One of several vacant spots where arugula was seeded.
Anybody Planting Fall Vegetables?
Hummingbirds are enjoying zinnia nectar and finches are loving the seeds. These giant old fashioned zinnias are now over six feet tall. I've saved this seed for almost twenty years.
I let the zinnias volunteer and seed in extra come Spring. Notice Bubbles is snoozing on the job. Need to talk to her about that.
Something bored into the first suyo cucumber near the top that caused some weirdness. Really funny looking.
Peas are now between twelve and eighteen inches.
Some greens are happening.
Spring collards that have summered are not as tasty after all the heat but they are good for soup. Fall collards are still small.
Hi All,
Here is a source for beans www.vermontbean.com. Vermont Bean Seed Company.
I plant spinach here in Fl. during the winter. You folks are all way ahead of me in planting and harvesting. We need rain bad but do have drip irrigation in our vegie garden. Nothing will grow in Fl. without watering.
I'm behind in getting garden ready to plant due to digging and working on 2 new ponds in front of house.
Good luck with all your vegies. Fresh vegies YUM nothing like them. Bonnie
Bonnie, I can't connect to your link. You may want to help the person out who was asking about spinach on the veggie forum. I have a home in S. FL on the east coast but they are in Goodland which is almost in the ocean on the Gulf. Once it cools off enough to grow anything it stops raining for three months. BTW, kinda' funny...you really do grow "Bonnie" plants.
Enjoyed reading about fall planting. My little brussel sprouts are liking this little bit of rain we had. We are still way down in rainfall. I think I will plant my mustard and collards this weekend.
She put a period at the end of the sentence that got included in the URL
Try this
http://www.vermontbean.com/
Thanks, RR. I was able to check out the site.
Elaine, I keep meaning to post the little Clivia that has bloomed not once, but three times since you have given it to me. It's charmed!
I planted one hundred and fifty eight garlic cloves and almost one hundred multiplier onions these past few days. The planting was easy but I spent days reclaiming old forsaken garden beds before planting. Back breaking. Now I am sore and stiff and wondering what happens when I get too old to do this. Can I still carry fifty pound bags of manure and fertilizer when I'm seventy? I was ripping out renegade wisteria, Virginia creeper and wild grape vines. Then I had to finger hoe out hundreds of violets and "wild" strawberries. At some point I remembered that I had planted those "wild" strawberries almost twenty years ago. That was after half of them had been launched over the hillside with the violets.
LOL,,, I know what you mean about pitching something down the hill. Somehow it creeps on up...
When we can't carry those bags, we'll just look helpless until someone comes along, or,, better, use a shovel and do it one shovelful
at the time. Glad that clivia is liking you. I need to fertilize mine one more time since we finally got a little rain.
Hey Maypop,
I'm 74 and still gardening and love it. HOWEVER, I finally bought me a BX25 (little one) Kubota with bucket on front and husb. adapated a cultivator for PTO on back and boy does it help when pulling out those roots and breaking up the ground.
Past 2 days have been cleaning out old garden spot mainly of sweet potatoe roots, what a pain but today I am going for seeds and maybe some plants. I know its kind of late to put garden in but I have to have broccoli. I love to eat it raw. Or cooked, stalks we use for slaw, leaves we eat just like collards. I have tried summer gardens and bugs just have a field day. Past 2 years we have had no luck with full size tomatoes so this winter just going to try small types. I particularly like sweet 100's but those plants sell out very fast.
In Fl. there is no such thing as counting on rain. For front of yard which is flowers shrubs I put in 82 sprinkler heads and 8 large rotors down the center 5 yrs. ago. In back vegie garden we have drip irrigation which has to be taken up every year and then put back just before planting. It's not handy but puts the water where you need it and don't waste it. That water comes from our well so have to conserve. This past summer we had little showers every day so didn't turn on irrigation but about 3 times but now its dry again soooooo. Took me many years to realize without some form of irrigation in Fl. you can forget gardening. I am originally (45 yrs. ago) from Conn. and had beautiful loamy soil and never irrigated a thing and had wonderful gardens. Southern gardening is sure different.
Good luck to all with your gardens. The taste of fresh vegies and being able to share them with others makes it all worthwhile.
Bonnie
PS I buy Bonnie's nursery plants also. Usually they work well.
Hi, Bonnie. I also have the little Kabota tractor. I don't use it in my garden though. We even wear light weight shows when treading in the garden. I do use a tiller in Spring on some areas but hand turn others. You sound like a very busy gardener. I hope I can keep it up as well as you have.
Meantime, the garden is still going. I thought the big dip we had last week would put a halt to things. It's definitely slowing down though. Thank goodness. All that canning was doing me in. I got five pints of sauce, a big batch of rattatouille with the eggplants sweet peppers and SO pickled the hot peppers. The recent rains made for a more normal Soyu cucumber but the plants are not very productive. Maybe a spring planting would be different. I have left one on to get big for seed saving.
