Fall Crops

August 31, 2013

I’m still waiting on a flush of peas. We are getting a trickle. Does anyone else get a good pea harvest in the winter or is it just best to wait until spring?

A chicken got out one day and scratched up and ate most of my spinach seeds and half of my carrot seeds. What survived looks good. I can’t wait until we start getting carrots again. I am trying to plant A LOT of carrots and lettuce so we won’t run out again! Speaking of lettuce, we’re having little salads again! LOVE IT!

It was also the plan to plant a ton of kale because we love it but animals or bugs (something) like kale sprouts. As soon as they start looking good, they’re gone! 😦 I need to cover them but I haven’t figured out how to work that out yet.

Remember my broccoli plant that was eaten by cabbage worms?

It, thankfully, has rebounded beautifully. However, two other broccoli plants have been eaten down as well. They seem to be putting on a bit of growth so there’s hope!

A couple of weeks ago, I planted some kale, cabbage, and broccoli and covered them to keep the cabbage moths away. However, I am running out of garden space so part of the cloth was covering spinach seeds…as in, the cloth was on the ground, not allowing the seeds to sprout and grow. I took the cloth off so the spinach seeds could grow (though most did not) so now all of my newest cabbage family plants are uncovered

Maybe one day I’ll have my garden planned out better. Right now, I seem to always be running out of space!

Speaking of running out of space, I prepped a sweet potato patch a number of months ago and was going to leave it alone until Spring, when I plant slips…then I ran out of room. So, I planted a small area with carrots and lettuce (see first pic in post). Then I ran out of MORE room 😛 Yesterday, I planted up the rest of the sweet potato patch with cabbage, broccoli (think I finally covered them correctly), kale, spinach, and carrots. I also gave my daughter some room to grow lettuce, carrots, and peas.

(Just for point of reference, blueberries are to the left, main BTE garden to the right, corn patches in top of photo)

Under the row cover is cabbage and broccoli.

Everything will be out of the patch by the time I need to plant the slips but I will likely need to haul a lot of compost onto the area to prep it for the sweet potatoes.

Even thought the chickens are STILL not laying any eggs, are doing a wonderful job prepping more planting spaces!

The chickens ate down the grass in the tractor. We moved it (you can see the tractor on the left), covered the area with newspaper and mulch. It will be ready to be planted in about a month. Normally, I would say you need to wait longer but I only waited one month with the last chicken-prepped area and everything is doing really well so…

(This is the first chicken tractor-prepped area. From bottom of photo to top: peas, carrots, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, kale, broccoli, more peas, more lettuce & carrots, fall cucumber and one more feeble attempt at zucchini. Each section was planted at a different date (little people kept waking up from naps 😉 )

I hope to move the tractor over the main garden during the winter so the chickens can eat all the bugs that are left and can fertilize the area, prepping it for spring planting. I would also like to move them onto the strawberry patch and potato patch – it’s a lot easier and more effective to move the tractor every month instead of hauling chicken poo all over the place! AND it takes care of all of the baby bugs and hibernating eggs over winter – I know you love my scientific terms but…you know what I mean 😉

By the way, I am finding a lot of rabbit poo in the chicken run so I have been scooping up run compost into a bucket & using it as a planting medium since rabbit manure can be used right away (won’t burn seeds as other fresh manures do). I’ll be needing to collect a lot more soon because come December(ish), I plan on making A LOT of greenhouses and I’ll need a lot of potting soil. Might as well make my own and save my gardening money for something else (like a riding lawn mower or more chickens 🙂 )

How is your fall garden growing? Are you tired of gardening since it’s the end of the summer? Take a look at the Back to Eden method of gardening. When you don’t have to water and barely need to weed, gardening becomes that much more enjoyable!