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We got by without a frost this morning. But there's frost possible and even some hard freezes predicted for every day the rest of this week. While the cold mornings are a bit of a shock, our daily high temperatures will probably remain in the 50s. That's pretty nice outdoor working weather. I'm still hoping to get something out of the rows of kale and carrots I now have under a floating row cover. And when I cut back the two sage plants in our herb bed, I may dry some sage. Beyond that, our harvests are done for the season. I have a row of caged pepper plants and what's left of our row of basil and parsley to remove from our main raised bed. And after the frosts, I'll pull the few geraniums that remain at some of the corners of the bed. In our East Garden plot, there are caged tomato and pepper plants to come out and be composted. There's also that eighty foot row of zinnias that need to be cut. But all in all, there's not a lot of work to be done before I till our garden plots to get them ready for next season. One last job after we have a hard freeze will be to remove the stalks from our two asparagus patches. Doing so lessens the chance of insect or disease carryover.
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I have a couple of hosta plants I started from saved seed last November. The poor plants have been on our back porch all summer as I never got around to transplanting them. I repotted them today in six inch pots and moved the plants to our sunroom where they spent last winter.
We had a light frost last Thursday, but got a real freeze this morning. While it didn't get down to the predicted 25° F, the low temperature this morning reached 31° F. That was enough to brown out our once lovely row of zinnias.
Our extended forecast from the Weather Underground calls for morning lows in the mid-20s for several days before things warm up a bit. Our growing season is well and truly over. I'm hoping to be able to clear our garden plots over some fairly nice weather and even possibly rototill our garden plots. I'm not sure of the wisdom of doing it, but I have eight lovely sage plants growing in six inch pots on the back porch. I use the sage plants as corner and halfway markers around the border of our East Garden plot. The old corner markers all got overgrown or mowed down this summer. While I'd originally hoped the sage would deter deer (didn't work), I've come to like having perennial plants as boundary markers for the plot. So rather than overwinter the sage plants in our sunroom, I hope to get them transplanted in the coming days. Just to be safe, I'll also start more sage indoors, either from direct seeding or cuttings from our two sage plants in our herb bed.
An email this morning alerted me to Burpee releasing their 2022 digital seed catalog. I didn't find a download link when I accessed the catalog. But this release makes Burpee our first seed catalog of the season. That's a bit unusual for Burpee, as their catalogs are usually one of the later ones we receive. We'll probably receive a host of garden seed catalogs in the coming days, weeks, and months. I'll briefly review the best of them here and also publish our annual list of Recommended Seed Suppliers.
Friday, November 5, 2021 - Trusted Seed Suppliers I've once again updated our page of Recommended Seed Suppliers. Our list of suppliers is based on our recent and long-term experiences with the vendors listed below. Seed quality, varieties available, price, shipping & handling charges, customer service, and reader input from this site all figure into our evaluation, winnowed a bit using The Garden Watchdog ratings from Dave's Garden. Some of the relationships run back well over forty years, while others are more recent additions.
Today, I started pulling the tomato and paprika pepper plants in our East Garden plot. The tomato plants take a while to take out, as they all had lots of vines growing through and over the tops of their welded wire cages. Those vines have to be trimmed back before the cages will come out of the ground easily. And of course, there were lots of green and rotting tomatoes to be picked up off of the ground. All of the tomato plants totally outgrew their five foot tall cages. Transplanted late on June 18, I'm guessing the excess growth may be the result of me adding a shovelful of compost this year to each planting hole. I still have several pepper and tomato plants to remove from the East Garden. When that is done, I'll turn to removing the zinnia plants that lined the east border of the East Garden.
It was finally time today to take out our nearly eighty foot row of dead zinnia plants. They'd been gorgeous all summer and also provided us with lots of zinnia seed for future plantings.