Some of my garlic came up this tall in just a week. Weird because the cloves were not sprouted at all when I planted them.
New greens on the right are coming along while older ones on the left got picked last weekend. Two grocery bags stuffed with collards.
Cindy, how are the favas? Mine are up.
Hey Laurel,
No activity yet, but I just planted them on Sunday. Had
I'm making "seed napkins" - gluing seed to folded napkins so I can plant through the season when the weather is not pleasant enough to bend and carefully seed or when I just don't have enough daylight hours to measure and seed. I did this last year and loved the results. "Square inch" planting while watching TV. :)
Planted garden on Oct. 6 and all seeds are showing up on Oct. 14. I was shocked. Maybe this winter we will have good yield.
Getting ready for RoundUp so working on lots of other projects but will get back to begie garden after Oct. 22.
Cindy your gluing of seeds to napkins sounds like great idea. Could you explain. I'm guessing you use biodegradible napkins? Its pretty hard just dropping a few of those itty bitty seeds seperated. I usually have to thin them all out after they get 2" high.
Bonnie
I have teeny tiny lettuce up. Also collards and mustard. With this cold weather that followed us back from Tennessee and that wonderful rain we had, I expect a great harvest.
Cindy, I sometimes save my tomato seeds on a paper towel and then just place them on top of the soil when planting. Sounds like your napkin idea..?
Bonnie,, the wonderful thing about Florida is the long, double growing season. My mom just planted more beans.....As long as it doesn't freeze..
Laurel, yum on that garlic!!!
I need to get busy again clearing out some of my woods.
Hi Bonnie and EFGeorgia! Sorry I'm slow to respond. I did post a little "tutorial" on the seed napkins here . I have to post some followups with photos of the sprouted seeds. They started coming up on Tuesday, lots more this morning. And my troublesome spinach (I have not been at all successful growing spinach in GA) is sprouted! I might get a decent batch!
EFGeorgia - yes - that's part of where I got the idea. Then I saw a blog a couple years ago with more detailed directions for planting and it kind of grew from there.
Laurel - I know you are cooking up a storm in DC - but wanted to tell you that my fava beans have sprouted! And it looks like nearly 100% germination! This is going to be exciting to get (hopefully) beans in late winter/early spring!
I'm sitting for five minutes while waiting on the fourteen pound sirloin roast to come out of the oven. It's for the one hundred roast beef, arugula and horseradish cream sliders being assembled tomorrow. I steamed eight pounds of shrimp and have three salmons still to grill. There's a curried aioli and a garden tomatillo chutney I created for shrimp dippers. There's twelve pounds of cheese (eight varieties) on site. I roasted bar nuts, made two quarts of caponata, five chicken pate tureens, garlic and Parmesan roasted fennel, grilled asparagus, onions and peppers and prepped salad greens and cured meats for the antipasti. I went over to the house yesterday to drop off all the service ware and set up. Almost done. Some cooking will be done on site in their open kitchen. It'll be like being a TV celeb. :>) Fabulous row house right in the middle of downtown D.C..Okay, my five minutes are up...back to work.
Laurel
Ah yes - when you get back - I need that caponata recipe. Assuming it doesn't frost tonight, I should have more eggplant midweek. Gosh that food sounds good. Can I crash?
;->
Looks like everything came up. Got to thin out the tomatoes. Now roundup is over I can get to the vegie garden. Really would like some fresh tomatoes for a change. Even the spinach is up and I usually don't have much luck with that. I love spinach salads. Lets hope we don't get early freezes this winter.
Good luck to all with your gardens.
Bonnie
Okay my fifteen minutes of fame are over even though I worked from one p.m. until one a.m. last Saturday night. We drove back to Maypop on Tuesday, picked and sprayed the greens for worms and got back to Atlanta last night. I've got bags of collards, a huge platter of peppers, two more of tomatoes (mostly cherries) and one lonely okra. There were three pickling cukes. I've left the two shoyu cukes on to save seed for next year. We've got tons of mustard, turnips and pak choy but I left it. The late planted Wando peas are flowering so maybe we will get some before it's too cold. We have lots of rattlesnake beans from the August planting. Broccoli, cabbages and Brussels sprouts are poking along. The fava beans are about a foot tall. Some seem happier than others.
Cindy, I'll send you that recipe now. My book is out right here on the desk.
L
Hey Laurel,
Thank you! Got it! My favas are about 4 inches tall now. There's the late Cherokee Purples that are a bit more than golfball sized now - I doubt they will survive long enough to ripen. But am hoping. The beans are everywhere. Next year I plant many fewer beans. The Rattlesnakes are ready to take over. The Romanos are doing well too. Peppers are winding down and I think the eggplants are giving up. My little okra patch continues to produce .2 pounds of okra nearly every day. I got the right amount planted this year - we only had too much a few times this year.
