Season change over

I find it hard to evict those tenants in my yard who are still working hard and producing yummy food.
Kale works year round here.

The tomatoes are still throwing out tonnes of fruit though the bushes are looking a little bedraggled. The okra are being left to go to seed since these pods got away on me. Okra needs to be harvested when much smaller.

 

Zucchini is still spewing forth, albeit at a slightly slower rate.

 

My nephews thought these were bananas  when they visited - I wish! Still not a bad assumption. You can see where they were going with it.

The peppers are coloring up nicely.

And speaking of color - one day's harvest brought in this rainbow of color and taste.

The harvest is top heavy with tomatoes, but the romas are great to freeze and paste later. I eat the cherry tomatoes as if they are candy, constantly nibbling on them, and the classic and beef tomatoes are usually eaten in wedges with a sprinkle of salt or in my lunchtime sandwich. My antioxidant levels must be off the scale!

One of the best things about growing your own food is that you can get varieties that you cannot buy in the stores. Such as red skinned (and higher antioxidant content) carrots.

Carrots grow all year round here. I planted these carrots in June after I harvested the garlic. They are now a good size to harvest.

In some plots I am able to seed the winter vegetables where there are some summer ones still on the go. Here I have some beans still growing up bamboo and string teepees producing enough for dinner every night. There is a late developer egg plant in the middle which may  or may not still produce something and a tomato plant and a melon hanging forlornly over the edge of the raised bed (to the left of the picture).

The bed is planted with sugar snap peas and cauliflower. The peas are at the right hand edge where they will be easy to harvest on a regular basis. I'll support them with trellising which I can add later as they sprout.

When planting peas, soaking them in water overnight helps them to germinate.

The cauliflower is a more "static" crop in that they are not harvested daily and so I have them in the middle of the bed where it is harder to reach.

Right now everything is protected with Sluggo to beat off the mollusc pests and bird netting to stop my feathered friends from eating the newly germinated seedlings. When the tomatoes and melon get pulled out, I'll plant that section with low growing lettuce as it is on the south side of the bed and won't be shaded nor shade the cauliflower. Lettuce are also fast growing so the crop that is there has a chance to finish.

I don't usually let the beds rest, preferring to use organic methods to fertilize the soil to keep its nutrient level high and mulching with compost.

In the front, the native garden is supporting all kinds of wildlife. Squirrels have excavated the soil from under this fuchsia and made themselves an attractive little home.

In North America squirrels are no big shakes in your garden, I know, but in this case my squirrels are helping me! It seems that they have been stealing/harvesting bulbs from someones else's yard and bringing them back!

I'm not sure what type of bulb it is but I'm going to put them in a pot to grow for next spring. They sure have gathered up a fine collection.

Out back, the baby lizards are scooting about. This little fella is only an inch or so long. The rusty nail head above and to the right of him gives you some idea of scale. Isn't he just adorable?

I can't wait till he's big enough to eat slugs and snails, though judging by the tiny wee snails I found recently, he may be the perfect boyo for the job!


 Byddi Lee

Poor gardening grammar

If the gardening season were a sentence, (like what was learned us in school) Springtime would be the capital-letter that starts the sentence, and winter is the full-stop (period to Americans) at the end.  Californian gardens have bad gardening grammar. There are three Springs - a small weird one when the rains come in the autumn and the grasses grow, the hills turning from golden to lush green - or as lush a green as an Irish lass who hasn't been home in a while can remember.  After the hard Californian winter (snigger) there is another Spring that brings forth cool season veggies - that can happen any time from December to March.  Then there is the third Spring, when the soil temperature hits the magic number of 55F, and it time to rip out the winter veggies and put in the warm season veggies.  Except I didn't quite do that, and now it seems I have perennial broccoli and kale (two types). 

Instead of a full stop for winter, here we had a couple of nights of hard frost, really just a comma, where the garden briefly stopped for a breath, gave up its tomatoes, egg plants (I'll use the American name because aubergine is harder to spell!), peppers and squashes, and then trundled on still growing stuff - lots of stuff.

Right now, I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  This is a book that not just every American, but everyone who wants to eat tasty, nutritious food, should read.  Kingsolver discusses eating what's in season.  She points out that the order in which food is in season is linked to the order in which the plant grows it. Hardly rocket science, but something I've never really noticed until it was pointed out.  Probably because we import foods out of season with that must-have-it-now attitude that modern society has engendered.  Never mind that the must-have-vegetable has lost much of its taste in being bred for appearance and longevity, and many of its nutrients have broken down as it travels the long journey to our plates from its exotic origin. 

But if we eat what is grown locally, and therefore in season, it goes something like this:

The first food of the year is the tender leaves - lettuce,

kale,

two kinds...

arugula/rocket,

 

 scallions,

bok choi - minus the nibbles taken by the resident slugs...

And there are also the new sprigs in the herb garden:

Parsley

Coriander/Cilantro - could the purple tinge be indicative of a phosphorous deficiency? I was learning all about that in Master Gardener initial training today!

The chive seeds I scattered from the seed heads have started to grow cute little chive plants...

Then, as the late spring blends with early summer, you have flower buds like broccoli.

This is followed by flowers and fruit-set such as peas.

And speaking of fruit... though orange is a winter crop really, but I just had to show these off. They are delicious!

  

Late summer sees the deep reds of fruits like peppers...

Before winter sets in, the plants store all their goodness in their roots - ready for next year...  Like these carrots snuggling into the soil.

 The turnips look as though they are peeking out, asking, "Are we nearly there yet?"

The most bizarre thing is that I took all these photographs in my garden TODAY! 

Just as the Irish weather can give you four seasons in one day, the dyslexic gardens of California jumble up their sentences and give you four seasons in one plot!

Though I have to hold my hand up to cheating with the pepper. It's in the sun-room and totally struggling!

Byddi Lee