Things are moving along very slowly in the garden. Late last week and over the weekend I guess I planted some last-ditch peas. The fava beans that I planted last week haven’t shown signs of sprouting yet, so I wonder if the peas will. We have had daytime temperatures in the 70’s the last 2 days but we have not been watering that much. It sure gets damp out there as soon as it gets damp.

I finally fertilized the greens (many of them) with the Biomin Booster (about the fertilizer) this morning. This evening I weeded the new strawberries and started to get ready to make a new compost pile. I’ve finally been pulling out some old cabbage plants and putting them into a bucket so they can be used for compost. I like the idea of mulching the paths, but everything is such a fine line when it comes to habitat for pests.

I’ve been reading a book about companion planting: Companion Planting: The Beginner’s Guide to Companion Gardening by M Grande (ebooks are the only books I read. The others are reference books or “someday I’ll read this” books. This kind of book always blows my mind and I am just glad that I know I have it to refer back to. I have some other companion planting books, but I can never get the time to read them since they are in print.

There are all these things we need to remove, and we still haven’t planted our winter cover crops, and now we’re getting ready for family to come for the Thanksgiving holiday… we’ll do what we can! One of my friends is like, “put those people to work!” and I’m like, there are toddlers. At best we’ll be able to pick peas. We got 2 peapods tonight. Or maybe 3. Production is proceeding slowly.

We were all out in the garden on Sunday, although I didn’t really do any work since I was sick still/again. This picture was taken around 12pm, I think. There’s so little light these days!

Gross picture alert (below)! We were losing a plant every other day in the greens until 2 days ago. Here are the remaining roots of the most recently-eaten chard. Please tell me that the roots were eaten by a gopher and the other damage is just from slugs (not nematodes or something)!

I got a whole 3 bulbs of one garlic variety planted yesterday! And i weeded more of the strawberries. Today T took 2 bulbs and planted them – whole – at the head of the pea bed. In the path. I was about to plant when he started to wander away. He had been sick last night. So… yep.

Yesterday we had a plumbing crisis so I didn’t get outside at all in the morning. After I ran errands, I got outside st about 6:45pm and I could see the beginning of frost on the kale leaves! This morning Z said that the drip lines were clogged with ice (of sorts). So I guess that was our first frost! #weather

I picked kale, a bit of broccoli, and a bit less than a basket of strawberries – all in a half hour.

I am putting in a goodly amount of work on the old Seascape strawberries (compared to other parts of the garden). As I’m picking, I’m pulling out ageing or really old leaves- especially the ones that are on the ground. I try to get every piece of old fruit out of there that I can, and remove/disrupt/kill all the bugs that I recognize as bad. I am hoping that these steps are reducing habitat and helping the plants to focus on producing healthier fruit and leaves. I was able to pick another basket of berries tonight! I paid less attention to the other variety (was running out of daylight), but still picked a few berries out of there. I wish I had time to pick up all of the yucky fruit and leaves and put them into the compost, but I don’t. I’ll just have to be careful to not plant strawberries (or, my friend Aaron says, tomatoes) into that bed or either one of the surrounding beds, which were empty this season, for a long time!

I visited the peas tonight and pulled some weeds and killed a bunch of slugs. The oldest pea plants are flowering! The youngest ones are spaced several inches apart, and there is a gopher mound nearby. I think a gopher might have a tunnel under the bed.

I keep wondering if I should plant the garlic and onions with the new strawberries, or not. They both could/should finish around the same time, although digging out the alliums would be quite hard without pulling the strawberries out first. I can always interplant green onions into the strawberry bed. From seed, though. SIGH!

This morning and this evening I worked on the new bed that’s closest to the newly-planted strawberries. Z chisel-plowed it the other day, but one part of the bed was too wet, and part of the bed got kind of dug out (maybe he stopped or markedly slowed down the tractor in those spots), plus the paths in our garden are for some reason nearly always higher than the beds (a bad idea for a rainy winter and cool spring). So I experimented with a hula hoe, which was not the right thing for our big weeds in this bed (but ok for the strawberry bed); hoed new grass with the small hoe; and hoed out big weeds and big clumps of grass with the heavier hoe. This evening I tried to use a shovel to level out the ground, and then I tried to rake some of the hoed-out grass and weeds to the side of the bed. We’ve got to put the drip tape back into place tomorrow and perhaps cover the whole bed (whose soil I hope will not blow away before then) with compost — time willing. I’d like to use some fertilizer, too, but there’s not going to be time, and it’s fish-based, so I’d worry that the animals would just dig it up…

Just now I was thinking about companion planting and wondering just how much garlic seed and how many onion “sets” I have onhand– could I just plant them into the strawberry bed instead of giving them their own bed?? Sigh. It might be too late to plant them by the time I get around to it! #latenightgardenmusings

I also managed to do my most-complete strawberry picking in a week – I got about 2 baskets of berries. Every time I pick, I only get a few fully intact berries. That’s ok, though- we can freeze them and use them for our evening “fruit drink,” blended with banana. We haven’t been doing that much lately, and I haven’t been eating enough fruit at all.