The Garden Part the Last -- October 18, 2009

This will be the final garden blog of the year, and that's a little regretful. It means that fall is in full swing, winter won't be far away (in fact we had snow here last week -- and that's NOT funny), and before you know it I'll be planning out next year's garden. But in fact, next year's garden has already begun. Before getting to that, let's take one last look at how we ended up.

Tomatoes.

The tomatoes are done, for all intents and purposes. While I think we did have a frost the other night, it wasn't a hard one by any means. There's still plenty of tomatoes on the vines, so I'm going to leave them up until they totally die off. But I doubt there will be enough sunlight/heat to actually get them to ripen. I could always pick them and let them ripen in the house, but most are really small anyway, so I'm apt to just let them go. I was a little disappointed with the tomatoes this year. The Roma/Plum plants just didn't produce a huge number of tomatoes. While the Juliet and Brandywine plants that Roy gave me did produce a good amount, those were the ones I was interested in the least. Next year it might just be all Roma/Plum, and leave the rest out.

Peppers.

The peppers, like the tomatoes, still haven't died off, and I have a lot of peppers still on the vine, so I'm hoping they'll get a bit bigger and stave off death for a little while longer. I still don't think they get enough sunlight, as I got several blossoms but didn't get many good peppers from them. Not sure what I'm going to do about this next year...maybe a smaller number, and do some research on what I can do to get a better yield.

That's all that's left now, as the squash is long gone to the composter. But it was time to move on to my next project -- planting garlic. Garlic requires a fall planting; it will winter over and then blossom in the spring, with garlic bulbs ready in the summer. I decided I'd plant them in the squash/potato bed, which yesterday morning looked neglected and forlorn.

The soon-to-be bed of garlic.

As you can tell from the photo, because of all the mounding I had to do with the potatoes I have a ton of extra soil in there. So first I had to dig all the extra loam out and move it. I also got as many of the weeds that have been growing in it as I could, as weeds have a very strong tendency to fight for nutrients with garlic. Once that was done, it was time to take stock of the garlic I had bought from Russell's a few weeks ago.

My garlic, ready to sow.

I got some variety of hardneck garlic, no idea what it actually is. Most of the cloves were big, and I determined that with 48 cloves I could easily fit them all in the bed. So I set about making 4 rows, hoeing a trench about 2-4 inches deep. I then took some compost from the composter and spread it in the soil as well.

Ready to plant.

This method was recommended to me by Lynn, who had a really good crop this summer, so she must know what she's doing. I then planted the garlic, spacing it about 6-8 inches apart (photo not available). Then I covered it up with about 2 inches of soil, then blanketed the entire bed in a mulch of leaves and grass clippings from my last mowing of the year.

Bed all mulched for the winter.

Lynn has suggested I cover up the leaves with some pine boughs, to make sure it doesn't all blow away, but I don't have any laying around. Either way, it's pouring today, and I figure by next week we'll have a foot of snow on the ground that will keep the leaves in place anyway, so I should be all set.

And that's it. Once the frost kills off the pepper and tomato plants I'll be digging those up. (But not composting them. It seems that my tomatoes and peppers have had some weird black blight that I'm told you don't want in your compost, so I'll be sending those to the street in the annual Natick lawn waste pickup.) Then it'll be a long winter before I get the beds ready for the spring. Next year I hope to get it going earlier than this year, by warming up the beds with black tarp to heat up the soil. Hopefully with a few extra weeks I'll have better luck with the tomotoes and peppers. See you in the spring!