Hello, dear imaginary reader,

Our rainy season has finally gotten going in earnest. We’ve now had 64% of our normal rainfall for this point in the rain year, which began on October 1st. At this point last year, we’d gotten 171%. Since this is an El Niño year, a lot of rain is expected to start falling in a few weeks. I have not managed to fertilize with the fish/kelp stuff. There have been preschool events, home repairs, and a sick child in the past month.

We have had a lot of frosty nights, but our garden has been holding up ok. We still have greens, although we are down to one chard plant (we had 8. I am hoping that what ate them was “only” gophers and not some sort of nematode or something). I still go out and pick a few days’ worth of kale and collards, and what little broccoli there is (and what cabbages there were), every few days. The plants at the northeast end of the garden are all pretty stunted, which I am guessing is due to the soil (that, or late planting) – something to keep an eye on.

T and I have scattered rye and vetch a few times. I can’t see the vetch against the dirt once it’s wet, but I can tell when the rye I planted is still there and when  it seems to have been eaten by birds! I think the wheat has started to sprout. Our very haphazardly-sown bell beans have roots but no shoots yet. The Chandler strawberries have up to 4 leaves, while the Sweet Anns (was that their name) are, in some cases, starting to have leaves. I did some good weeding of the garlic around Thanksgiving – this has made it possible to see the garlic and the few onions that have come up. 🙂 I wish that I had had extra straw to scatter in the berry and allium beds, because in some places you can see damage from the rain hitting the soil.

I planted some peas at the end of the pea row a few weeks back, and the seedlings are visible now. The purple podded fava beans at the end of the strawberries have also come up 🙂

I need to start a new compost pile, and I don’t want to put it where the ground is very mushy. I do, however, want it to still be inside the garden. I’m very confused about what to do. I think I will need to buy straw for the pile (the last pile didn’t have enough browns and is still kind of stinky), but it’s very hard to find organic straw, and even harder to transport it with a carseat in the car. SIGH!

I’m hoping to do some crop planning for the spring someday soon. The seed catalogs all look awesome!

We ate more food from this place than you’d have thought, given how few things are growing!

We had greens, of course; olives; pear sauce (made into pie? i forget); pear crostada (sp?); pear booze; sage… oh, and there were like 4 different days on which kids (and Z’s mother) picked strawberries! They had to have picked 3 or 4 baskets’ worth (?!). Then we even colder nights over the weekend and everything froze. The strawberries appear to finally be finished. There were no peas last week, and the plants are very unhappy from the cold. We had a heritage turkey (that we provided and Z brined with some of our rosemary) and it was awesome!!!

I think we’ve been watering too much, but there were some windy days over the weekend and we wanted to be sure that the soil didn’t dry out.

I got the 25ish Sweet Ann (iirc) strawberries planted today! The bed sure looks weird because I put so much compost out before the rain the other week, but that’s ok.

Today was the 1st time that Z got out to the garden since last Sunday, he thinks. He got to do some push-mowing and he also raked some of the messier beds. And he punched a hole for a new line to water the strawberries- we’d had 2 but one of them had been too far over.

Hopefully we will finally get our cover crops sown tomorrow. Oh, and some fava beans! I was trying to hoe the bed they’ll be in today and I think I hurt my knee from standing on the very uneven ground (it’s like a snapping or popping that feels like it’s where the hamstring meets the back of the knee). I don’t really feel it unless I’m doing one of the things that bother it, I guess.

I had to do a lot of re-burying garlic today 😦 The companion planting book that I’m reading recommends planting garlic with so many things, and I’m just like: raccoons. Garlic may just be a crop that we can’t grow here.

Family (his) is coming this week – I hope to get some of the big weeds that are almost blocking the garden entrance cut back before they get here!

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.