rinsed the leaves twice in the picking bucket before washing them one by one under the kitchen faucet. While I'd carefully culled out bad leaves while picking, making a bit of a mess I still need to clean up as I tossed them aside, many of the good leaves had dirt and/or grass clippings clinging to them. When I was done cleaning, I had put a big green bag of large spinach leaves and a smaller green bag of baby spinach in the refrigerator. But I still had a colander overflowing with spinach leaves left. I needed a spinach intensive recipe for supper!
That not much of a recipe, I realize. But that's sort of the way I cook. When I rinsed some spinach leaves yesterday, I saved every bit of the rinse water, dumping it on the spinach bed. But everything needs water all at once, now, and we simply don't have the well capacity to irrigate. Getting Ready for Winter (and Spring)
I also picked the last of our Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers and pulled the few remaining vines. I did leave the trellis in place, as we have some snapdragons intertwined with the trellis netting that I hope will begin blooming profusely, now that they're not having to fight the cucumber vines for light and soil moisture. That narrow bed will need to be cleared next month, as we'll be planting it to garlic yet this fall. As with the other narrow raised bed, it will be heavily mulched with grass clippings once it is planted. Doing so helps stabilize soil temperatures, although one has to be careful to pull the mulch as early as possible in the spring, or when the garlic shoots begin to come up. Grass clippings will matt and prevent weaker garlic plants from pushing leaves through matted mulch! Impatiens and Hummingbirds
Canes and Ladders I'm finally off my cane. I was having to use it early in the morning and late at night for about a week, but finally don't even have to do that. I do, however, still keep a folding cane in my truck, just in case. But I'm also parking at the far end of parking lots when shopping to give me a bit more exercise going in and out of stores. Pushing my hip rehab pretty hard this morning, I was up on a stepladder washing windows. I may yet pay for that one, but our bay windows in the dining room sure look a lot better. Standing on a ladder and riding the lawn mower are still two things that really irritate my new hip. Friday, September 25, 2015 - The Race is On
July and August, when one typically plants fall crops in this area, are the driest months of our growing season. This year, the annual mini-drought that plagues our area has extended well into September. So the catch in this wonderful challenge is getting our fall crops up and out of the ground during the driest part of the growing season in time to beat the first killing frosts of fall. We employ several tricks to get our fall crops going, including pre-soaking seed before planting, heavily watering planting furrows before direct seeding, using transplants when we can, lots of grass clipping mulch to hold in what soil moisture is already present, and very limited, selective watering of newly seeded or transplanted crops. (See World's Most Expensive Row of Green Beans for why we don't water more. And yes, I keep a brand new, unused jet well pump in stock in case I screw up again.) Beyond the hot, dry weather and soil moisture problems of getting a fall garden going, we have to be cognizant of our limited number of growing days before our first killing frost. Our first frost usually occurs sometime in October, although we're able to get past mild frosts with the use of cold frames and/or floating row covers over our tender crops. Below is an commented listing of the fall crops we're watching with days-to-maturity figures in parentheses and a target harvest date calculated from the planting/transplanting date. Note that the target harvest dates do not allow for the shortening day lengths in fall. For us, tomorrow will be the first day of fall when we receive less than 12 hours of sunlight as our days continue to steadily shorten. After this point, one might need to add seven to ten days to traditional days-to-maturity figures for various crops.
Amazing cauliflower (68) - transplanted July 31 - target October 7 - I put out only two cauliflower plants this year, as our fall cauliflower never seems to mature before a frost.
Various kale varieties (55-62) - direct seeded July 31 - target September 24-October 2 - We've done light pickings and thinnings of the kale already for kale chips and boiled kale. Since kale is quite frost hardy, we should easily make a good crop of it for at least one big batch of Portuguese Kale Soup. Various green bean varieties (50-61) - direct seeded July 31 - target September 19-30 - We did a thorough picking of our first row of green beans last weekend (September 20), but our second row of somewhat later varieties are taking their time setting beans, especially the Bush Blue Lakes. As long as we don't get an early frost, we should still make a crop with them.
When I picked spinach on Wednesday, I left a few America plants unpicked at the very end of the row. At that point, I knew I'd picked far more spinach than I needed for our dinner. I like the looks of the savoyed leaves of the variety, although it's hard to get bugs, dirt, and grass clippings cleaned out of the depressions. America produced far better than the two highly touted, more expensive, hybrid varieties we grew. Lettuce I've omitted our fall lettuce until this point (first transplanting August 17), as we take many of our romaine and softhead lettuces pretty early, replanting over and over until cold weather finally ends their season. I pretty well took out all the rest of our first transplanting of lettuce this morning, although there are still five or six small plants remaining that I put in a week or so ago. I have more lettuce transplants on the back porch and will be filling in the open spaces in the bed in the next few days.
The one Skyphos plant I cut, a red butterhead, gets the award for most bug damage. We really like the lettuce, and so do the bugs! But we had a very nice Pandero, a red, mini-romaine we're trying for the first time this year, that did quite well. I used our garden hose to rinse the lettuce thoroughly, although I'm sure we'll find some bugs and grass clippings on it yet. I let the lettuce dry in the sun for a few minutes before bringing it inside to dry some more in our dish drainer. Then it was bagged and went into the vegetable drawers of our refrigerator.
