To Do In The Garden; October 27, 2009

I have a few garden chores I've been putting off; I need to get to them as they'll only loom larger as the weather gets colder and (more importantly) wetter.

1. Pull out remaining warm weather crops: pole beans, zucchini, corn stalks, sunflowers, tomatoes.
2. Clean trellises and store in a dry place.
3. Clean the greenhouses (I need to research a little bit about greenhouses first; I'm tending to think I want to disinfect them.)
4. Weeding and general garden clean-up. This will be ongoing until the leaves are off all the maples.
5. Gather my mulch. I'm not sure I'll need mulch for my winter crops, but I want some shredded leaves ready and handy if I do. I need to enlist my husband's help for this.

Goal for today is to pull out the beans, corn and zucchini. Unless it rains, in which case I'll pull out the tomatoes and work in the greenhouse.

I also need to decide what to do about my pepper plants. Even with the low temps we've been having, my hothouse peppers are still setting fruit. To heat or not to heat?

First Frost; October 25, 2009

We awoke to a light frost this morning. A bit late; in our location near Woodinville, Washington, we usually see frost before the end of September.

I wanted to verify that so I turned to the Sunset magazine website; their gardening maps provide a much greater level of detail than that available from the USDA but the information I found left me shaking my head and wondering if perhaps their weather data had been gathered in an alternate reality.

It's a bit hard to tell exactly which zone we'd fall into here because the map can't be enlarged quite enough, but I'm saying Zone 4-1/2. If memory serves me, the "growing season" (obviously some stuff grows all year - dandelions, for example) for my garden microclimate is mid-April through about the third week of September for summer crops such as beans or tomatoes.

My confusion underscores the need to keep accurate records. Not that I've ever followed that advice. I tend to be a rather haphazard gardener but I'm trying to change. So...if any of you have stumbled across a good method of journaling your garden info, I'd love to hear it.

Now my winter gardening begins in earnest.

Breezy With A Chance Of Leaf Flurries

I wouldn't say that bigleaf maples provide spectacular fall color - unless your favorite fall color is yellow - but what they lack in hue, they make up for in quantity. One of my favorite things about fall it watching the multitude of maple leaves swirl through the air on their journey to the ground.

I've heard that a mature bigleaf maple can have a 250,000 leaves; we have 15 of them in our yard so I have plenty of opportunities for leaf watching.

Cabbage Loopers

I defy you to justify the existence of the cabbage looper.

We had an unusually hot summer in Western Washington this year and I fervently hope that is the explanation for the unusually large number of these little beggars in my garden, at least compared to any of my previous gardens. I've never had a garden suffer so much damage as I had this year.

Virtually 100 per cent of the damage was caused by cabbage loopers.* If someone had asked me six months ago to pick up a wiggly, green caterpiller in my ungloved hand, much less smash it between my fingers, I'd have told them to take a hike, yet that's exactly what I found myself doing in my frenzy to rid my garden of these destructive pests.

How destructive are they? The damage on this cauliflower leaf was caused overnight by a single cabbage looper! Since I was committed to a pesticide-free garden, hand-picking was my primary weapon, aided by a surprisingly effective spray of diluted Johnson's Baby Shampoo. Yes, it kills insects. Yes, people put it on their babies. But who am I to judge.

I picked hundreds of these pests off my kale, broccoli, cauliflower and Chinese mustard, but my lettuce wasn't immune to damage, especially the green oak leaf lettuce. My Red Sails leaf lettuce suffered very little damage and Flashy Trout's Back Romaine none at all.

I sincerely hope that a return our normal summer weather will translate into fewer cabbage loopers but I am not going to take any chances. My mantra for next summer? Floating row covers.

*Surprisingly, slugs were a non-issue during our hot summer, although slug damage is picking up now that the weather has cooled off.

Garden Helpers

The good gardener labors tirelessly in her garden, battling the elements to produce a good crop. The smart gardener uses all the technological means at her disposal to achieve the same. But the wise gardener is willing to take help wherever she can get it. Even from spiders.

