Volunteer Madness

We have VOLUNTEER MADNESS going on. Carrots, onions, and sunflowers. And its the second week in April.

Can I bring my self to till these in? They are in the totally wrong place, but, geez, what does a plant have to do to get some respect around here?

Last Harvests (So Far)

For Thanksgiving we finally had the last of the Crookneck Squash in some great soup and we had some herbs (Sage and Rosemary) on some roasted carrots (mix of Chantenay and Danvers Half Longs) from the garden. It was nice to harvest some crops so late. Here I am in December harvesting carrots. You can see the few as the green tufts in the image above in beds 3 and 4. They have survived the cold surprisingly well. I will be roasting the remander of the Chantenay carrots today and left some of the Danvers. I had to turn the beds over (also nice to be able to do in December) because I had toyed with no till gardening.

I put down layers of grass clippings and shredded leaves on all the beds (excepting the area where the asparagus and the Danvers carrots are)and thought that maybe they would compost like I have seen on some blogs, but they weren't. In fact the grass formed an almost inpenetrable layer and wasn't breaking down at all. In fact, it was still green. So I broke out the poachers shovel and turned them all. Of course the sudden rush is the first brutal cold and the first serious snow of the year. Was out well after dark finishing (hence no pics)but got it done before the snow started. We got 4 to 5 inches that night.

I did not get to turn the side beds or the squash beds turned though. Didn't get the raspberries any extra mulch. Didn't get the strawberries pulled. Got the asparagus under cover though.

Pulled in over 400 pounds this year from the garden. Not bad.

Still Harvesting

Potatoes from a bucket on the deck. Onions that were still in the ground. Carrots from the garden. Some organic beef and celery. Stew. So yummy! So filling on an overcast, cool day.

Late Garden Still Going!

Its been a while since an update. Sorry for the delay, but life has been demanding, some things needed to slide a little, and this has been one of those things.

Here is a pretty typical day these days. These are actually the last of the summer potatoes, a good sized carrot or two, some peppers (marconi, cayenne, and poblano here), some tomatoes (Brandywine, Costoluto Genovese, and a little Cherokee Purple), an onion or two, and a special addition today - a little Charantais!

We harvested the first two ripe ones today and have 14 more to go. Let me tell you, we must have the exact right soil or something because these things taste AWESOME!

Here we have one of our BIG Rouge Vif de Etempes pumpkins. He have eight of them, but these two, next to each other on the same vine, have gotten a lot bigger than the others. Anybody got an idea on average size of these normally? Also, as is my plan each year, I just let them sprawl into the yard.

A number of the little cabbages that I thought would just die in the August heat came around strongly in the streak of cool weather we have had of late. The advantage of this in particular seems to be a total lack of cabbage loopers. I had loopers on me early cabbages (and I spent a lot of time picking them off by hand, yucky!), but these seem totally uneffected.

And here we have HOT HOT HOT Thai peppers grown from seed from my dad. These things are tasty, but a couple of them will drop you to your knees.

Will try to make it a lot sooner to the next post!