when it is foggy we call it froggy. lately, a usual sign of fall is froggy mornings. waking up to pea soup and having to wait a bit for things to burn off and dry out enough.
the dry bean harvest is coming along, i'm weeks behind in a few chores and the large drainage project is about a month behind schedule. such is life, eh? :) at least i'm still kicking, taking prisoners and turning them into mulch. that's a bit of a joke, as we have watched _Arsenic and Old Lace_ a few times too many.
oh look, a shadow!
ok, back to the comment about prisoners and mulch, sometimes we have raised beds that look an awful lot like gravesites. last year i even pounded in a bit of flat wood at the end of one of them and it was a bit spooky. oops, wrong month, it's not October yet...
new growth in the one strawberry patch is coming along very nicely. the peas are mostly taking over now that we've had a few light frosts which knocked back some of the beans and soybeans. that is fine, they accomplished what they were planted for (a bit of green in the bare spots). the peas will chug along until we get some hard frosts.
planted one garden yesterday, it is one of the larger patches, had to get it cleared of dry beans first, the crop looks ok, but some varieties didn't fare well. as it has had beans two years in a row the rotation is now garlic in the side part closest to the pathway (with a band of winter rye and winter wheat along the very edge which will be chopped back once it gets long enough to block light to the garlic). and to the north side i have winter wheat and winter rye as green winter cover crops and perhaps will leave it or some of it in the spring to go to grain stage. i've not had any grains here before so it will be interesting to see how they do.
already the winter rye, winter wheat and oats in the cabbage patch are well up and growing. it's scary to look at that and see grass. we just aren't used to grass in those gardens any longer...
i planted enough garlic this year for the future but about half of what i planted last year. and i made sure to put in about 80 in a more closely spaced planting to be used as green garlic in the winter and early spring. so much easier than trying to seed bunching onions. though some day i have to get the welsh onions or some other more perennial versions to trial in our soils.
the lack of a hard frost has meant that some cherry tomato plants are persisting in turning green fruits into edible delights. the golden cherry plants have held up well the fruits don't taste off like many of the sweet 100 cherry tomatoes. Ma dislikes the gold ones (the color is unnatural), i think they taste as good or better than the sweet 100s. anyways, the variety is good with me too. we've raided them at times to use in juicing/canning.
for sure we are over 160 quarts canned of tomatoes, tomato juice or salsa this year, a welcome restocking of depleted supplies. now we are canning beets.
onions this season didn't do well. i suspect mostly the poor month of June with a lack of sunshine, but also i think the sets weren't all that great quality. i have a ton of seeds to plant someplace, both in a formal garden and i'll scatter some about in wild places.
the back green manure patch is flowering again and looking very nice, the few bare spots from digging the garlic out were seeded in with buckwheat and turnips. the tops of the buckwheat were knocked back by the light frosts, but the bottoms are still green and blooming. the turnips are mostly now overgrown by the alfalfa and trefoil, but they are there. we'll see if any of them survive the winter and give me a crop of blooms and seeds next spring/summer.
ok, well, time to scrape up a bit of breakfast and then putter around shelling dry beans and such until i can get outside. only a few more dozen bushels of beans to pick and shell and even more gardens to get ready for winter and i sure hope soon to get back to the drainage project, would be nice to have that more settled before the rains and cold weather return.
c'est la vie. cheers, *hugs*, etc.
songbird