season officially over for me

[songbird]

the beets are picked and that last garden is cleaned up and ready for winter. we'll be pickling them Sunday. today i may take some of the smaller ones and clean them up and steam them for us to eat.

whatever else i can do from now on will be me getting ahead of the spring projects. now that's a thought... probably the first time since when i started helping out here that this has happened.

kinda scary and it's not even halloween any more... :)

our 70F day yesterday was so nice that i had the garden shed foamed in and done pretty early, so i went out with a garden pillow, sat in the sunshine and picked the beets. i dunno how good they are, but i bit one to see and it seemed ok. it took me about an hour and a half to get the beets picked and about 45 minutes to dig the hole, scrape the squash vines and beet tops and weeds from the surface in there and bury it again.

came in and made a nice dinner of toast and hot chocolate and was relaxing when Ma came home with a double cheeseburger and a turtle sundae. i haven't been that full in a long time. to say the least once i crawled back into the futon and got warm again i was very sleepy, but did manage to stay awake the rest of the evening until a more proper bed-time came around.

yes, i know, i live a very exciting life. :) now i have to figure out what to do today... hmm...

songbird

[George Shirley]

Wife is out picking kale, peppers, and eggplant at this time, probably some lettuces too. Looks like she's getting ready to go to her church and deliver some grub to the pantry there. The kale plant is nearly five feet tall and looks like a palm tree, there were to others also but they gave up the ghost earlier in the fall.

Yesterday was mid-seventies, it's mid-forties this morning and a freeze is forecast for next week. It's summer one day, winter the next, strange weather.

George

[songbird]

yesterday i shelled out the last few box tops of dry beans i had forgotten about. that ways i could get them in the worm bins to give the critters more to chomp on. takes a few months for them to be digested.

no snow that is sticking yet, but some was on the ground around my brother's place. still too warm for anything to stick.

that's a thing on the coasts (boiled peanuts) i haven't ever tried them that ways. roasted and peanut butter and various things made from those are as much as i've ever done.

thyme is a major low growing ground cover here that we both like (and more importantly does not react with us after contact with the skin). the bees are all over it. we have several types here and i am encouraging it to take over some edges so there will be less weeding to do there(s). i've never planted any from seeds. same with oregano. our oregano seems to have gone missing, smothered by the pennyroyal. we don't use it in cooking that often anyways.

for onions, they seem to keep ok through quite a bit. i have some nice red onions left over in the garage to replant or use up this winter. more seeds than i can ever possibly use. buggers cross pretty easy too so i am only trying to plant two kinds now the red ones and the giant sweet onions Ma likes to use. the white onions rot easily. the red onions and the sweet ones may provide some fun crosses. we'll see... :)

with the millions of ladybugs here it is very rare that i will see any aphids. sometime in the past 20yrs they imported ladybugs from some place and these are in addition to the natives. always a lot of them crawling. hard to keep them out of the house (but my recent foam sealing and caulking should help with that). i think the various green patches i leave in the gardens act as enough of a refuge for them. the alfalfa, thyme, trefoil, lillies, strawberries all seem to harbor them over the cold spells. as soon as there is any kind of warmth and growth again in the spring they are out there crawling around.

oh, at one time i grew a lot of the dwarf grey sugar pods (peas) and harvested them. kept them on hand to replant but also had enough to try cooking them up to see how they tasted. while Ma did not like them mixed in with other beans i did like them myself. so an easy crop for sure, very productive even if i don't get the pods for eating or the young peas for shelling. :) i don't know if you like dry peas cooked up much at all or not...

songbird