Just finished planting the winter English peas (Willet Wonder) Brassicas are doing ok despite this prolonged drought. Radishes, turnips, mustard, broccoli and cauliflower are ready. Cabbage in a couple of weeks. Rutabagas are forming up nicely. Collards just waiting for a good freeze. Carrots coming along should be ready in January. Night Shadow eggplant will not quit, but expect this coming weeks freeze will take care. Few green tomatoes and peppers still coming.

farmerdill said:Just finished planting the winter English peas (Willet Wonder) Brassicas are doing ok despite this prolonged drought. Radishes, turnips, mustard, broccoli and cauliflower are ready. Cabbage in a couple of weeks. Rutabagas are forming up nicely. Collards just waiting for a good freeze. Carrots coming along should be ready in January. Night Shadow eggplant will not quit, but expect this coming weeks freeze will take care. Few green tomatoes and peppers still coming.

Just an amazing garden.

Well no farm but a few containers of arugula and Swiss chard.

Okra is starting to produce. Some lemons are ready; other citrus is coming along. First aloe is blooming. katie

My garlic is all planted (over 1,000 cloves this year although I hadn't planned to grow nearly that many!) and mulched with a few inches of new wheat straw. While I was on my knees planting the garlic, I was also trapping pocket gophers. Three of them! The garden did dry out enough to do the rototilling a few days after the garlic had all been planted and I have not found any evidence of gophers making new tunnels since then. Another gardener gave me raspberry plants that had come up in his pathways. We've had several frosty nights, one down to 22 and more rain showers in the past 2 weeks. This week I went leaf collecting and brought home 35 big black plastic bags of them which other people had raked and bagged! Some are wet and will compost in the bags, and some are dry. The dry ones will be run over with the lawn mower in the spring and used to mulch new seedbeds.

That's a great use for throw-away leaves, Mary. I assume all those bags would have just gone to the land-fill. More than half of my garlic has sprouted. Some varieties sprout quickly and some sprout very slowly. I guess it is enjoying our cold weather, at least cold for us this time of year. We had some frost this morning and it got down to 30F. Tomorrow will be the last morning of freezing temperatures, but with the humidity rising, we will have a really heavy frost. I don't really know how many cloves I planted. Not as many as 1000 but I have double the Creole I have ever planted. I have several pounds of bulbs that I couldn't plant and need to go through it all, keeping some for kitchen use and making the rest available.

Nothing is going on here. Yesterday and today are both too cold and windy to spend much time outdoors!!

Newyorkrita said:Nothing is going on here. Yesterday and today are both too cold and windy to spend much time outdoors!!

Same here -- brrrrrrr! (but I'm thankful to still have no snow on the ground; 40 miles north of us they got 6" a couple of days ago...)

The only veggies I have going are chard, arugula, kale, rutabaga. Also rosemary, thyme, oregano. DH said he needed to go to grocery store, but we just went I said. (He cooks turkey because I'm vegetarian.) His list? Oregano and thyme. I took him to the yard and pointed to the fresh herbs growing right there!

The only garlic variety I have ever had showing a green top above ground before winter really sets in is my softneck, Chinese Pink. Freezing temperatures didn't hurt the green tops and when the weather warmed they just kept growing. I want to make some garlic braids. Hardnecks don't work well for that. My other varieties are Turkish Giant and Persian Star, and I also have elephant garlic which looks like garlic but really is not. Some people like it, so I grow it. I sure do wonder what is happening under all of that straw mulch. The soil temperature was down to 40 a couple of days ago. It was above 50 when I put the soil thermometer in the row about 3 weeks ago.

I was able to still harvest thyme, sage and parsley today from my garden as I'm starting to prep for Thanksgiving tomorrow.

Wishing everyone here (and your families) a Happy Thanksgiving.

Linda

SCButtercup said:The only veggies I have going are chard, arugula, kale, rutabaga. Also rosemary, thyme, oregano. DH said he needed to go to grocery store, but we just went I said. (He cooks turkey because I'm vegetarian.) His list? Oregano and thyme. I took him to the yard and pointed to the fresh herbs growing right there!

LOL, Judy! I love shopping in the garden, much more peaceful than the grocery store

Happy Thanksgiving everyone -- however you spend it .

I bagged up lots of Sweet 100's and Sungold tomatoes for some day in winter when I need the taste of summer. Our sage and rosemary went into the dressing. It smelled so good.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Harvested 11/7:

We loved these little luncheon orange peppers!

Well, today I pulled out the very last 4 tomato plants so all of them are now gone.

My pepper plants already got frozen to death so mostly I pulled them out today also.

I think I'm finally done out in the garden... today I filled 5 buckets with "finished" compost and put them in the little hoop house to use next spring, and turned over the newer part of the compost pile and tidied it all up. Then I moved the 5 potted blueberry plants into the hoop house for the winter, put all the rakes, shovels, etc. away in the storage shed, and brought the tools that we had been using for the new greenhouse back to the shop.

Next on my to-do list is cooking and freezing the winter squash and shelling out the bean seed pods that I collected from my plants... and the seed catalogs are starting to roll in!

Ready for winter and next spring!

@Pirl
I think I've seen your Bonnie Lunchbox Orange pepper plants at WalMart or Lowes. I'll have to try them next year. Thanks for the reminder!
Johnny's has seeds of Lunchbox tomatoes in several different colors. They look a lot like the 'Yummy' or 'Yum-Yum' series available from Totally Tomatoes, Reimers or Tomato Growers. More info on these little snackers is at http://davesgarden.com/communi...

Same here - either Lowe's or Walmart. They produce a lot!

Time to begin the December planting. DP sweet and Pink Diamond plants have attained sufficient size and we finally got enough rain to begin transplanting.