Fall Gardening

For the most part the summer vegetables are starting to slacken off. We’ll be lucky to get a few more squash and maybe a handful of cucumbers. The eggplants keep coming and there are more bell peppers this year than last year, but they’ll both be winding down. We’re moving into the calm period between harvests. The fall crops won’t be ready for a little while. In the mean time we’ll eat up what we can and start eating up all the basil. Sue makes a mean pesto and we’re likely to have a lot of it in the freezer for eating this winter.

The cantaloupe are doing very well. We are two fruits that are growing perceptively larger each day. I can’t wait to slice one open. I saw a lot of small fruits on the vine, but haven’t see anything other than these two take off. My fingers are crossed.

For winter crops we have some Chinese cabbage/bok choy, cauliflower, Swiss chard (both transplants and from seed), regular ole cabbage and various lettuces. I’m hoping to put down some of the bok choy seeds I harvested last month when all of plants bolted. It’s cool enough for them to grow properly now. The hyacinth beans are growing and some other Chinese squash is growing (from seed). There are also some si gua plants, but we’re not likely to get anything from them since they were planted too late. Sue planted more chive seeds and they are doing well.

Lastly, our butternut squash plant has started to really take off. It was large to start with, but yellow and not great looking. In the past two weeks to became nicely greened and is showing lots of new growth. I expect it to do just fine.

Now is time to plan out next year’s garden. We learned some lessons this year and I’m looking to do things quite a bit different next year. We are definitely doing lots of eggplant, cucumber, squash and bell peppers; however, we are going to do tomato from seeds. We’ll be choosing disease resistant varieties. I’m also going to try a different trestling system for the cucumbers and tomatoes. The cages and stakes don’t work well for tomatoes and the cucumbers are just too limited on the thing I built last year. Next year we’ll have something up to 6 feet tall for them to grow on.


2 Responses to “Fall Gardening”

  1. jessie Says:
    August 22nd, 2009 at 6:33 am

    we have a friend who had one of those old style clothes line setups, one t-bar at each end of the garden. he double-strung some clothes line, really tight across. then he had the tomatoes tied to that as they got big enough, and some of the vinier stuff tied up there. it worked out fantastically. one of the neatest gardens i had ever seen, with plenty of room to walk between rows, yet in a very small space.

  2. Shaun Says:
    August 24th, 2009 at 9:32 pm

    My coworker’s neighbor has taken that idea to the extreme. 12+ feet of heavy duty bars driven into the ground and then set in concrete giving him about 8 feet of height. He has the sides staked down to the ground and lines run between the poles using stainless steel cable. It’s all very elaborate, but he is a retired engineer and has the time and know how to make something exotic for growing tomatoes. I saw a video online showing how to use tall stakes (I found 7 footers at HD), wire and some nice plant clips to trestle the tomatoes. It’s supposed to produce the most fruit from each plant. I’m looking forward to a lot of fruit and easier to maintain plants.