Rather than pull the zinnia plants by the roots, which I knew would screw up my back, I cut them off level as close to the soil surface as possible with a pair of lopping shears
The cut zinnia stems were pretty woody, but nevertheless, I piled them atop our compost pile. The photo above shows the compost pile after just the first of five or six loads of dead zinnias added! It also shows the compost pile after the zinnias were added. They'll get topped off later this month with our asparagus stalks. The zinnias and asparagus will not be totally decomposed by next spring, but they add a lot of material to the pile. After clearing the zinnias, I mowed the East Garden plot, readying it for fall tilling. There's still a bit of compost by the wheelbarrow that needs to be screened before I till. It appears that today will be our last nice day for about a week. I worked this afternoon in near seventy degree temperatures. But rain and falling temperatures are on their way. Killing frosts are predicted for Friday through Monday morning before things warm up a bit.
Thursday, November 11, 2021 - Veterans Day (U.S.)
This morning, I stayed in my pajamas and worked on our garden plans for next season. It's a matter of fitting in everything I want to initially grow, observing crop rotations, and adding succession crops. And of course, the plans remain fluid as various ideas pass through my head. The biggest changes can come at planting time. The image at right, updated from years ago, shows the location of our various garden plots. While I've had physical issues limit my gardening the last few years, I'm resisting my advancing age and am going ahead planning another full garden for next season. Our two narrow raised beds, plots A-1 and A-2, are pretty easy to plan. The plots along with the north end of plot B, are in a three year rotation with tomatoes and peas/cucumbers the main part of the rotation. Our ERS peppers join the rotation for next season.
Our 15' x 24' main raised bed carries a lot of crops. One of note is two early rows of green beans. Since the field next to us will be rotated to soybeans next season, it is essential to grow our beans early before hordes of Japanese beetles can migrate in from the soybeans.
While our raised beds are fairly easy to care for, our large East Garden plot is always a challenge to keep weed free. Lots of grass clipping mulch helps a lot with regular tilling of our sweet corn suppressing weeds there. In a bit of a gamble, I'm going to once again try growing potatoes. We've had mixed luck with them in the past with some great crops and several total failures.
So, that's the plan for next season. I'm still doing my garden maps in the old Appleworks application. It runs natively on my old 2010 Mac Mini and under emulation in Sheepshaver on my newer (2018) Mac Mini. Having had more than one Mac Mini cook itself, my Minis now rest on a Seville Classics rack, not necessarily designed for holding computing equipment. There are the two Minis on the top shelf, large external drives on the middle shelf, and backup drives on the bottom shelf. It's only been a little over a year since my last computer upgrades, but the improved ventilation provided by the rack seems to keep the computers and drives cooler.
Saturday, November 13, 2021 - Shopping Guides
After doing the gift shopping guide, I realized I should put together another guide of more mundane but possibly essential items for gardeners. That page includes stuff such as trowels, shovels, hoes, and garden chemicals. Quality tools aren't cheap, but then, you usually only have to buy them once. I still have a long handled shovel my late father gave me over forty years ago. On the other end of it, I bought cheap garden hoes for years and regularly broke the head off of them. One of my lovely step-daughters asked me one year what I'd like for my birthday. I replied, "a good hoe," when I should have said "a good garden hoe." She was shocked, as she mistook my use of the word "hoe" for a slang meaning of the word. But I've not broken the dandy hoe she gave me.
Monday, November 15, 2021 - Seed Inventory It was cold, wet, and windy outside today. That's lousy weather for outdoor gardening, but not so bad for doing our annual seed inventory. Keeping track of what we have and what we are out of aids in seed ordering. This year's inventory took all day. That's actually about a day less than usual, as I cheated and didn't count some old stuff I wanted to still save but hadn't used this season. I brought our heavy bag of saved seed in from our garage freezer last evening. The inventoried seed was back in the freezer in less than 24 hours. The thawing and re-freezing doesn't do the seed's viability any good, but my method seems to be the best I can come up with.
