End of Season wrap up

Well, we find ourselves at the end of the growing season... and what a lousy growing season it was! The rainiest June in history, i think it rained something like 40 days straight - i couldn't get my seedlings out until well into the summer. As a resule, a lot of my crops started quite late. Others suffered a great deal at the hand of Spotty, the woodchuck/gopher/tiny demon that lives in my garden. He has a hole about 1 foot from my furthest bed, and spent the summer eating my lettuce, spinach, peas (just the leaves), beets, cucumbers, kohlrabi, and even sunflower and tomato leaves (I think he got sick on the latter - they are loaded with toxins - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato#In_Britain). Several plants survived him and went on to fruit. I picked several dozen french breakfast radishes,which got less spicy the longer they grew - most were a little small, but they came up fast. About 2 dozen tomatoes were harvestable - i guess i didn't plant any of the cherry tomato seedlings i started, or they didn't make it, but the Sweet Tangerine yellow slicing tomatoes came up very nicely - though i think they needed more sun to ripen faster - i picked them all green and ripened inside. We had them in a salad yesterday and they were delicious!

I grew a lot of mesclun lettuce. i guess it's too bitter for Spotty, because he didn't touch it. it makes a really nice light salad, but it's a pain to wash and harvest - a lot of work for not a lot of lettuce. maybe i need a salad spinner? well, there is still some left - maybe as much as a pound? if anyone's interested, let me know - it's organic and healthy, and i can only eat so much bitter salad.

The sunflowers were BEAUTIFUL!!! i will not bother wit the small ones in the garden, but i might grow them in long boxes on the porch - they were pretty, but not sturdy - i could stake them to the railings. The taller ones grew to bout 6 feet, with heads as big as saucers. the petals dropped off kinda fast, and i wish i grew a lot more. maybe next summer i'll put in another row of raised beds so i can have one just for sunflowers.

I got a couple of random peppers - 2 banana peppers, one habenero, 2 little red ones - maybe they were a thai red pepper? and a few that didn't make it off the vine - a poblano and abell i think. more peppers next year, in their own bed.

Oh, and i think i managed to drive spotty off rather naturally! I tried filling his hole in, but he dug it out, including rocks as big as him. I tried all natural smelly rodent deterent made from garlic and fish oil. Nothing worked. My friend Dorothy said that when her dog started eliminating in the garden, her woodchuck stopped coming around. so, for a week, i dropped the cat's poop into his hole, and before i knew it, he was gone - the hole slowly filled with leaves from disuse, and my plants seemed to be less damaged each morning. So, poop works! just make sure it's downhill from your plants - you don't want that running off into your veggies! and beware that it might attract other things - that may have brought the fisher cat down from the hills to my deck, for all i know.

I also got rid of my slugs naturally. The rains brought them in droves (they started the day i brought home my supplies, including a bale of hay they infested within hours), so i found 2 natural, organic cures. This lady explains it better than i can: http://www.janesdeliciousgarden.com/snails_and_slugs. I did the beer trap (which you can also bait with yeast and water. I tried to come up with a good way to use copper, but didn't think of the "barbed wire" she posts. There is a brief explanation here as to why snails and copper don't mix: http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7427.html - basically, because the metal causes a current to run through their mucus and disrupt their nervous system.

So, what i learned this summer was:

-I need more space - things were crowded and i wanted more of some crops.

-some things will have to be fenced in to protect them from the woodchuck.

-i need to start earlier next year

-some things are really easy to grow - grow lots of those!

Oh, there are still some carrots and a few other things in the ground - i guess they can go pretty late, but they are still very small. thank god they're just baby carrots! ;)

this blog will probably go dormant for a while - unless i start blogging about the indoor herb garden over the winter. thanks for reading!