Good use of them.

It was 29F here this morning. Yesterday I planted some garlic (after attending a garlic workshop at the botanical garden) from Hood River. I put it in one end of a raised bed then covered it with a combo of fine mulch and dirt by about 4 inches. That is what the 'garlic expert' up here suggested. Left the paper on them; will eat those that the paper peeled off of. I have chives growing out in the other garden. Don't know if that stuff will return or not. I could cut the tops and freeze it I suppose so as not to lose it all if they don't return.

I also read that I should heavily mulch my asparagus. Need to get some garden stuff cut down, rake leaves and such and fire up the grinder to get more mulch. I use bales of weed free straw for more brown also. I used the last of my fine wood chips and cardboard on one of my beds; almost finished with that one. Sort of at a standstill as to where I will just rake/pull weeds and mulch heavily and where I will put down cardboard. I have a bunch of pots that will go around the yard next year with Squash, broccoli and such leaving the raised beds for other stuff like lettuce, peas, beans. Never tried egg plant and have given up on tomatoes. Well, maybe I could try a 4 gallon bucket or two with them. I built one of those with a collander in the bottom, drain hole, and such but it didn't work terribly well. I really followed the directions. Maybe it still needs poly around it to keep it warmer although it looked really healthy at the first of the summer then peetered off.

It sounds like you have a good plan going. When I mulch my asparagus with 10-12" of oak leaves, I will do the same with my garlic, though only 6-8". I don't grind the leaves up though, just use them whole so that they don't compact too much. I don't really know whether I need to mulch my garlic, but after our bad winter last year, I was glad I did. I won't even plant the garlic for another week or so, and the mulching won't happen until much later. I watch the 10 day forecast and when the lows will start getting into the lower 20's, I will mulch. Generally, all the garlic has already sprouted before mulching. I like to allow the sun to warm up the raised bed so that the garlic will sprout (and grow) faster.

How are you doing, Mary?

Sounds like you are all busy 'hunkering down' your plants for winter. Down here we are just planting and getting up to speed.

We had a circus of a day in the school garden today. When the first class of kids, 4th graders, came out to the garden the bunny was actually in attendance! What an excitement that was, you can imagine. The kids effectively put the fear of you-know-who into little Peter Cottontail and he squeezed through the picket fence and high-tailed it for the bushes.

Then we discovered one tomato plant with zero leaves left on it and a couple of big, fat tomato hornworms munching on the smaller stems. Again, what a thrill for the kids to see, and we picked them off but saved them for the other classes to see. There were 7 huge hornworms in all that we found on the plants in the garden. I brought them home and fed them to my local bluejays - that would have been a great thing for the kids to see, too!

We also encountered fire ants in our compost heap, luckily I think I was the only victim of a bite. Plus there were whiteflies on the pepper plants. Kindergartners planted some sprouted potatoes, red, gold and purple ones in all. (I bought a mixed bag of colorful potatoes and sprouted them in my cupboard at home) You should have seen the big eyes on those little kids when I said that potato was sprouting a whole new plant. Hope they get going! We had a brief cool front last weekend but it's back to tropical again now.

Sounds like a fun day, Elaine. You are helping create a whole new batch of gardeners!

Yes we are! You should hear the range of ideas we get out of the kids when we say "How can we keep this bunny out of our garden but not hurt him in the process?" Most of the kids actually just wanted to let the bunny eat everything, and enjoy his presence. We argued that we'd have to keep planting and planting, and that more and more bunnies would come . . . a crazy discussion! Did we really want to grow a garden just to attract bunnies? Then we got onto "what eats bunnies" and everything from coyotes to eagles and owls and hawks came into play. Luckily the session ended before we got onto the blood and guts portion of that.

Same with the hornworms, (although all agreed it was ok to let the birdies eat those guys, they are not furry and cute) We did engage in the talk about how to deal with the fire ants and the whiteflies in a safe, organic, healthy manner that would still make it ok for us to eat the veggies down the road. It's enlightening when one kid says "Just spray 'em" and another will say "But the spray is poison!!" to open the floodgates to a great discussion.

I think showing school children about gardens is wonderful. I date my love of it from a school teacher in primary school that used to spend some of his teaching time showing us how to propagate. I always remembered how choughed I was to make new plants. Hooked.

@Oberon46, Mary Stella -- I've never mulched my asparagus, other than giving it a little top dressing of compost in the fall. And I'm pretty sure your chives will return -- I'm not entirely sure it's possible to kill those things!