I spread the various Ziploc bags of seed across our dining room table. The seed is bagged alphabetically: asparagus; beans; beets; brassicas; etc.
I bring the seed bunches to our kitchen table pretty much alphabetically. By the time I got to "tomatoes" around six in the evening, I was pretty well worn out with the task. It didn't help that I had seed stored in our big garage freezer, our kitchen refrigerator freezer, and in a cool, dark area of our basement. Some of the heavier seed packets get weighed on my postage scale. A few actually get poured out and counted seed by seed. Most of the amount figures are estimates. Some seed packets get really iffy estimates of "a lot" or "a few."
Above is an edited view of part of our seed inventory. Besides knowing what and how much of what I have, knowing the seed source is also helpful for re-ordering. I keep a separate spreadsheet of seed orders formatted identically to the seed inventory. When new seed comes in, I cut and paste the info from the order spreadsheet into the seed inventory. I use a very old copy of Microsoft Excel for my spreadsheets. I've resisted upgrading computers to the latest and greatest hardware and software versions partially because of Microsoft and Adobe's current annual fees for using their stuff. My copies of Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are bought and paid for. If you lack a spreadsheet application, the free, open source Open Office suite includes one that seems to work just as well as Excel.
I ended up my work day with a view of a lovely evening sky over our main garden plots.
Tuesday, November 16, 2021 - First Seed Catalog for 2022
We've found Fedco to be a reliable supplier of bean and other garden seeds the last few years. While some seed houses haven't yet opened for orders, Fedco is open, receiving and shipping new orders. As I paged through the Fedco catalog, I picked twelve vegetable varieties I'd grown before and noted their prices from last year and this year. Of the twelve, ten minimum size packets all went up 25¢. One item stayed the same price and another, possibly a misprint, went down $2! With our annual seed inventory completed yesterday, I'm ready to begin putting together our garden seed orders for next season. Besides print catalogs, which I love, a number of seed houses have published their digital seed catalogs for 2022. Sometimes downloading them is a bit of a chore, as some new software requires loading all the pages into ones web browser before choosing to print or download the files as PDF documents. So far, here are the ones I've found:
We finally have a bright, sunny day outside today. But I'll be in my easychair going through the new Fedco Seed catalog.
Get Holiday Ready with Cyber Week Savings! Up to 50% off this Exclusive Collection at 1800Flowers (Valid 11/26 @ 12:00am - 12/5 @ 11:59pm EST)Friday, November 19, 2021 - Covid-19 Booster The FDA authorized Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccine boosters for all adults this morning. Having gotten up early, I was online registering for my third Moderna shot by 9:30 am and got an appointment for today! The appointment was again at the Sullivan (IN) County Health Department on the town square. I was poked and gone in less than a half hour. Last Tomatoes I had to dump our last three tomatoes in the compost bucket this morning. Of the thirty or so underripe tomatoes I'd picked at the end of October and ripened in a tray on our dining room table, I think we used ten of them. After enjoying our own vine ripened tomatoes this summer, both my wife and I will be reluctant to buy hothouse tomatoes. They're red and wet, but lack the wonderful flavor of homegrown tomatoes.
Saturday, November 20, 2021 - "Best" Garden Photos of 2021 Ten years ago, I began publishing an annual photo article of our Best Garden Photos of (year). I've been proud of most of those pages. But our "best" this year is pretty weak. For some reason, I didn't take a lot of shots early in the season. And then early in July, I fell head first off our back porch which resulted in a really limiting neck injury. For a month or so, I couldn't stand even having the camera strap around my neck, let alone crouching, looking up or down (or even sideways) to frame shots. So my best photo of the year came early with some apple blossoms.
