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| My Garden is About Done This Year October 12, 2007 11:02:38 Right now I still have some tomatoes, green peppers, and okra left in the garden from the summer crops. I have a large patch of volunteer collards growing and have the remnant of an attempt to plant some fall salad crops that amounts to only a few feet of lettuce. The continual heat in July with no rain almost finished everything off. Only mulching and a little water hauled in kept things going. There are probably about 6 feet on leaf lettuce growing that was part of a planting done in the middle of August. I planted spinach, lettuce, radishes, and mixed greens. I watered these to get them to germinate and all of it came up pretty well but the relentless heat in August first burned up the spinach and then most of the rest. The radishes mostly lived but went right to tops and produced very few radishes. We went from mid July to the first of October with practically no measurable rain. In addition to this the temperatures were in the upper 90's and low 100's for a good part of August. Last Sunday, October 7th, it was 91 degrees here. We did have about two inches of rain about a week ago but it is only a start on recovering soil moisture reserves. Today at noon it is only about 55 degrees so maybe the heat is over but I am sure we will have warm days ahead. We had the same scenario last year. A hot dry August and September, a dry fall with a late frost. I did not heat the house to any extent until November. Today I made a fire in the wood stove to take the chill off. Yesterday I placed my three solar panels back on the heat collector on the back porch roof. It blows warm air into the kitchen when the sun shines on it which is not til after noon right now because of trees. Once the trees loose their leaves it will start to warm up in the morning and go all day. The three 15 watt solar panels power a 12 volt dc fan. I will have to take some pictures and write a piece about that unit. For now, we will eat what we can from the garden. I have some garlic bulbs a friend gave me that need to be planted. I have never grown garlic before. It will be interesting to see the result next summer. If the ground stays dry I will probably spread some horse manure on the garden and work it in this fall. I prefer to do that in the fall because horse manure can be kind of hot and it is good to let it break down some before planting. I hope to expand my garden area a little before next spring so that will be something to work on this winter. Comment on this article |