Fall Chores




Beans, peppers, marigolds
 (dead cucumber and squash vines not shown thankfully)

 

The season is wrapping up, there's not too much left in the garden anymore, and winter is not too far off. Luckily, after a week of just awful cold, cloudy, and wet weather we've had the nicest, sunniest and clear couple of days and I've been making the most of it. Unintentionally and  due to these conditions, mainly caused by high pressure in the area, it's been a little cold and there have been light frosts the past  couple of days. However, I still have eggplants, peppers, and beans growing and they've been doing pretty well with the night covering I've been giving them.



The eggplant patch (what's left of it)





Still flowering



Meanwhile, I've also been working on a few other projects. In particular, I've improved the compost bin/system and now it is in fact more than just a pile of stuff on the ground. I mainly just turned it over, pulled out some tree roots that are never gonna break down in this century and mixed in some of the adjacent stuff that I had just piled there this summer. After that I encircled the whole thing with one of my green chicken wire-like fences so I will be able to pile in more stuff. Which was actually my original intent. Between the heavy, wet, and clay soil on the one side of the yard and the dry sandy and hard soil on the other, I could really use some compost and organic materials to balance them out. Thankfully, it is Fall in the Northeast and the lawn is both long and covered in leaves. So this week my biggest job has been the collecting these valuable(to me at least) materials.



Doesn't look too hot but eh gets the job done.



And this is where the story of me and the lawnmower begins. As you are probably aware, the mulching bag of a lawnmower does not actually hold that much especially in terms of leafy material. Sure, it can hold the contents of at least one moderately long lawn, maybe if your yard is small, the back and front lawns. But when the lawn is actually very long and you have procrastinated due to the weather about mowing up the leaves, you can end up making quite a few trips to empty the bag.

I swear I must have emptied that stupid bag every two or three passes, on the really leaf-covered parts it was more like one and a half. So here I was turning on and turning off the mower every two seconds, lugging the bag to and from the new compost pile and returning only to start over again in a second. There's no way the on/off, on/off sound of the mower couldn't have attracted the neighbors to their windows and I'm sure there was more than one curious face. I was kind of expecting some patriarch of the neighborhood to come over and tell me I'm doing it all wrong, "See son, yer doin that all wrong, whatcha need here is a mulcher, a mulcher, I tell ye. This here's a craftsman i'nitt, you musta got one o' them intcha?"

However, what someone might fall to understand, and it's really pretty understandable since many people just aren't gardeners, is that you can really use this stuff. It's so good for your soil, plants, and yard. Why rake them and leave them for the village to suck up with the giant vacuum cleaner thing when you can use them yourself? I don't know if anyone told you but its literally raining fertilizer here.

And so yes while I may complain and feel like a weirdo for spending so much time mowing them up, I'll be out there again soon collecting away. There's no way I'm not gonna take advantage of this autumn gift. And I definitely have been as you can see in the picture above and in the other subject of this post: the new bed I put in and the improvement I've been working towards in the other ones.



Not a great picture but that's with the compost dug in.



As our yard is not very big and there are a lot of trees and obstacles for growing like lack of light and patios and other stuff I really have to capitalize on available space. I don't really have the ability or inclination to grow in the conventional big plot, straight rows, and the reliance on aids and power tools that are required to sustain that. I honestly have to and really enjoy mixing plants together and growing in a biologically diverse system. Most of the varieties I look for are different and have some sort of a value outside of simply yield and appearance. Growing them together is honestly a lot smarter too there's less of a risk of pests just destroying the entire crop and plants really benefit each other in symbiotic relationships. Biodiversity is a great way to go especially for people like me with too little space.

However, I'm working on finding places to expand and I've found one potential new bed and last week I worked on getting the turf ripped up, a border in place and the soil dug deep. This week besides just putting the leaf/grass mix in the compost bin, I threw some in all the beds including this one to be worked in later. Next year this will most likely be greens of some kind in the early spring and then peppers over the summer. This gets a lot of sun all year long and has as close to full southern exposure as you'll find in our garden. Due to this and being right next to the house it's pretty sheltered and gets pretty hot and the house and stones right near it should radiate the heat pretty well at night. That's the theory anyways.



Again, not a great photo but that's the new bed and I'm proud of it.


In other news, we've been making a lot of salsa recently, my dad's gotten really into it and it's really amazing stuff. Due to this though we've been making pretty consistent trips to the market and besides just getting salsa ingredients we've picked up some pretty cool stuff that I've since saved seeds from. The Striped Cavern tomatoes were pretty cool and really delicious. They're hollow(a genetic trait) which is pretty different and made some pretty awesome stuffed tomatoes. They could really make for some interesting crosses next year. Also, while the squash I grew this year was a bust (the variety was Red Kuri) I like to grow them as they're so interesting and make for a great green mulch. We picked up a green cushaw squash and while its not as popular up here in central ny, it's a classic american heirloom from the south. I plan on growing that next year and since its supposed to be a very vigorous and large squash, I should have plenty of green mulch to work with lol. One other thing we found that was really cool and very delicious in both taste and aroma were these really cool variety of purple peppers. It was different than other purple peppers I've seen, like a jalapeno but pointier and more conical, less rounded features than a jalapeno. I've seen other purple pepper varieties, the NuMex pepper varieties have great colors but I've read a lot of poor reviews and they seem a lot more like ornamental variety than one for the vegetable patch. There seems to be a bunch of purple bell peppers and a few other varieties that change to purple before changing to red or another final color. There is a pepper variety I know of called Pimenta de Neyde from Brazil that ripens to a final color of purple with a white inside flesh along with purple leaves, stems, and flowers but seems to have a bad taste. Which in of itself is really pointless. If it tastes bad why grow it? But for breeding that could be really interesting. Anyways this one has red flesh, was really delicious, beautiful, and I think it is Peruvian Purple. Or at least that's what I think the farmer dude mumbled. I looked it up on TheChileMan and while they sound and look similar, the pods seems kinda chunky to be born upright. Not that it matters anyways, we'll just have to find out next season. I look forward to it.




Striped Cavern tomato

 



Two tomatoes fused together, this happens when a flower has 2 pistils in one flower.
 This sorta thing seems much more common in heirlooms, part of why they're so interesting.

 


The purple pepper I was talking about, possibly Peruvian Purple



Speaking of next year, I'll be working towards planning for next years garden and hope to get a lot of that on here as it becomes clearer and closer. I have a bunch of other posts in mind, I hope to get them up soon.