Autumn Odds and Ends

 I am puttering along doing seasonal things.  It is difficult to realize that we are only two weeks away from our average first frost date.  It feels like June!  The plants don't look like June though.  They are tired out.  I took cuttings from my Coleus plants to over winter indoors.  I am also experimenting with Marigold cuttings.  You can root them in water, but I mix up worm castings and vermiculite and use a rooting hormone powder.  I put the cells in a solid tray so I can bottom water them  I had great luck with these last year.  I have turned four Coleus plants into dozens.

Let's take a moment before I pull this Thai Basil plant out to admire its amazing growth habit.  This is Thai Towers.  Last year I grew Emerald Towers.  These two varieties are specifically bred to be slow to bolt.  Both varieties made it through the entire gardening season with no flowers.  Of course when Basil plants flower they begin to taste bitter, and they stop putting out fresh leaves.  This plant is 43 inches tall.

We have started our biggest fall landscaping chore - cutting down ornamental grasses.  We whittle them down to size by looping a rope around them and cutting them off with a Stihl gas powered scythe much like a hedge trimmer.  It makes short work of them.  I have already done all of the Daylilies and Hosta and have started on other plants like Echinacea.  I like to take my time dividing and transplanting and removing things over several weeks, but grasses are a team effort.  Now I have to go through the dry creek bed, cleaning up stray blades of grass and pulling all of the weeds that the grasses have been hiding.

The grasses are showing their fall colors.  Below is Cheyenne Sky Panicum.

Can you guess how delicious this Seascape strawberry was?

Seascape is an everbearing variety that I just planted from bare root plants this past spring.  They are getting well established now and have recently begun blooming again.

Slowly Prepping for Winter

 We are continuing to enjoy perfect summer weather....  If you don't mind dry.  The daytime temperatures are warm with a lot of sunshine and no humidity and the nights are cool.  I only recorded 1.25" of rain in August, and in September we have had one rain totaling just over .25"  I am starting to carry water to some of my favorite shrubs just to keep them alive.  The perennial and annual flowers don't seem to mind the drought.  

A few days ago we fenced the front shrubs off to keep the deer away from them this winter.  The deer have never tried too hard to get to these, but tracks in the snow indicate that they stop by to check them out just about every night.  We usually put woven wire tubes around them, but the shrubs have finally outgrown everything we have made up.  The safety fence was the easiest solution.  You can hardly see it from the road.

I am still getting a few things out of the vegetable garden.  The fact that I almost never watered this Belstar Broccoli all summer did not deter it from trying for a second crop.

This Little Lime Punch Hydrangea bush put out some really nice blooms this year.  I planted it in May 2024 and last year I got a few blooms.  This year it really cranked them out.  The deer ate two blooms under the netting.  These loaded stems will not hold up to snow or wind, so I need to deadhead this before winter.

I decided I may as well enjoy the nicest blooms.  Hydrangea flowers dry very well and hold their color.  These blooms will last for months in the house. I used the opportunity to shape the shrub a little.  I will remove the rest of them later and do a final shaping prune in the spring..

When you cut Hydrangea blooms to dry, you should put them in a little water so the petals do not wilt before they start to dry.  In a few days I will poor the water out of the vase and let them dry slowly.

For now, since the weather is so fine, the bouquet can stay out on the deck.

Success in Succession Planting

 My Clarimore Zucchini plant is finally getting tired.  This plant has pumped out dozens of zucchini.  There are usually two or three getting big on the vine at any one time.  But now you can see that the base leaves are yellowing and there is some powdery mildew specs on the leaves against the ground.

If you look at the growing end of the vine, the new blooms are slowing down and the last one did not get pollinated.  It's time for the plant to come out.

Back in July, after a rainstorm, one of the base leaves wilted and I feared it was a sign of a squash vine borer or some viral disease, so I planted a few seeds in a pot and set it aside and in due course I transplanted that resulting plant to a gallon pot. On August 11, after I had pulled the main crop of cucumbers, I set that plant out in the empty space created.  I have already picked the first zucchini from this plant a week or so ago, and there are two new zucchinis just about ready.

Out with the old - In with the new.

Apple Pie Season

I have been picking up useable windfall apples for several weeks already, but now the Northern Spy apples are starting to ripen by the basket load.  These are hard, tart pie apples that do not keep well at all.  By the time they soften and sweeten enough to be tasty to eat on their own, they are too soft for pies.  And then they get mushy on the outside so that they are impossible to peel anyway.  I have already given away several bags to people who look forward specifically to having the old fashioned and hard to find Northern Spies.

