No, these aren’t our pumpkins. But these are:

I went to visit my uncle’s farm last weekend. They are having a big fall event with tons of pumpkins, gourds, indian corn, hay rides, and more. We helped out some in preparation for the big kick-off.

Relating back to our garden, I brought back a truck full of manure from the farm. It’s still sitting in the back of the truck, and I don’t know how happy the neighbors are going to be when we spread it on! A truck load isn’t really that much, and ideally I’d like to get two or three more before next spring. A neighbor of ours knows someone who has sheep, and so this spring we’re going to go out there to get some sheep manure. Supposedly, that’s the best you can get – it decomposes really quickly, and it makes for a great fertilizer.

There’s a chance of the red dropping below zero tonight (I mean – 32ºF), so we raided the garden. Lots and lots and lots of cayennes! There were a bunch of eggplants that aren’t very big, but together they amount to something. We picked up a bunch of apples from various Farmers Markets, and I’m in the process of making a green tomato/apple chutney right now. I’m going to can it, and Chris and I will enjoy it all winter. I doubt that any of my family members will be interested in chutney – they’re the “milder” type.

I’m heading out of town this weekend to visit my family, and I hope to bring back a truck full of manure from my uncle’s hobby farm. He said that I’ll have to go and collect it (no compost pile, I guess), but I hope that will help out the garden a lot. Then, next spring we hope to hook up with a sheep farmer in town to get another giant supply. I think our main problem (aside from the lack of sun because we’re in town and have trees) is just that our soil doesn’t have enough nutrients in it – adding some manure should definitely help out.

We have a lot of cayenne peppers! We will probably dry most of them, and maybe pickle a few. Our Purira chiles are starting to turn rainbow colors (I would have posted a picture, but we picked all of the orange/red ones before I took pictures, and I’ve already put them in a spaghetti sauce!). Also, we learned that if the Czechoslovokian Black peppers just stay on the plant, they get red and spicier! I added a few of those to the sauce as well.

The chiles seem to have done fairly well this year, even planted so closely together. With our tendancy to eat spicy things (especially Chris), I think that next year we may need to add a couple more plants. Probably not the Czechs, but definitely the cayennes, puriras, and maybe some other neat varieties.

The tomatoes are starting to die off. We had a couple of cold nights, just under 40º F, which the tomatoes definitely did not like. We pulled off a bunch of yellowing leaves today, and some entire plants may need to go soon. I’m actually excited about making some fried green tomatoes with curry and possibly even a green tomato pie! (I’ve heard that my dad likes green tomato pies, so I better start looking for good recipes!)

Chris planted some kale in the front yard today. We have a lot of new little areas with seedlings – I hope they mature before it gets too cold! Chris said today that he is going to start building cold frames for this winter – maybe he will write about them soon!

These are flowers from squash and/or pumpkin. This morning while watering the garden one fell off and it made me think I should try picking a bunch and frying them. I picked about 6 and put them in a paper towel and jessi thought they were garbage and threw them in with the dog business (can i say crap? i don’t think thats offensive. i apologize if my grandma or someone ever comes across this)! maybe next time.

it is a law that i take pictures of the garden to post about. whats frustrating is how bad i am at taking pictures. this kale sprout is case in point, but we all get the idea – the kale i planted is sprouting.

the idea of this picture was to illustate that lots of my green onions got ruined from the dudes who came and put in a new gas line. it turns out they also broke a shovel. i saved the metal part cause it looked like it was a good shovel. also they like to eat beef jerky and drink squirt. even though i will have less delicious green onions to eat and it is their fault they were nice guys on the whole. they did move all our eggplants in containers out of the way.

today i bought some more seeds. its mostly cover crops for winter/spring and some herbs to plant inside! for this weekend i hope to get started on making my cold frames and/or dig up some grass for a new garden area next year. its been warm the last few days, but i’m sure fall will sneak up on us.

Our pumpkins, though very small, are starting to turn orange! Just a few more weeks until pumpkin pie (or something). Unfortunately, there are only four very small pumpkins on the vine now. Maybe next year.

This Sunday, I’m going to pick up a load of sheep manure to spread on the garden. That should really help improve the soil for next year. I’m also planning to see if I can get some manure from my uncle who has horses and cows in Andover. Maybe next time I go down there, I’ll come back with a truck full of fertilizer!

It’s been cool and cloudy in the morning giving way to sun and warmth come afternoon. The summer squash is winding down even if it doesn’t know it. It along with the other squashes, pumpkins and cucumbers continue to make more flowers even as their leaves turn yellow and then brown. Here is our last and sadly only third summer squash (a story told on another post) still on the vine.

Yesterday I planted kale, corn salad, raddichio and parsley. Hopefully its not too late. I haven’t gotten around to building or even thinking about cold frames yet and more distractions continue to present themselves.

Also pictured are the mysterious onion sprouts I discovered when preparing a seed bed for the Kale. Supposedly brassicas do well after an onion crop. We had no luck with cabbage or broccolli this spring/summer and the brussell sprouts are more sprouts than brussell at this point. I am not expecting much, but I doubt those damn cabbage moths are still around. Last week I planted some spinach and green onions. Some of the spinach seem to have been eaten up (along with some beet sprouts) and there wasn’t all that much to begin with, but the green onions look great.

