October’s A Treat!

Trick or Treat

Smell my Feet

My Garden Still Has Goodies to Eat!

I cannot believe that it is the last week of October and there is still harvesting to be done! This may be the most fruitful month my garden had all season! A rainy, rainy season and some learning pains with blight & monster-mint led to a somewhat quiet garden yield this year.

How do you take your garden lumps?

I take mine with a heaping order of Google and Twitter! Thanks to modern technology and social media, I have learned to take less-than-ideal garden losses in stride. I have discovered a generous gardening community willing to share experience and knowledge this year in two specific areas:

BLIGHT AND MINT

I wasn’t very pleased to lose an entire bed to over-zealous spearmint in my garden. But, I have learned not to grow mint directly in the ground in my zone 5B garden (unless I want to try to be a commercial grower of the stuff – and ummm, that’s a no). Ok. So. Mint in containers – check.

Blight. Really? This is one I have heard about, patted shoulders for other sufferers, and not ever experienced. Now that I have – I am well prepared … Wait. The thing about blight is that you cannot prepare. Bummer. Big, bad, blighty bummer. I have however learned more about crop rotation and soil prep. I have been considering a re-do in my raised-bed garden set up. I have decided that there has never been a better time than now. I have some suspect soil that will be covered and treated/watched next year because it was the bed that contained the contaminated tomatoes, and I have also decided that I am going to reconfigure some of my raised beds to mimick a keyhole garden layout. It’s exciting and liberating to change the layout and style of my raised-bed garden. Gardening with cinder blocks is quite enjoyable! So, blight is a nasty, nasty word – but I’m going to beat it by applying some knowledge and changing directions. Blight can bite it? Check.

And how about this October? I can’t believe we are still picking … Strawberries!!! Whoddathunkit? And green peppers? Small, but – hey, who am I to complain? A harvest is a harvest, right?!

What are you still harvesting? We are still harvesting those warm and fuzzy feelings of beautiful zinnias and snapdragons. Blight or mint or rain be darned, we still have evidence of a good, happy, and beautiful year!