October 31, 2008 • 1:03 pm 11
A repeating effort to point out the odder ways that people find my silly little blog.
10/30/08: Search term “where do egg shells come from”
For those of you using this search term to find my blog, I’d like to provide a definitive answer to your question:
Egg shells come from eggs.
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 30, 2008 • 9:21 pm 5
Live each season as it passes; breather the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit and resign yourself to the influences of each. – Thoreau
There’s really no getting around it. The signs are all there.
Dead plants. Wrinkled fruits, castoffs, blending into the leaves. Next year’s volunteers.
Cold temperatures. Chimney smoke. Hats and gloves.
Summer is over.
I’m a bit of a sourpuss. A real downer. A pessimist. And I am best summed up I think by a portion of a poem that I heard somewhere once and don’t know who wrote it:
Today is the first day of spring… I can’t help but think of the last day of autumn.
Hope springs eternal except that I eternally expect winter. And, indeed, winter is coming.
The garden this year was again a fantastic part of all of our lives. I think back to digging it out, tilling it, fencing it. I remember a beautiful spring saturday when my two sons and I took a ride out to an old mill that’s been selling seeds and plants for decades. We had ice cream together and Kyle helped push Sean in his stroller and made him laugh over and over.
Even further back. I remember sketching the first plans for expansion on graph paper last December. I remember ordering seeds. Starting them. Killing them! Starting them again. Hardening off. Predicting the last frost. Harvesting. Cooking.
Writing. Reading.
I am certain that I am not endlessly fascinating, but it’s been awfully fun to blog all of this. Even when the tomatoes died and a little piece of me went with them, it felt good to write about it.
So, this season is over. I’ve got a few more blogs to do about some of our final harvests, but… it’s over. Self indulgence time. Here are the posts I most enjoyed this season for one reason or another. I hope that you liked them too!
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 21, 2008 • 9:18 pm 6
August around here is hot.
October around here is not.
The late crop of peas went in around 8/23 and the carouby de maussanne have given me some nice snow peas in the past couple of weeks. My beloved cascadia peas.. well, they’re just getting around to beloving me. And the frosty freezey nights (jealous, jealous! jealous of my love for cascadia peas) are frosty freezing the life right out of them. The peas can take it a bit, but not too much. We’ll see. I’d like just a few of the lovely cascadia flowers (white like a bride!) to produce before they suck their last bit of nitrogen from the air. We’ll see.
The frost is kissing the peppers too. Hearty, healthy soldiers these peppers. Real peppery troopers! The surprise of the season for me has been these guys. A steady stream of peppers and the cold has finally beaten them down, but their color remains defiant. Given that I’ll be skipping tomatoes next year to let the blight go blye blye, perhaps I’ll fill those beds with peppers. It’s the most popular vegetable in my house.. even the baby likes them.
I do like the symmetry of this season. Starts with peas and cold nights. Ends with peas and cold nights. Peas (and peppers) please me. Still.
Filed under: Uncategorized , frost, planting peas
October 19, 2008 • 5:48 pm 9
The cool thing about cool weather is that there is some stuff you can still get in the ground and get a jump on spring. In my Connecticut zone, you can get some great early garlic (June) by planting a crop in the fall.
Now.. the secret to good fall garlic planting?
Timing.
And in my case I may have blown it, but we’ll see. I’ve got myself a resilient, feisty garlic type (russian red.. spicy and delicious) and I think it’s going to be okay. But.. tonight… the frost comes. The trick to garlic timing is that you want to get it in the ground and give it some time to settle in a bit, but you don’t want it to be so warm that the garlic starts to grow. Some roots.. sure. That’s fine. But the start of a neck? Probably bad.
Ideally I would have gotten these guys in the dirt maybe a week or two ago, but my beds are raised and should be okay through this freeze/frost. We’ll see.
Here’s how you do it.
Filed under: Uncategorized , garlic in the fall, how to plant garlic, planting garlic, russian red garlic
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