Elaine, what a great day in the garden with the little kids... lots of lessons going on there! Next you can maybe raise -- or have some of the kids raise -- the hornworms up to become hummingbird moths!

And, apparently none of the kids suggested letting the bunny eat the garden until it got fattened up and then killing it to have for dinner... (which is probably what would happen up here in the UP)

Doing fine Ken. Doing the radiation thing now. Will be done the end of the month. All clear thus far.

I am rereading my Lasagna Gardening book for ideas for next year relating to herbs and such.

I also give my parents credit for my love of gardening. Growing up they gave me a little garden with dill plants and watermelon (I know weird combo). The dill brought in caterpillars and was fascinated with them eating all the dill. Didn't really care much for harvesting the dill just loved the caterpillars!

Yup, we've already planted dill and are about to plant some parsley and fennel as well. They are edible, and also bring in the butterflies really well. The black swallowtail butterflies eat the parsley down to a nub, so we need to plant LOTS.

So much fun and such good life lessons, not to mention environmental ones. Our garden is a chunk of a huge playing field, so there were for sure no butterflies or bees anywhere near, before we planted our butterfly garden. So of course we ask the kids "Why do we grow flowers in our vegetable garden" and a lot of them get it already!

That is such a nice thing your doing Elaine.
Today, I pulled up all the vines from the squash, pumpins and melons, and tilled that part of the garden. Also tilled where I had dug up the sweet potatoes and Iris potatoes.

Now I notice some of my sweet potato vines are blooming with beautiful flowers. What's going on with that? All the plants are still lush with leaves.

Mine ususally blossom too, but not this year for some reason. They look like morning glories.

There are a lot of strange things going on in the gardens this year.

Some of the newer varieties bloom profusely. My Carolina Rubys, Covingtons, are covered in blossoms. I have also had Beauregards bloom, but much more sparsely. My Carolina Rubys and Covingtons are now blooming profusely but nary a bud on the Carvers. Never saw a bloom on Porto Ricos, Georgia Reds, Oklahoma Reds, Centennials, Jewels etc and I have growing sweet potatoes more than 70 years. They tend to bloom when the soil is moist and daytime temps are favorable, but mostly it is a function of variety.

I picked up a tray of 50 plugs of Sweet Charlie strawberries. Some of the family don't like the variety we now have so hopefully these will be sweeter.

I also got another rhubarb to try. I think I may have been over watering mine.

I planted broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and brussels sprouts the other day. I am seriously late with them so I will have to plan on covering with plastic at night and hope I can bring them to maturity.

All the rest of the garden is gone except two rows of strawberries to weed and six rows of perennial flowers to weed. I transplanted some flowers and tried to condense them tto the least amount of rows but in the end, I still had six rows.

I have been using Dave's shovel method to get rid of a lot of the grass on the aisles but DH mowed anywgphere there was nothing planted and it will get rototilled next week and planted in crimson clover.

We have found a source for regular manure loads where they load it and it is only about 5 miles away. What a relief. We leave the trailer and they load. Right now, with fresh manure, but they still have two piles of composted waiting to be loaded as well. Not sure why my son wanted the fresh right now, but we have a big pile of composted already so the fresh pile can sit until spring with a few tosses of the bucket on the tractor in between.

So, other than preparing the garden for the cover, I am not doing fall gardening except I couldn't resist a bit of cauliflower, etc. oh, I will plant some fava beans next week as well. I keep planting in the spring because I forget to fall plant but it gets way too hot after the short spring.

Spent a good part of the afternoon putting the plastic covering over my hoop house frame -- while flock after flock of sandhill cranes flew overhead, on their way south! I'm hoping to have fresh salad makings for Christmas this year, out of the unheated HH (if Eliot Coleman can do it so can I, right??)

We had (our first) light frost last night, maybe another tonight, but then things are actually going to get a bit milder; every day is truly a gift right now, feels like winter could settle in any day. We're still bringing in tomatoes to ripen and have lots of peppers on the plants, plus carrots and a few beets, and a small onion patch that I'm going to cover with a "low tunnel" tomorrow. This weekend I plan to make tomato juice, and next week I'll plant my garlic. And I still need to put pots and stuff away in the greenhouse. (and before you know it, the seed catalogs will start showing up in the mailbox )

Still have basil in pots on deck, also put out Swiss chard in pots, have fall planting of rutabaga and a few cauliflower plants. Next project is to harvest herbs for dried herb tea mixtures...even have some stevia blooming, maybe I can get some seeds.