Starting our fall garden

 It's official. Our fall garden is underway. We now have collards, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, some leftover cucumbers and peppers and plenty of room to plant more. We still need to mulch but we were pretty weary after getting all this done.

It wasn't the most perfect summer for a garden and I have decided not to spend any time bemoaning the fact that we didn't have the most wonderful garden ever. I know that in the true spirit of farming you just have to move on to the next season. Droughts hit everyone pretty hard.

Much of the time was spent clearing things out and tilling under the vegetation that was left.

The pole from the beans need to be cleaned off and stored for next year.

The tomato and pepper cages can be stored in the shed.

My husband manned the tiller and it took awhile to get things ready.

We left some late cucumbers and the fence. They are growing pretty slowly. I was surprised they survived the last couple of weeks because the weather was so dry. In early spring, we will plant pea pods and let them run up the fence. It would be nice to utilize it while it is up. I am not sure we will have fall cucumbers but we had the seed back in August so we really weren't out anything but labor.

My job was to buy the plants. We would normally have waited a bit to buy plants but I was concerned that if I waited they will all be gone. That has happened to me before. At least the nights are cooler and since the stores have the plants, it must be the right time for them. I purchased a tray of collard plants, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and some cabbage.

I thought I had a half tray of broccoli but it was actually cabbage. I certainly didn't need that much cabbage. I guess I picked up the wrong tray at the store and had way too much cabbage and no broccoli. Luckily they have a return policy. Whew! I was so worried about my mistake. We now have broccoli plants and we will have broccoli in the ground by tomorrow.

The main thing we wanted to do for our spring planting was to till in some lime. It won't help right now but when spring rolls around, the pH level of the soil will be sweetened.

 

We decided to also treat for grubs. Milky Spore is a natural way to get rid of them. I would love to take care of those awful Japanese beetles. I hope this helps.

After putting out lime and milky spore it looked like this. We all looked like we had been dusted with cake flour when we were finished. The wind was blowing up small lime whirlwinds until we tilled it under.

Then it was ready ...

For our plants, heavily laced with Moo-nure and watered liberally. The photo at the top is the way it looks now -- a very good start.