From there, it was pretty much downhill. So, here's a link to my not so Best Garden Photos of 2021. If you like pretty garden shots, here are my previous best offerings:
I'm still waiting to open the floating row cover over our kale and carrots. Direct seeded on August 29, both crops were slow to emerge. Adding at least a couple of weeks to days-to-maturity dates to compensate for shorter daylength in the fall, the carrots should be just about ready to dig. But with winds around 20 MPH today, it wasn't the day to be messing with a thin fabric row cover in the wind.
From perusing their digital catalog last week, I already had down to order some Red Ursa kale and County Fair zinnia seed from them. It turns out they no longer offer the Red Ursa variety, our second favorite kale variety. And they were out of the zinnia seed. That might have spelled the end of our order for HMOS this year. But then I ran across a couple of sweet corn varieties I'd like to order. We've previously attempted to grow their open pollinated, supersweet Who Gets Kissed?, but deer swept in and ate it just as it was tasselling and putting on ears! I'd also like to try their Enchanted sh2 bi-color sweet corn, as sh2 varieties are getting hard to find. But then, it's also out of stock with other sites listing the variety as a crop failure! On the downside, High Mowing Organic Seeds has boosted the price of most small seed packets 30¢. And while they were an innovator several years ago in including shipping in the cost of their seed, they abandoned the practice and nearly doubled their flat rate shipping charge on most orders to $4.95. That makes ordering a single or two packets of seed cost prohibitive.
You simply don't knowingly share infected seed. And anthracnose in tomatoes is really hard to miss. That earned the seed seller a spot on my "When Hell Freezes Over" list. So even with some mild criticisms, High Mowing Organic Seeds maintains its spot on our list of trusted seed suppliers. BTW: My booster shot of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine last Friday produced no real side effects. The injection site was a bit sore for a day or so, but beyond that, no problems. Even so, I'm still wearing my mask when I go out shopping, as I'm an old geezer who might be an easy target for a breakthrough infections of the delta or some other variant.
Thursday, November 25, 2021 - Thanksgiving Day (U.S.) Rejoice evermore. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 Happy Thanksgiving
The ten seeds I tested all germinated. I'm guessing I got lucky with this batch of seed, as butternuts are said to continue to ripen their seed after they've been cut off the vine. As I brought up the rest of our saved butternuts, I found that many had molded on the inside, but found just enough good flesh to complete the dish.
Hopefully, I still have kale and carrots under a floating row cover to be harvested. I also need to cut and compost the stalks from our two asparagus patches. And I need to rake up some leaves and/or grass clippings to mulch the narrow raised bed where our early peas will be planted in early March. And if I'm extremely fortunate, I may be able to rototill a few of our garden plots. With the holiday, some nasty weather, and a couple of physical setbacks, I haven't done much gardening of late. Processing saved seed, grinding egg shells and such take time, but don't show outside. In the meantime, I've been binge watching the old HBO series The Newsroom. An interview with Jeff Daniels on Nicole Wallace's show on MSNBC got me started. He talked of series creator Aaron Sorkin writing an inspiring speech Daniel's character gave in the first episode.
Tuesday, November 30, 2021 - Carrot Day
I used a garden fork to gently lift the soil under the carrots before pulling them. There were lots of small, thin carrots that I might charitably call gourmet carrots for steaming. But there were also about three pounds of good carrots. The smaller carrots came in at five pounds, and the culls at two pounds. The culls, still good for eating or cooking but not for long term storage, will go to the food bank on Friday.
See How We Grow Our Carrots for the full story of growing carrots, start to finish. November Wrap-up Most of this month has been filled with cleaning up our various garden beds. I did do our annual seed inventory and saved some seed. With the inventory completed and our initial garden plan done, I'm ready to start building our seed orders for next season.
Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
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. Once when I was farming and clearing small trees and brush, I didn't cut off all the saplings level with the ground. When later cleaning up the area with a moldboard plow, I blew a rear tractor tire running over a sharp pointed seedling! That's an expensive mistake I've sworn never to make again. Even using the shears, some of the zinnia stems were as tough to cut as small tree limbs.
in the refrigerator.
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