2015 Garden thread

Well, harvest is upon us! The weather took a turn, and we are nice and chilly again. We have been harvesting steadily and it's about time for all of it to come out. I have also been harvesting seed! Spinach, peas, chamomile, and other flowers. I also have a couple of seed crops maturing Waltham 29 broccoli and radishes. This year I will be growing carrot tops in the house for the winter to hopefully get carrot seed. I'm also going to leave some cabbage inground after harvest and hope for seed next year. It still hasn't worked that way for the carrots. I guess a couple of turnips and Brussels sprouts should stay behind too, hhmmmmm.

It's been a good year, too warm at times for my tried and true cool weather crops, but good nonetheless.
The harvest has been and is still good, not stellar, but good. As usual things get so busy when summer starts that some projects never see the light of day. The garden expansion is in hold still, but I have figured out a few ways to expand within the current fence. I'm incorporating more permaculture within my existing spaces with perennial herbs and berries among my fruit trees. I am also going to start some layered lasagne beds between my raised beds so I can grow my cool weather crops in ground and use the raised beds for larger onion, carrot, squash and celery crops. The cucumbers did much better this year in an open top cold frame. The zucchini still succumbed horribly to powdery mildew. I give up on them. I think its just the woods, even my neighbor was bummed about problems with hers, and first year so no contamination.

Ah! And my lovely tomatoes decided to thrive. From near dead single leafed seedlings, they changed their minds and flourished! I have two Cherokee purple tomatoes that are five and six flowers each grown into huge healthy beautiful tomatoes! Among many others on the plant, I just love how those do that when they are happy. The rest of my heirlooms flourished as well. Interestingly, the gifted tomatoes didn't do as well. They did not like the shift from whatever they had been fed to my organic regime, with the exception of two, a Roma and another. I think they may have been mislabeled possibly too, the plant I thought were cherry tomatoes ended up being a good pounder so I had to wait longer than I thought. Roma is also a very old heirloom as well though and drooped but recovered and is covered in tomatoes from head to toe now.

It's another hit and run, though we start school next week so I will be back online a bit more. I have two moose quarters hanging in my shed still and my husband had to go back to work today. I'm going to try and surprise him by having half of one of them butchered up when he gets home. Wish me luck.

Oh, on that note though, we had a family we know over on Saturday for a harvest meal! The entire meal was harvested by our own hands within three days. We had moose heart, peas and carrots and a pot of apple pie filling with apples off my friend's tree. Our friends helped us butcher and prepare a beautiful meal. I would love to accomplish that on a more regular basis and it gets a little easier every year. We can feed ourselves beautiful food! True, real, healthy delicious food.

Sorry, double post.

On a side note, since I have the space, we also harvested a bunch of puffballs this weekend! They are happy with this cooler weather and so I got to add a layer of them into each the soup jar and the seasoning jar!

a FYI posting


moringa trees from seed, 2015


I have two moringa plants/young trees in pots and this one in my 'spoils area', outside as the 3rd part of my experimental endeavors

moringa cannot tolerate freezing cold so my SC location is iffy,,,

my outdoor moringa has seed pods, its over 5'9" tall, and today 1 november 2015 I cropped a lot of foliage/leaves/twigs/seed pods to prep the young tree for a plastic enclosure for a makeshift winter green-house

see these pics:


sorry the subject is so lost in the background greenery, but as seen this is my waste-area/spoils-area that is undergoing a cheap landscaping alternative to 'the Lawn'

the lump of greenery at the right of the 'Moringa' is a patch of peanuts, I have several more patches in my grow areas thanks to the local family of squirrels...I will likely dig up the raw peanuts for the squirrels for their winter diet









oh, I noticed ants and black mite looking things on the plant... so I used a power sprayer with mild dish soap to hose off the Moringa... my potted Moringas' have no such problems