Fall hit Portland rather suddenly last week. It felt like it came early, but it is October, after all. In fact, I think it was unseasonably warm up until last week. Guess I’m just sort of distracted, so the chill caught me off guard. But the heat is on, as are the sweaters and wool socks, and the urge to knit is creeping back in. (Time to knit? That’s another story altogether.)
The winter garden, all cleaned up
This weekend was all about switching the garden over from summer to fall/winter. The many (many) pounds of green tomatoes were collected and sorted. Most will get pickled, and some will hang out in paper bags and hopefully ripen. The corresponding tomato plants were yanked and the tomato cages stored for next year. The winter squash vines were pulled, as were the eggplant, cucumber, and the six okra plants that produced two ripe pods all season. (I knew okra doesn’t grow well here, but I gave it a try anyway the past two years, because I love it. I’m done. Not going to try growing okra again. It just doesn’t work.)
All that bare dirt is where the summer veggies used to live, as well as 12 pots of tomatoes, eggplant, okra, etc...
The winter spinach bed was destroyed by pooping/digging neighbor cats just as the wee plants were sprouting. (The more I garden, the less I like cats.) On Sunday we (not preggo me) dug out all the cat shit, and I resowed the spinach. It may be too late for it to grow before the frost, but it was worth a shot. I covered the bed with the cat-repelling bird netting that should have been on it in the first place, so if the seeds do manage to grow they won’t have to contend with Eddie and Joji and Ishiro and assorted other neighborhood beasts.
I also sowed mesclun and arugula seeds in the pots where the tomatoes used to live (after adding some complete organic fertilizer* to refresh the soil). I have no idea if they’ll grow either. Seemed worth a shot. I had the dirt, I had the seeds. The days are probably too short now, the weather too cool. But hey–what if they do grow? We’ll throw cloches over both beds in a week or so, when we expect the first frost, so we’ll see. It’s our first year gardening past September, so it’s all a grand experiment at this point.
The Brussels sprouts, kale, and mustard greens I sowed at midsummer are like two feet tall now, and we’ve been eating the kale for a while. (I can eat kale again! The food aversion is over! I still don’t even want to THINK about zucchini, though. It may be years before I can eat zucchini again.) I lopped the centers off three Brussels plants last week, following advice given to Heather at the farmer’s market, and now those plants are producing the cutest little sprouts. Apparently the sprouts won’t develop until you force them that way. You cut off that center growth a few weeks before you want to harvest the sprouts. Go figure. We would have been waiting all winter if Heather hadn’t asked this farmer why her own Brussels weren’t producing yet. So I did three plants last week, and will stagger the remaining eight plants through the season.
We LOVE Brussels sprouts, but I’m really hoping the spinach and salad greens grow. (Fucking cats. I totally planted that spinach bed in time and they destroyed it.) It’s going to be a long winter if the only three garden vegetables available are kale, mustard greens, and Brussels sprouts. There are five winter squash put up, which won’t last all that long. With the five million winter squash vines we had going, I expected to have about twenty winter squash set aside. Nope.
Yes, yes, I understand I can still buy vegetables at the store, and that it isn’t considered cheating, but I’d really hoped not to need to. That may have been a bit grandiose for our first year of winter gardening. Something to work toward, I guess.
Oh! In all the bitching about the cats, I forgot the most excited bit! I planted garlic and shallots and leeks this weekend, too! A ton of them. (No picture. Imagine a rectangular plot of dirt–covered with cat-repelling bird netting–and then imagine me pointing to it and telling you there are shallots and garlic cloves and leek bulbs buried in it.) Add that to the already-established overwintering onion bed, and I’m hoping we won’t need to buy any of that type of thing from late July forward into a glorious, stinky infinity. Well…that’s a bit grandiose, too. There will probably be enough garlic, but I only sowed enough onions to get us through a couple months. We use a lot of onions. Maybe another onion bed next year…
Hmmm…I do believe I’ve rambled my way into one of those posts only interesting to me and the three or four gardeners who stop by here. Or maybe just interesting to me. Ah well. Maybe tomorrow I’ll bake some bread or something. Or take pictures of the blueberry jam I made this weekend. Who knows? All kinds of exciting things afoot here.
