Garden: Summer Clean-Up & Fall Planting

September arrived and brought relief from daily picking, all-day preserving sessions, and the heat. Some things are still producing, but much is finished. Those are the beds I need to tidy up and plant for fall. I’d better warn you that this is a long post, but there’s lots of pictures. 😄

Here’s one of the beds that is still producing, mostly volunteers.

The only thing I planted in that bed was the Swiss chard. Of that, I tried to plant half a bed, but only the one came up.

This chard was also a no-show in my African keyhole garden. Of the horseradish, I thought I dug it out last fall, but it came back with a vengeance.

One of my mostly finished beds is my summer squash below.

Tatume is a Mexican variety of summer squash, and I find it does pretty well for me. It doesn’t succumb to wilt or other disease. Squash bugs were a problem, which I kept under control through June. After that I didn’t have time to keep up with them. The lone squash in the center of the photo got away from me, so I left it in hopes of volunteers next year.

My method of clean-up has changed over the years. Before, I would pull everything out of the bed and toss it in the compost. Now, I cut off vines or plants at ground level and lay them back into the bed. Then I cover them, above with soil and/or wood chips and compost. So I now leaving roots in the ground, as per the soil building principles of A Soil Owner’s Manual (my book review here.) Plant roots feed soil microorganisms: living roots first, dead roots second. Cutting and leaving plants is called “chop and drop” in permaculture; everything the plants took out of the soil is able to return back to the soil.

The last of the squash was half-a-dozen or so mature Tatumes.

I scoop them out and save some seed for planting, then, I steam the scooped out halves, scrape out the flesh, and use it in canned soup.

Just below the squash bed is my rather disappointing field corn bed.

We had heavy rains and winds several weeks ago and most of the corn lodged (fell over). It was planted late, as a second crop of corn (I grew sweet corn early), then it had sparse germination. So I wasn’t sure I would get even a seed crop.

Across the aisle from the corn are my black turtle beans. Four rows being taken over by blackberry vines, honeysuckle, and bindweed (morning glories). It needed rescuing.

These are a good dried bean for me to grow. They’re a delicious and they tolerate our hot droughty spells. I mulched and watered them in the beginning, but since then they’ve been on their own.

My first pickings yielded small bean seeds, but we’ve had more rain since then. With the weeds now pulled, I anticipate the rest of the crop will be better. Yes, I do pull out persistent weeds and feed them to the goats!

I planted two kinds of winter squash: North Georgia Candy Roaster and Long Island Cheese. The candy roaster did fantastically well last year, but this year, meh.

The Long Island Cheese is part of a three sisters planting, along with the sweet corn and Cornfield Pole Beans. This squash was incredibly slow to get going. It got water early in the summer, butit  had to survive the hottest, driest part of summer on it’s own. But it hung in there and has just started to flower!

If first frost holds off, I should get a squash harvest.

The pole beans were slow starters as well. But since our last good rain, they’ve taken off and are beginning to produce beans.

These are so named because they are somewhat shade tolerant and will use corn stalks for poles. These are the first beans and they’re very welcome. I had to cut back my bush beans earlier because they did poorly after it became too hot and dry. Sometimes, even irrigating the beds doesn’t seem to satisfy.

I still have a few tomato plants hanging in there.

Of the 40 seedlings I transplanted, I have less than a dozen plants still alive. So I only get a trickle of tomatoes, but I’m glad for each of them. The Matt’s Wild Cherry tomatoes are doing very well.

These tasty little guys are hard to keep up with!

I’m still getting watermelons too.

These are Orangeglo watermelon. They’ve been both prolific and delicious this year.

We’ve eaten watermelon every day since early July. Then one day, Dan announced he was “watermeloned out.” So the rest, I’m dehydrating.

It’s been a long tour, I know, but this will be the last shot, I promise.

Jing was a new variety of okra for me. Even though I’m pretty sold on Clemson Spineless, the catalog description made it sound too good to pass up. My negatives about it was that it was another one that was slow to grow and start producing. Considering how many other things had this same problem, it may not have been the okra. On it’s positive side, it has a delicious flavor, is highly ornamental, and the pods remain tender even when quite large (compared to Clemson Spineless). It’s producing better now, so I will probably get several pints to slice and freeze. I don’t need a lot of okra in the freezer, but oven fried, it makes a really nice side-dish for winter meals, or to add to soups.

So there’s my garden in early September. I need to get cracking on my fall planting. But now it’s your turn. What’s happening in your garden?