Contributed by Harry

Hopefully, you have had a successful garden this year and, literally, enjoyed the fruits of your labor.

If you have followed our Gardening with Children Guide, you will soon be finishing this year’s activities and harvesting the last veggies and enjoying and cutting the last flowers.

What now?

If your plants have finished producing, it is time to pull them out.   “Finished producing” means the plants are dead or dying or all the fruit is harvested and no more flowers are appearing promising more fruit. If they are healthy, you can put them in your compost.  If they are infested with pests or disease, it is best to remove them by putting them in a plastic bag, tying it closed and disposing of it.  If you don’t pull this year’s dead plants out, they may set and shed seed.  This is not a problem, but if you want to ‘rotate your crops’ you may have to deal with ‘weeds’ next year.

I tend to have dill and cilantro all over my garden every year.  A random marigold is a whimsical addition (and some marigolds deter nematodes).  This may be a blessing, not a problem, but some larger plants, like tomatoes and kale might end up crowding out the things you plant next year if left to their own devices.

If you intentionally let some of your crops go to seed, like the dill, cilantro, beans, calendula, sunflowers, etc. (see our Facebook posts on the subject), it should be about time to collect those seeds if you have not already.  Once the seeds are collected you can pull out the plants and add them to the compost.

We assume you have been weeding your garden, whether in the ground or in containers, all through the growing season to cut down on competition from ‘weeds’ for precious nutrients and water.  Even though your garden is finishing up, you should pull out and remove all ‘weeds’ that may have escaped notice.  If they are flowering or have seeds on them you should not put them in your compost.  Compost needs to get pretty hot to kill seeds.

“Nature abhors a vacuum.”  That means if some thing is not growing in a space, some other thing will arrive to fill it.  So bare soil will invite seeds blown or dropped in to germinate and root.

You can prevent this in a couple of different ways:

If you are growing in containers and they are small enough to easily move, put them some place where they are not exposed to rain and light.  Any weed seeds will be less likely to germinate over winter.

If you are growing in the ground you can:

1) Mulch the soil with three or four inches of grass clippings, shredded leaves, wood chips, straw, etc.  This will protect the soil from erosion and compaction.  It will protect the bacteria, earthworms and other denizens of the soil from the harsh extremes of winter.  It will also deny weed seeds light so any seeds that do germinate will die due to lack of light.  Those that do make it through the mulch will be easy to remove.  And as the mulch decomposes, it will add nutrients to the soil.

2) Grow a ‘cover crop’ like crimson clover, rye grain (not rye grass) or mustard.  This will do several things.  It will prevent erosion and compaction.  It will maintain the soil microbiology through winter.  And a legume like crimson clover will add Nitrogen to the soil; rye is “allelopathic” meaning it prevents other plants from growing, so it is a natural weed prevention; mustards kill or suppress diseases and pests.  (Many farmers plant all three for maximum over-winter benefit!  We used to do that on our farm.)  In the spring, you can either cut these to put them in your compost or chop them up (mow them down) and turn them into the soil to break down and add more organic matter to the soil.  If you do grow rye as a winter cover and turn it into your soil, wait two weeks before growing.  The allelopathy will dissipate by then.

3) If you are in a Hardiness Zone which is not too extreme, you can grow a cold tolerant crop into the winter!  If you start your winter crop early enough (now or earlier, depending on the crop and your location), you can be eating kale, carrots, beets, parsley, spinach, collards, lettuce, etc. for quite a while, maybe all the way to spring!  In our Zone 7 farm, we fed customers 10 months a year and ate from our fields all year round!

If you like garlic or onions and have the room, now is the time to plant some so it will be ready next year.  The onions in the photo at left are bunching onions.  We will pull them through the winter to add to recipes.  Notice the straw mulch to keep down weeds.

[If your containers are large or immobile, you can do these things to them also!]

Also, if you grow in the ground, now is a good time to have your soil tested.  If needed, agricultural lime applied now will have time to “sweeten” the soil for your next year’s garden.  The results of a soil test will tell you how much to use.

So, a little flurry of activity now as autumn advances will help give you a head start on spring – or you can continue enjoying produce for a while yet.

We hope this helps you continue to enjoy your garden and Nature.  Remember to explain to your young helpers what and why you are doing.  Don’t let good ‘teaching moments’ escape.

Contributed by Harry

Last week felt like we had migrated to the Bahamas… or the Bahamas had come to us! (At least, I have heard the Bahamas are warm even in winter.) Beautiful days with high temperatures in the sixties made us want to be out exploring instead of preparing the cave for the kids’ Christmas visit.

We did take an afternoon off to celebrate our eleventh anniversary and take a walk along one of our favorite local trails. On our way home, we had to stop and enjoy one of the most spectacular and reddest sunsets we have seen in a long while. Several others stopped to appreciate and capture it with their cameras.

It was surely an optical illusion, but with no leaves on trees everything seemed so much more present, crisper and closer. Rock faces and other landscape features appeared in places we had passed dozens of times before without noticing.  Vista views seemed wider and farther than in spring or summer. Even as the temperature dropped as dusk approached, it was hard to take our eyes away from the beauty.

Yesterday we could feel the temperatures drop all day long. We woke up to upper thirties and by dusk it was in the upper twenties with the first light snow of the season carried by very high winds… gusts more than thirty miles an hour. It made the house vibrate and the trees roar! Even the dogs didn’t want to stay out in it and preferred the house warmth. It was so nice to be inside by the fire even though the snow ended up being only a dusting that barely lasted in the shade once the sun rose.

That’s it for now. Time to wander out to find some plantain (Plantago lanceolata). I’ll chew it up and hold between my cheek and gum most of the day to draw out a minor toothache.

I hope you are having a wonderful day!

Harry

Contributed by Harry

It’s not officially Winter yet, but it sure has a wintery feel:  temperatures hovering around freezing in the mornings; occasional frost; mountainsides devoid of colors other than browns and grays – save the few pines, spruce and firs…

There are a very few lingering goldenrod, purple aster and yarrow flowers stubbornly displaying their defiance, but most of the summer flowers have produced their seed heads resulting in lots of fluffy clumps of various shades of off-white up the mountainside. The large mounds of virgin’s bower seed heads covering the dying vines always look frosty.

Ninety-nine point nine percent of the leaves have abandoned their tenuous perches and now begin their slow decomposition on the forest floor to humus to nourish their former hosts and new growth in the Spring.

The multiflora rose hips have changed from hard dry orange to softer bright red and, while they will never be as tasty as some other hips, have taken a decided turn toward a Vitamin C-laden sourness and sweetness.

Even the last of the domestic and escaped apples have ripened. A couple of prized trees have fruit that rival the Gala, Fuji and HoneyCrisp in flavor, texture and sweetness. YUM! (From which Deb, or one of the daughters, occasionally makes a pie for me.)

The scraps from the woodshop are knocking the morning chill back and warming us pleasantly as I write this. The scraps won’t last long when Winter really takes hold, but I and a couple of the offsprings cut and split about six cords of firewood this past Summer that will hopefully provide two or three years warmth.

Speaking of the woodshop, I seem to have been cursed with the need to look at every piece of firewood as a potential project to be sawn, planed, bored, carved, turned or otherwise magicked into a practical or aesthetic object.

Ah, well, back to the apothecary. I need to whip up something Deb suggests I take for this cough while we eagerly await the first snow. (Which we had had by this time last year and does not look at all imminent – just another bout of heavy rain.)

Happy day to you!

Harry