* Complete Organic Fertilizer, as defined in our gardening bible: Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades:
4 parts seed meal
1/2 part lime
1/2 part phosphate rock or bone meal
1/2 part kelp meal
I had the same experience with winter squash, which I grew for the first time this year. There were tons of vines with lots of blooms, and I sort of thought I’d be enjoying a bounty of winter squash. I got six, which is good, but less than I expected. Good luck with your winter gardening!
Rats! I wish I’d known the brussels sprouts trick a week ago. I just yanked out two plants that looked like they were going to produce a ton of sprouts. The sprouts just got gangly and never “headed” up. Oh well, too late now.
ah, you were all smart and staggered your brussels. i was so excited at the possibility that perhaps there was still hope for ours that i lopped all their heads off at once. at some point in the not so distant future, we will be eating brussels sprouts daily as all six plants mature at once.
It’s a funny thing about blogging. You would have had no way to know it, but I loved this post (I’m mostly a quiet, noncommenting knitting reader). I’ve been a lazy gardener the last few years but I put down the wool this morning to pick some cherry tomatoes and a few raspberries and admire our volunteer pumpkins – so orange and plump and fabulous. I’m sniffling and it was cold out but it was sunny and quiet and it’s such a marvelous thing that there is food in my backyard in the middle of October. I like knowing that you’re thinking about your garden, too.
(I don’t remember what your sun situation is, but if you want raspberry canes or some rhubarb in the early spring, you’re welcome to them.)
Our garden is fairly well done for the year. I wish it would stay warmer and we could have a late season garden but it gets much too cold. I will try to occupy my time this winter doing research and drawing garden maps. Preparation or anticipation?
Grrrrr….cats…not to go into a long-winded rant, but sometimes I want to just SMACK the owners of all the cats that use my backyard as their private litterbox / fornication ground. They dig up my garden beds, nibble on my spinach, tear around the roots of my roses (I have no idea why), poop EVERYWHERE, have their trysts right under my bedroom window at night…ARGH!!
Love the cats, but surely do wish their owners would keep them inside, or in their own flamin’ yard. {SCOWL!!!}
Your garden looks beautiful. Our Brussels sprouts are doing really well – I totally should get some pictures up on my blog, instead of whining about lack of planning and poor fair turnouts. (Not related to each other, naturally.)
I have yard envy! Stop making me want to move to Portland.
There is probably some way to deter cats using your spinach bed as a loo. There is lots of stuff they don’t like the smell of and there are various kinds of pepper spray. You could spray the area around the bed and they would probably avoid it. Bertie is not allowed outside so he would never poop in your spinach.
David brought my knitting boxes out of storage. I couldn’t knit at all last year because it made my hands cramp up. Hopefully this winter will be better. 😀
You can still like my cats! Honest! They are strictly indoor cats. And Gryphon is actually *afraid* of the outdoors. And thunder. At least since lightning hit the tree outside and fried the computer and microwave about 4 years ago.
If the spinach sprouts, you can cover it with leaves and protect it over the winter, and it will start growing again in the very early spring, before you even plant anything else. I routinely plant lettuce and spinach in the fall, knowing it won’t produce now, but will be ready very early in the spring. I had a “volunteer” butternut squash growing in my compost pile, with vines growing up the fence and all over the place, and I’ve counted 12 or so squash so far. Pretty exciting!!
Nice work. Hadn’t ever tried the trick with the brussel sprouts – good to know it works. You did better than we did with the winter squash! We got 4. We’re seeding greens this weekend and they usually sprout for salads for us up here. Hope yours do well, too.
I love this time of year on your blog! This may sound silly but have you ever tried Fried Green Tomatoes? Here is one recipe: http://elise.com/recipes/archives/001506fried_green_tomatoes.php
They are really yummy and not INCREDIBLY bad for you, plus most of the ingredients you would have around the house. So I’ll end my rant now.
I love reading about your garden! Its all a big experiment really, no book can give you the exact advice for your plot, so you just have to try. From my own experience there are many failures, but the sucesses make it all worth while. And each failure is knowledge gained!
Don’t let anyone rain on your parade and tell you that you can buy vegetables at the store. It isn’t the same. They don’t taste the same, it is a responsible, sustainable thing to do with your yard, and it is so fun to create something useful from a little seed and some hard work. Kind of like knitting. The socks at the store are completely different than the socks you knit.
I’m a knitter, gardener, mother and librarian, so I’m reading most of what you post and enjoying it!