  We have two trees and I bag the apples to keep them from getting Sooty Blotch.  Oddly enough, over the years I have noticed that the unbagged apples show less and less of the blotch to the point that this year I don't really see any at all. I wonder if that is a result of bagging so many of the apples each year.  Have I killed it off?  Starved it out?  Or is it more to do with our dry weather?   I usually bag about 130 apples on this tree but this year I bagged 150.  The cool, wet June meant that I had almost no June drop at all.  The few bagged apples that dropped, I just reused those bags on remaining apples so that I went into harvest with a record 150 bagged apples.

The second tree is rarely as productive.  This year I did not bother to bag any apples on the second tree, but it still produced pretty well.  All of my apples survived two significant hail storms. There are a few scabby spots or mishappen apples.  Lumpy and bumpy.  The bagged apples showed the least damage.

The better tree is underplanted with thyme which cushions any windfall apples well enough that they don't bruise.  But once they start to color up well, I go out each morning and put a little pressure on the ripest looking ones to see if they want to come off.  If I let them all fall, the rabbits will have ruined most of them by the time I get out there in the morning.  This year I thinned and bagged those 150 apples without even getting out a step ladder.  But, there are still good apples high up in the tree.  I put my apple picker head on the 12 foot telescoping handle for our roof rake and now I can reach anything.

I have often weighed in apples over 16 ounces, but the more apples you leave on the tree, the smaller they are.  I still get a few really large ones around 12 to 13 ounces.

I have already run a batch through the dehydrator and made one apple pie.  It looks like I will be processing some of these for pie filling the freezer.

Putting Raised Beds To Bed

 As we are now most of the way through pulling out vegetable plants, I am also prepping the beds for winter.   About half of them had leaf mulch in them already, but some of the heavy producing beds (Sweet Corn, Beans etc) did not have mulch, or in the case of the Beans, relied instead on living mulch in the form of Marigolds or Lettuce.  

My favorite winter cover is shredded leaves, but if you just fill them up with shredded leaves, a good portion of those blow all over in the winter winds.  In the past, we had an Oak tree just to the west of the garden and the west wind would dump almost all of those leaves right inside the fence.  We took that tree down last year and last fall we had a MUCH easier time rounding up fallen leaves in the garden.  But we still use the blowers a little to clean things up so having loose leaves on top of the beds is a bit self defeatist.

So what I do is put down a layer of leaves and then seal it in as best I can with a layer of compost.  The compost pile that I dumped out of the tube in March has been turned throughout the summer to finish it and was ready to sift and use.  At this point most of the worm activity had moved from the compost pile over to the fresh scraps in the compost tube which is verified by the worm juice coming out of the bottom.  These compost tubes function more as a worm farm than a hot compost pile.

There were still a handful of worms left in the bottom of the cold compost pile.  I sifted the compost one day and then loaded it in the wheel barrow to use the next day and found that the worms had taken the hint and relocated overnight.  As you can see, they congregate in the cracks of the pavers.  I wonder if they have a worm highway under there that leads six feet over to the fresh food?

While sifting the cold compost, I found quite a bed of worms red wigglers

There were still a few worms left over mixed in with the compost but they got shoveled into the raised beds where they can feast on leaves and leftover roots all winter.  On a positive note, for the first time in about three years I encountered no Asian Jumping Worms anywhere in my landscape.  I wonder if the constant snow cover helped to kill off the eggs over the winter.  I have never seen them in the raised beds or the compost area, but I was finding them fairly often in the landscape and Dahlia beds,

Autumn Garden Decor

Today we cut the cornstalks out of the raised beds and I made some corn shocks so I could continue to enjoy them.

It is Autumn weather here now.  One of those days where it is bright and sunny one minute and then dramatically stormy looking the next.  The key to keeping a shock of corn standing on a blustery day like today is to drive a T-post or place a shepherd's hook in the middle and tie the stalks around it with garden twine.

I have begun cutting the pumpkin vines and bringing out the pumpkins that have cured.

I still have three similar pumpkins in the garden in the process of turning orange on the vine.

I have also brought out some of my ornamental pepper plants that I grew from seed specifically to bring out in the autumn.

This Black Pearl pepper plant is very dramatic with its deep purple leaves contrasting with the bright green new growth.

It has very shiny black peppers on it that will ripen to bright red.

Black Pearl

I have kept the pepper plants in the garden or on the potting bench where I can enjoy them each day.