Interested in hearing about shoyu cukes - never heard of them. I'm guessing they are Japanese?
One broccoli should be able to be harvested late next week. The kohlrabis are looking fabulous! Can't wait. And greens are producing - I'm hungry!
Cindy
I went back over this thread to see when some of the greens were planted. It seemed so long ago but most of mine went in Sept. 4th. We had two quick days to visit and spend in our N. GA. garden. I picked a grocery bag each of mustard, turnip greens and pak choy. The pak choy is beautiful! Some is starting to bolt but I see it with flowers in the Asian markets and it costs extra. The flowers are very flavorful. I frequently cook an Asian soup called pho http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pho and pak choy is wonderful in this dish.
The two grocery bags of collards picked before we went away were cooked and yielded six quarts. We ate two quarts that week and I froze four. It seems there is as much on the leaves now as there was three weeks ago. No time to pick and cook them though. They'll have to wait. Hopefully I can compress and post the photos I took yesterday within a few days.
How's your garden? Did you folks in the hotter areas ever get favorable planting weather?
It has been cool here. My brussel sprouts are up about 4 inches now... We got 1/4 inch of rain Thursday... very little. Mustard is up and growing. Georgia Collards also. The spinach is just not...... and I do love it.
I think we got more rain than you did, Elaine. Maybe close to an inch. The pond is seriously low though. There was no time to spray Bt before we left Friday afternoon because we started panicking about traffic back into the city while standing in the garden picking greens at 3 p.m.. It's bad coming and going these days. I'm hoping the greens don't get wormed between now and the day after TG. Also, we are now having deer problems for the first time since we fenced some acres beyond the garden. The dogs are contained when we are there so the deer must be jumping the fence. The peas that were flowering a few weeks ago have been munched as well as some tomatoes and cukes. Might not get peas after all but there is still plenty to eat. I'm not going to mention some of the other stuff in case something happens to it but the rutabagas might be ready by TG.
Yes, bet those deer are jumping over and having themselves some of your yummy veggies. But maybe their munching will just encourage sprouting out and produce more. That is what happened with my impatiens. I also planted some green pepper basil in front of them, so maybe that is an idea...plant things in and around veggies that the deer don't like.. hmm Hope the worms don't bother anything.
I've never found a plant deer don't like. Those deer proof plant lists are a crock! They eat the roses, the gardenias, every veggie in the garden (even the hot peppers) and herbs. This must just be one because there is a bit of grazing here and there. We cooked a bunch of pak choy with our Asian soup tonight. It was delicious. Plenty more still there.
I took these photos with my 'droid so there are no wide angle shots but here is a glimpse at a few tomatillos. There are hundreds. They always come in around frost time and are fine even after hard freezes. Even when the plants freeze out the fruit is still good.
Since we can't get back until after TG I picked all the sweet peppers "just in case". I started with this veggie bag but had to switch to a regular grocery bag. The plants were loaded! No time to let them turn red though.
Critter damage on the cucumbers...
Still no frost here, so some things are hanging in there. My eggplants are flowering, but I picked all the small eggplants last week when it was going to be in the mid 30s several nights. They were getting puny looking. I think we're done on eggplant. The peppers are turning red, red, red... The plants are still loaded with peppers and more flowers. I am going to try digging one up to keep inside during winter. I have a friend who does this every year with her peppers and then puts out in spring to get the earliest peppers in the area!
Cindy, I've tried overwintering peppers and tomatoes but end up with such bad whitefly after a few months I ditched them. I worry about my other house plants. Make sure you spray them with whatever you use before bringing them in. Also, cut them way back because you'll do a number on the roots digging them out of the soil and into even large pots.
Our eggplants and okra are done. The favas that made it are about 18"-2'. I say, "made it" because it looks like a vole or mole has been busy down the row. The are back from summer vacation with a vengeance. Maybe it's moles going after Fall grubs. Here's a photo and pay no attention to that nasty tomato leaf.
We are going out of town in a couple of days and won't have internet for a week or so. If I don't get back here that's why.
Well, believe it or not, we're still eating some golf ball sized tomatoes here. They're not wonderful but definitely better than anything you get at the grocery. My peppers are also still coming in. In fact, I find they like it better after it cools off a bit. I have broccoli planted but was late so none yet. Here's a lemon off my lemon tree. This is the first year it's produced. I took it next to an eg to give you an idea of its true size.
Io1 - Looks like my tomatoes... We're forecast 34 tonight. I covered peppers and the tomatoes I've been nursing along - some Cherokee Purples that are just starting to blush. I'm sure they won't be great, but who's picky in Nov.? Our Principe Borghese tomatoes continue to produce and so does the San Marzano. plant. I harvested another 2# of beans this morning (pix) on the chance that we actually do get a frost. I hate the growing season coming to an end... But the broccoli is doing great!