Still needs to be planted (and soon): radishes, more carrots, cover crops, and eventually some lettuce and more corn salad.

I spent the better half of the evening grilling eggplants. Mostly ours, but we got a couple from Easy Bean this week, and then there were a few food shares left at the food co-op that didn’t get picked up by Thursday evening (they deliver Tuesdays), so after doling out vegetables to volunteers before they went bad, it seemed I had enough eggplants to preserve! (I guess people just don’t like eggplants. Actually, two volunteers told me that they had never even eaten them before and didn’t know what to do with them!!).

My new vacuum sealer is finally coming in handy. Just days after we pulled three-quarters of our green beans, we had over 2” of rain, and the beans still in the ground started producing like it was July again! So, we are freezing a bunch of beans as well (finally!).

Also, Chris is making tomato sauce tonight. He started cooking down most of our tomatoes (yes, we have a lot – but no where near as many as I had thought we would) the other day, and we ended up with a lot of extra tomatoes from the food shares that never got picked up. Our giant pot (five gallon?) is quite full with sauce (granted, there’s a bottle of zinfandel in there as well), and though it will cook down a lot tonight, it will definitely can six or eight quarts of sauce! Yay!

… There are still a lot of carrots in the ground, and beets that we need to take care of. As per my mother’s recommendation, I am going to make all of my Christmas presents for my great-aunt (the one who kept giving me the carrot seeds) this year out of carrots: frozen carrot bread, carrot soap, frozen and/or canned carrots… I’m sure she will enjoy the themed gift!

I picked one of the white eggplants that has been around for a month or so now for dinner last night. I was a bit weary because it was still green, and supposed to be a “white” eggplant, but I’ve heard that over-ripe eggplants are no good. The seeds were QUITE dark, which makes me think that we left it on the plant too long! Plus, it wasn’t very good cooked – very bitter. We ended up getting rid of it.

In a frenzy, I ran outside and picked all of our larger eggplants, just to make sure they weren’t over-ripe. We had one more pink bi-colored eggplant (that’s the purple one…?), and a few black and white eggplants. Chris got home and told me that he thought maybe the eggplants were underripe! Arrgh! According to “the experts” (I really like to refer to “the experts” as often as possible), eggplants are ripe when their skins are “shiny.” I don’t know… they sure look “shiny” to me, but then they’ve always looked “shiny.”

In other news, I brought all of my papaya herbs (trees), grapefruit trees, and medjool date trees into the house tonight instead of putting them back in the garage. They take up the entirety of the new shelving system, and I realize now that if they grow at all over the winter I’m going to have to find some more options. Oh yeah, and I need to buy many, many more lights.

Keeping plants inside is still a kind of “gardening,” right? Well, I don’t have anything else to post about the outside garden today, so I’m straying off on a slight tangent.

There’s one of the places that I will be overwintering some of the plants that won’t survive outside from October through April. The “plan” was to set up multiple areas like this, complete with fluorescent lights, in three or four rooms in the house. To my disappointment, the studs in my walls are 24” inches apart (not 16” as I had hoped), and so I need to buy the 4-foot shelves instead of the two-foot shelves. A simple job likes this costs nearly $40, so maybe the three-to-four-room plan isn’t going to work out. In any case, I need somewhere to keep my plants (and we will need somewhere to grow seedlings next spring anyway) where the cat can’t get to them.

Oh yeah, spider plants. The plant above is the only one I have that is sending out a shoot! I steal the spider babies from my uncle’s house every Christmas, and dutifully kill most of them shortly thereafter. This particular spider plant was eaten down to the dirt four or five times (seriously!!) by my old roommate’s cat. Well, the cat is gone and though our new cat hasn’t yet expressed an interest in my houseplants, I’m keeping them out of reach from now on.

I’ve fought with spider plants for six years now, after learning that they are the “easiest house plants to care for.” Right. Well, the ones I have now are eight months old, and maybe they’ll make it to a year. Here’s what I’ve learned over my years of spider plant experience:

1. Don’t over-water your spider plants. If you do over-water them, though, they will happily suck up as much as you give them. Then they grow fast and need to be repotted. Over-watered spider plants have giant roots, all big and puffy like potatoes. But don’t worry – they will die soon enough.
2. Ignore your spider plants. If you find yourself thinking, “oops! I haven’t watered the spider plants for a month!” don’t worry. They’ll be just fine (see #1).
3. Occasionally, let your cat eat your spider plants all the way down to the dirt (or snip them off if you don’t have a cat). This is fascinating. The one spider plant that was eaten by a cat came back with a vengeance! The leaves are twice as thick as the other spider plants, and in two months it was larger than the others, and had already put out a shoot with babies!
4. Don’t sunburn your spider plants. They do like to be outside in the summer, but please put them in the shade. Too much sun will only make their leaves turn clear, and then they will die.

The end!

After all of the planting, removing vine borers, watering, and waiting… it looks like if we’re lucky, we’ll have three small sugar pumpkins this fall.

We need to get in touch with someone in town who has sheep. Apparently, she gives the manure to a few different people in town, who spread it on their gardens. I’m hoping to do this before the frost, and maybe again in the summer. We definitely need to work up the soil; hopefully next year will see better yields.