I grew three varieties in total.

Hot Pops

Acapulco

The Dahlia beds are looking nice.

Beginning Fall Clean-up

 In the rhythm of the gardening year, you spend two or three months planting and adding things and then two to three months digging up or removing things.  The turning point, for me, is somewhere in late July.  For the last few weeks most of my gardening work has involved deadheading and cutting back and removing the ugly a little at a time, both in the vegetable garden and the general landscape. Now that we are in September, I am also moving things around.  This is the second best time to divide and relocate perennials.  The best time is in April when they are still dormant so they can wake up in their new location.  But there are things that I've looked at now for months and I just can't wait any longer to deal with it.

One of those things is this huge clump of Carex Ice Dance that is right by the steps to our side door.  A few years ago I dug this out and left just a few little plants.  I relocated the bulk of the grass and have divided it since into many other plants.  It took about three years to come back bigger than ever.  This is the location where the vole or field mouse made a nice snug nest under the snow bank and ate off the roots of my favorite Echinacea plants.  I am also digging out an eliminating any "Deerlilies" that are not my favorites.  There are some I am willing to fight for, but others that were just background plantings.  Today I dug out three of those and replaced them with this nice grass that the deer don't eat and which is evergreen so it prefers to be left uncut in the fall.  Low maintenance!  The look of the grass is similar to the lily foliage so you can barely tell that I've changed anything.

These few little whisps of plant left undisturbed will grow next year and fill in.  Every fall we cut back all of our ornamental grasses and daylilies.  The reason for this is if I leave them, they turn into a soggy mess that is difficult to clean up in the spring because the sogginess makes them impossible to cut with any of the tools that I regularly use.  And when you have hundreds of clumps to deal with you can't mess around.  I am already cutting back any dried up or unruly plants.  Every wheelbarrow load that I take out now is one less to deal with on clean-up day.

The Long Awaited Cantaloupe

 Today I picked the first ripe Cantaloupe and it is good.  Not quite as good as last year's, but a lot better than a store bought one.  These are from the seeds I saved from last year's best Cantaloupe.  The ripening date is 10 days later than last year which isn't bad considering that I didn't even transplant these until the middle of June and last year they were volunteers and already rooted in sometime in late May.  I cut it up and put it in the fridge so I can have it for breakfast in the morning.  They are always better chilled.  I have another dozen of similar size (small) out there ripening.  Not bad for six vines.

Yesterday I picked the first of the Chelsea Prize English Cucumbers.  They are not growing very long, but this one was good.  Very crisp.  The variety is Parthenocarpic which means it will produce fruit without pollination.  That actually makes it perfect for this late in the season because since the nights started to get cold there have been few pollinators in the garden.  All of the buzzy things are spending their days in the compost tube where it is warm and they can feast on sweet kitchen scraps.

The vines look deplorable but they are producing and that is what matters.

Last of the Sweet Corn

 Today I picked the last of our Sweet Corn.  Out of two raised beds, 50 stalks each, we have been eating Sweet Corn for three weeks.  That's pretty good.  We've shared with the neighbors, and frozen for winter and had as much as we wanted to eat.  I planted Solstice and Gotta Have It.  Solstice is a 70 day corn, and Gotta Have it is a 78 day corn and I planted them a week apart.  The Solstice produced 40 ears and the other produced 50.

This week I got tired of one of my Dwarf tomatoes spreading blight so I hacked it out.  It was the Kookaburra Cackle which wasn't a bad tomato but both plants picked up blight early on and spread it to the Adelaide and the Summertime Gold and those plants resisted quite well so I don't think they would have had a problem on their own.  Kookaburra was also dropping green tomatoes left and right.  I have plenty of tomatoes without having to deal with that sort of hassle  

I then removed all of the diseased leaves off of the remaining plants.  Just look what heavy producers these plants are.  I have already picked half a dozen or more off each one.

Adelaide Festival

Summertime Gold

Because I removed so much foliage, I threw a 30% shade cloth over them so they wouldn't sun scald.

They will be just fine like this for the remainder of the season.  I am getting some really gorgeous slicing tomatoes out of the other bed with almost no blight or disease problems at all.

Clockwise from upper left:  Pike Co, Barlow, another Pike Co. Carbon and another Barlow

Tonight I made a jar of my sweet/hot pickled peppers.

Instructions in this past Blog: Of Pickled Peppers

Autumn Morning Sun

 

Even Funny-Bunny was enjoying it