This information won't be of much use to gardeners this year with a growing season similar to ours, although the posting will remain available for future use in our blog archive. Gardeners further south may still be starting fall gardens. An old friend who now lives in Florida added me to the Grow Gainsville garden page on Facebook, and
I've recently enjoyed watching their postings as they plant their fall gardens. Monday, September 28, 2015 - More Lettuce
I'd picked the last of our August 17 planting of lettuce last week. We have another small planting that I did on September 13 to keep us in a continual supply. Those plants are looking pretty good at this point and should mature just about the time when we will use up the last of our already picked lettuce that is in the refrigerator. Today's planting included: 3 Defender, a long, narrow leaved romaine; 2 Winter Density, a bib/romaine type that puts on an abundance of crispy leaves; 2 of our favorite iceberg type, Crispino (grown from seed saved last year); and one each of the reds, Skyphos and Red Lollo. The red lettuces seem to get bitter far quicker in hot weather than the other varieties we grow, but they also add some great color to our garden, and if we pick them early enough, our salads.
Our attention now turns to bringing in what we can from our fall garden and then beginning to prepare our garden beds for next season. As usually happens at this time of year, our bell pepper plants are ripening an incredible amount of peppers. Since we grew the plants for both fresh use and seed saving, I only planted the Earliest Red Sweet variety to ensure the purity of the seed saved. Growing them for the first time in years on good soil, I now remember why I like the variety so much.
We did get a brief shower last evening that dropped two tenths of an inch of rain. That's not much, but we do have a 40-70% chance of rain tomorrow, depending on which weather forecast one uses. We also ran our well dry on Saturday for the first time in several years. We weren't being extravagant with our water use, but the water table is just that low right now. The well recharged in about an hour, but we'll have to really conserve water for the next month or so. Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - September Wrap-up
Even though we're pretty close to the end of our gardening season, the precipitation should do several of our crops a lot of good. With no risk of an early frost in our extended forecast, we may yet harvest good green beans and lots of Sugar Snap peas. Both of those crops have been severely impacted by the dry conditions. Some of our green bean plants have been blooming, but not setting pods. Others were producing short pods with only one bean fattening in them. Most of our Sugar Snap peas have looked more like snow peas, with large pods with only bumps showing where fat peas should be by now. Despite the dry conditions, we got a lot done in September. We began harvesting lettuce fairly early in the month, with only a few of our plants getting bitter in the occasionally hot, always dry growing conditions. Our row of spinach got picked repeatedly for spinach salad, boiled spinach, and even some spinach and cheese ravioli and shrimp portofino, both with lots of extra spinach added to the sauce. We made one small batch of bread and butter pickles with some of our Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers. We also were able to save a good bit of the cucumber seed for sharing via the Seed Savers Exchange, even after ruining one large batch with too hot of water during hot water treatment. Most of the boxes of cull garlics I'd left sitting for a month or so on the back porch got turned into garlic powder. We had so many cull elephant garlics that I sent a box of them with Annie to work to share with her friends there. While we wanted as much garlic powder as we could produce, the mild elephant garlic might not produce pungent enough garlic powder, although we did include some elephant garlic in our powder this time.
We've also enjoyed having tomatoes all month long, although not in any great volume. As mentioned Wednesday, our Earliest Red Sweet peppers are really producing right now. Those that we picked on Wednesday got cleaned, sliced, and frozen for winter use last night. I also had three nearly perfect peppers to save seed from, adding to our seed stock.
The flowers that edge our raised beds have burst into full bloom. By this time of year, they don't have to compete so much for light and moisture from surrounding crops as they do most of the growing season. And our gloxinias growing downstairs under plant lights have exploded into bloom over the last two weeks. I managed to find time to finish and put up a feature story that I'd started four years ago. Sadly, almost no one read it all the way through, but that's possibly because it deals with the winter/spring subject of Growing Your Own Transplants. On the other hand, it just may totally suck. As we move into October, we'll be getting our garden plots ready for next year. We did get one narrow raised bed tilled and mulched for winter and an early spring planting. I'm beginning to wonder if the hummingbirds visiting our feeders will need fur coats for their migration south. This morning, we still had at least one hummingbird visiting our feeder. That's a bit later than I can remember them staying in the past, but the tiny birds seem to know when to leave. Maybe they know something we don't about when it's going to get really cold this fall. All in all, we've had a very productive month. We harvested and put up some things for winter and are still enjoying produce from our fall garden. We pretty well finished up our seed saving for the year with good stocks of fresh Earlirouge tomato, Japanese Long Pickling cucumber, and Earliest Red Sweet pepper seed. Physically, my strength and mobility have continued to improve, although on most nights, I can tell exactly where my new titanium hip is! Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
. Kale, like most 
We finally got the rain yesterday that we've desperately needed for over two months. It was a steady and fairly heavy rain that lasted all morning and afternoon, dropping 1.10 inches of precipitation on our dry garden beds. Our lawn seemed to immediately green up.
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