Wow, I can hardly believe its been three weeks since my last post. Time sure flies. Well the last two weeks have finally brought us about two inches of rain but things are still dry. The ground soaks it up fast. And tonight we are expecting our first frost, really a hard freeze (29F).
I’ve covered what’s left of the tomatoes and peppers, but not very well, just draping old bed sheets and plastic sheeting over them. If they survive great. It is supposed to warm up into the mid 70’s again over the next few days which will give them a little more time to ripen. If they freeze, I’ll just pick the green tomatoes and let them ripen inside as best they can. The few little peppers that are on the plants will just be picked green.
I hope to have a small high tunnel in place next season to get the tender plants in earlier and extend their ripening into the fall. One of the reasons I have not been posting of late is that I’m working on two new garden beds to plant garlic in this fall. I hope to get it all in by the end of September. I have about 150 cloves of several varieties and hundreds of bulbils. The bulbils will take two seasons to reach full size but by then I’ll have enough garlic growing to keep me supplied all year. I’ll never have to buy that cheap stuff from the grocery store again as long as I can dig in the dirt.
The asparagus I planted this spring is growing a nice crop of ferns and I should be able to harvest just a few spears next spring. The strawberries are doing great also with daughter plants filling in most of the space between the original plants I put in this spring. Looking forward to a nice crop of berries next spring.
The soil here, although it drains well is on the less than fertile side. The deeply dug beds that I have tried have done the best so that is what I am going to do with all of then as time permits.
The soil is composed of a thin layer of topsoil, about four to six inches, followed by a rock filled sand and clay mixture of a foot or so and below that rock filled course gravel. I am excavating the soil down to that rocky gravel depth roughly twenty inches deep. I then back fill with any vegetation, grass clippings, food scraps, and compost that I can find along with a few inches of manure and a good sprinkling of wood ashes. On top of that goes the original topsoil.
It ends up about two or three inches above it’s original level and then over the season settles down to about even.
On this week’s shopping and errand running trip we stumbled onto a garage sale. They are getting fewer as the season goes on. But it was a good one. I picked up a nearly new garden hose that is 150 feet long. It is not a very high quality one but should last a few seasons and the cost was $.75, that’s only ½ cent per foot and it wasn’t even dirty. My wife picked up a like-new toaster oven for $3.00 to replace ours that is like-old and ready-to-die. Not bad for only going two blocks out of our way.
I’ve been working on building shelving for the basement also, at the request of my wife, to get things down there a little more organized.
UPDATE ON THE FREE ELECTRIC MOWER:
The battery terminals were so badly corroded it took two days of applying a baking soda mixture and several squirts of WD-40 to get them loose. I brought the batteries inside and charged them with a little constant current charger and after a couple days took them back out. Upon installation I found that the cable activated power switch needs adjusting but the motor ran. Now I’ll need to see how much of a charge the batteries will hold when fully charged.
Originally posted: September 14th, 2007