I have a love/hate relationship with this time of year. The cool, crisp mornings make for the perfect temperature in which to enjoy tea on the back porch, easy sleeping throughout the night and more comfortable days without air conditioning (I work in a historic, adobe building). Such temperatures also mean, however, that the garden is beginning to take on the slightest of browning patterns and veggies begin to finish up their cycles. This means crunch time…lots of harvesting, eating and putting up…which is fun (and yes, rewarding), but also exhausting and a bit sad. The cooler temperatures also mark the beginning of Clean Up time…pulling it all out, cleaning it all up and prepping everything (as much as possible) for the winter ahead. I have to say, this is my least favorite part about this whole gardening thing.
This brings me (yes, finally) the point of this post. But first…I think we have a new word, my friends! Cornage. It’s kind of like carnage, but when there’s corn involved 😉 Well, at least, that’s what Fish Girl coined it when she walked into the back yard a couple of weeks ago and saw all the corn we’d pulled covering our back porch!
With all of the corn being harvested over the past couple of weeks (remarkably, a little late and a little tough, but fine enough for canning up some creamed corn), it was time to clean up the two beds that had housed that corn for the last few months.
The first bed, in the front yard, was simply ripped out, save for the Mystery Melon and that’s doing pretty good in there but won’t be ready for harvesting for a while. Everything else is gone though. In it’s place is buckwheat, a cover crop, that we’ll let do it’s thing throughout the fall. We’ve decided against planting out this bed (and it’s neighbor) to over-winter veggies this year since we’ve planted this bed continuously for the past two years. Even though we’ve practiced crop rotation, we decided it deserved a rest.
The second bed (pictured above), is part of all the news beds we built this past spring in the backyard and was planted bio-intensively this summer with sweet corn, bush beans and beets. We pulled the corn and beans and have left the beets to size up a bit more. We will turn this bed into a hoop house in the fall and cross our fingers that things will actually grow.
Since the beets were already in there, I did some very strategic planting around the beets in order to maximize our yield…eventually and in theory 😉 Into this bed has gone:
- American Spinach
- Bloomsdale Spinach
- Kale
- Easter Egg Radishes
- Pac Choy
- Turnips
- Rainbow Chard
- Parisienne Carrots
You guys keep me inspired and motivated, and thank you so much for the steady stream of tips and great ideas! I’m about to start setting up my vertical pallet beds.
Forgive me for the too-long comment, but I’ve just got to tell this story after reading the above comment about the mess:
Last winter I salvaged a Christmas tree that someone had dumped at the curb and it sat for over a month without ever been hauled away, and I took it round to the back parking area behind our duplex where our compost bin is, intending to strip the needles off the branches and add them to our compost since we have such alkaline soil here in L.A. Well, the tree was quite a bit larger than I realized (what was my first clue — how huge and heavy it was when I dragged it across the street and up our steep driveway??), and so there it sat. And sat. And sat. Every few months I have a go at it and cut off a pile of branches and sit out in the withering sun stripping them, and have so far denuded about a scant 30% of it. Well, by this point (after the big garden operation we just did yesterday), that dead, dried-out fir tree has been joined by three banana trees I have taken out over the past several months and a large pile of banana leaves that I have every intention of cutting up and composting, but I’d better get cracking and get it done before it starts to rain. Talk about a mess! Our landlord even commented about it the other day….
At least now the front garden is almost completely cleared out, and I am really looking forward to completely re-strategizing it and getting my cool weather plants in (salad greens, spinach [I’ve been planting Palco hybrid that has done very well in shade and our warm winters], mache, carrots, beets, chard, kale, bok choi, and I’ll try broccoli & cabbage again, but have pretty much given up on cauliflower since it apparently doesn’t get cold enough here to form heads, and I bought all these seeds for lovely, multi-coloured heirloom varieties 🙁 We’re still baking out here in the Mother of All Concrete Jungles, but it’s not too early to mobilize the fall garden plans 🙂
Oh man…I hate it when all the intentions in the world are kicked around by life and what has to actually happen (you know…work, food, sleep…)! Glad to hear you’ve gotten the front almost done, though! Do you ever feel like you’re chasing yourself around your house and yard? you know, start a project, complete it, start another, complete it, start yet another, complete it…it really is like a cycle and if you’re paying attention and working to improve things, the cycle never really ends! 🙂 Anyhow, your fall garden sounds like it will be wonderful!!!
“Do you ever feel like you’re chasing yourself around your house and yard?” ROFL!!! That’s the story of my life!!! And the GUILT of all those partially finished projects lying around and my tool box being a permanent resident of the living room and my painting stuff piled up in the office, and then when I’m concentrating on completing one project, several other things are going to bits in the meantime….
Thanks to this post of yours, I did have another go at the composting mess yesterday and made some good headway. Now there’s only about the top 25% of that fir tree and about 2.25 banana tree stalks left to reduce since I dealt with all the leaves. There is now a big clean spot on the concrete by the compost bin where the worst of the mess used to be 😀
Great post. We’re not much different here. you’re ahead of us. We’ve “pulled it out”. But we’ve not “cleaned it up”. We’ve pulled the corn, some barren tomato plants, and some unhappy radishes, but we haven’t cleaned them up! The corn lay in a pile against the garden fence. The tomatoes plants are all wound up inside their cages in an ugly pile, and the radishes are in a jumbled mess on the driveway where our car should be parked. Oh, yea, we’ve got lettuce into the ground this weekend. If that doesn’t happen, then we won’t have fall greens for dinner.
Did I just rant? Sorry…
I do like the intensive gardening approach you’re taking with the beet bed. We’re like that too. You know; if there’s dirt, then plant something in it. you can always thin it later!
Ha! We do that, too! More often than not, actually! Life as a way of getting in the way of doing the things we don’t want to do 🙂 It’s so much more enjoyable to plant and harvest than to clean up what’s left at the end of the season!
Ooh, you reminded me to plant my cold weather stuff. Thanks! I love the cool crispness of the morning.
It’s amazing to me how quickly the season is changing! Enjoy your planting!