We had a bumper year for pests in the garden, meaning it was also a bumper year for garden spiders. I took to carrying around a stick as I walked down my garden paths in order to knock down the many webs. This being a more pleasant option than knocking them down with my face. Even though I detest spiders, I welcome their presence in the garden, knowing that they're my staunch allies in the battle against the bugs.

Sometimes your helpers aren't home when you come knocking. I can't say that I'm exactly sad when that happens. Empty spider webs are much more fascinating to me than spiders.

Sometimes, though, even I can make an exception. I apologize for the quality of the video; it was taken with my iPhone. Most of the jiggling happened when the wind blew the spider in my direction and I had to leap backwards, lest the spider infringe into my personal "spider safety zone."

The other garden helpers that established a noticeable presence in my garden this year were tree frogs, like this adorable fellow, hiding amongst the cucumber vines. I love these little guys and only wish I knew how to attract more to my garden.

One helper that was noticeably absent from my garden was ladybird beetles and I'm not sure why. I may resort to importing a supply next summer should they once again choose to boycott my garden.

First Lessons Of Winter Gardening

One of the things that I've already learned about winter gardening is that things grow much more slowly in cooler weather. Of course I knew that, but failed to apply it when planning my winter garden. Actually, "planning" might be an overstatement. Let me backtrack a bit.

I got my dream garden this year. We started by taking down 12 mature fir, hemlock and big leaf maples. This is what the northwest corner of our back yard looked like at 8:00 a.m. on April 21st, 2009.

At 2:00 that afternoon, the back yard looked like a war zone and that was only the beginning. After the trees came down, the bulldozer came in to pull out the stumps, clear the debris, smooth out the large hump in the foreground of the photo, grade it to a gentle slope and add a gravel driveway and building pad. By the time all was said and done it was late May and time to start work on the garden.

My garden consists of nine raised beds 16' x 4' x 11" and two greenhouses, 6' by 8'. We started construction of the first greenhouse on May 22nd, then constructed the nine raised beds. The second greenhouse was completed on June 29th.

This is the super long way of saying that I got rather a late start on my planting, even though, as you can see in the photo, I started planting before all the construction was complete. The late start set me back for the rest of the season and, since I felt like I was rushing to play catch up, planning got pushed to a back burner. Which brings me back to where I started...

While I have lettuce, spinach, kale and other greens established in the garden, their slow growth means that I'm using them faster than they can replenish themselves. On top of that, most of the lettuce is "well" established; too well established, actually, and is starting to bolt. What's up with that, anyway? I thought lettuce only bolted in hot weather but this lettuce, that weathered our unusual 100 degree days, is bolting now.

Still trying to play catch up, today I seeded nine square feet of raised bed with Red Sails leaf lettuce, Flashy Trout's Back Romaine lettuce, Tyee hybrid spinach, Chinese mustard, blue kale, corn salad and Cherry Belle radishes. These will be growing in cold frames.

I also started two 1-gallon containers each of blue kale, Chinese mustard and Flashy Trout's Back lettuce in the greenhouse about three weeks ago. All have germinated but progress is slow.

All this makes me think that NOW is not too soon to begin planning for next spring.

Welcome To My Garden

And welcome to The Notes That Follow Sow, where I'll be sharing my garden adventures. This may seem like an unconventional time to launch a gardening blog; October is generally a time for garden endings rather than beginnings but, hey! I've been called worse things than unconventional.

Most of my yard is generally put to rest by mid-October, but I have a lovely new vegetable garden that I'm trying to keep in partial production over the winter for cold-tolerant crops and using cold frames and a greenhouse. I don't have a lot of experience as a vegetable gardener in general and none as a winter gardener so this first year should be a real learning experience. Hopefully that's as opposed to a complete disaster.

Check back often (or better yet, subscribe!). I'm going to be posting frequently on my successes and (God forbid) failures and filling in here and there with belated news from my summer garden. I love comments and if you have question, please ask and I'll answer them if I can.

So thank you for visiting my new blog. I'm looking forward to getting to know you.