Fall gardening thread

Beets. I had distant cousins who had a farm in the Shakespeare area, and when I was young we'd visit and take home some surplus from the garden. I remember the beets in particular, and how the pickled ones tasted best after sitting in jar for a couple of years.

I planted a store bought garlic bulb years ago, and still have feral garlic growing in what has become a very neglected herb garden.

Never plant thyme.....

We had an accidental tomato plant come up in the flower garden this year. I left it alone to grow. Now we have a daily supply of cherry tomatoes. For those who like those sorts of things. I'm not a fan of raw tomatoes. Texture is all wrong. Wrong I tell you! Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Speaking of wrong, brussel sprouts are very easy to cook wrong. There seems to be a narrow window between under and over done. I suspect the enemies of brussel sprouts have probably never had them cooked just right. My wife--Morgan Fairchild-- was treated to bug infested brussel sprouts as a child, and no amount of cajouling, pestering, nagging, or promises to be fullfilled later in the boudouir can convince her to try them in her adulthood.

So we are a sproutless household.

I miss them.

I went out to the allotment today and pulled my onions. They are prety small this year, compared to last year. I think they got watered more last year (by the neighbours).

Ever since Diazinon was taken off the market I've been looking for ways to stop onion maggots. My organic gardening experiment this year included planting marigolds and nasturtiums with the onions. I had five onions with maggots in an area without flowers, while the rows that had the flowers had no maggots. One problem was that the nasturtiums grew too well. Some made five-foot vines. They were so big they crowded out the onions. I think I'll stick to marigolds next year, as they're more compact.

My corn is still the freak show of the allotments. Everyone else's corn stalks are 4.5 feet high, brown and full of big ears. My corn is still green, 7-8 feet high, and the cobs are about three weeks of warm, sunny weather away from being ready. There's no way they'll beat the frost.

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Oh... and if you are going to get a hard frost and still have green tomatoes, tear up the whole plant and hang it upside-down in the basement. My parents swear by that method to enable the rest of the tomatoes to ripen.

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I always pick my tomatoes green and leave them in boxes. I process them as they ripen.

There's no way I could find room to hang 50-60 plants in the basement anyway.

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Where do you place the box of green tomatoes? In the basement, or near sunlight?

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I keep mine in the basement. We used to keep them in the upstairs crawl spaces on the farm.

I don't need 120 lbs of tomatoes ripening all at once.

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Originally posted by Boom Boom:
[b]Question: is it really necessary to pull up all my veggies before the first frost hits? I'd like to leave my carrots, beets, rutabagas and lettuce in the garden until at least October. Can't they all survive the occasional frost?

[ 17 September 2008: Message edited by: Boom Boom ][/b]

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Root veggies can. Heck you can leave carrots in the ground all winter and pick them as you go if they won't sit in standing water and you cover them with straw to keep them from freezing.
Lettuce, no not so much. It's pretty tender. If it's just light frost you can cover it with something over night like plastic or even a sheet and remove it in the morning. That works until you get a really heavy frost or freeze.
If it rains though and the leaves are sopping and it dips below zero at night you could get freeze damage. Had that happen to me once even when it was covered.

I think I've mentioned before that I accumulate the plastic tops sold with cakes and such to use as cloche's in the winter and spring to protect plants. They may do well to preserve root vegetables in the ground, too.

Rutabagas are a sneaky word for turnip, isn't it? [img]smile.gif" border="0[/img] I think they grow turnips in England all through their "winter", and a number of other vegetables under cold frames.

Hmm. I seem to remember watching this or that show, which made me think that 19th century gardners knew a lot more about this kind of stuff than we do today.

I wonder if researching more from an historical angle might offer up more cold weather/vegetable preservation tips than more modern sources?

A nieghbor across the road used to start his tomatoes in early April by putting a saw horse over them, then drapping vapour barrier over the saw horse. He'd then run an extention cord to the contraption to power a 60 watt light bulb. In our climate that was enough to protect the plants from the frost-- but not the aesthetics police if there were such a thing.

I've tried using a plain plastic jug filled with water as a kind of "battery"-- the water would keep the enclosure warm during the night, but I found it didn't work too well. But that kind of heat storage might work if you tweeked it a bit: aluminum cans instead of plastic? Paint them black?

Hmm. I'm not working five days a week anymore, maybe I'll have time to fart around with stuff to see how much I can mitigate the cold weather in the garden.

....but then, I started posting here again, so I doubt I'll find the time..... [img]frown.gif" border="0[/img]

Remembering more now, I think the show was probably on PBS. It seems your Victorian era English gardeners had a lot of time, money and cheap labour at their disposal so they could obsess and experiment.

A few things I remember... I think the south face of a brick wall will give the soil within a yard of it the same climate as the unsheltered ground 300 miles south. Often they'd train exotic fruit trees to grow against the wall-- I think the term for that is called 'spillating'.

There was also the social pressure-- in the age before mechanical refrigeration-- to have a table with fresh food all year round. Not so much from a nutrition aspect, but from an outdoing the Jones' perspective. Well, maybe not the Jones'-- Jones is a Welsh name, and all yer Welshmen were easy to lord over because they were stuck at the bottom of a coal mine fueling the industrial revolution for which they got paid a pittance. Ah, the bitterness of a Celt matches that of a rutaturnip.

One other thing they did was to dig a hole in the ground and build a stone dome over it, and fill it with ice during the winter. The ice would keep, along with the food stored with it, all summer.

I seem to remember, on a trip around Quebec city, "cold cellars" dug into the rocky bluffs across from the farm houses whose long skinny fields stretched down to the St. Lawrence. Most of the cold cellars were separated from the house by the road.

I've always thought that it would help if you built a garden, with intentions of cold framing it, so that the angle of the soil matched that of the winter sun's rays... 23 degrees? Solar panel specifications would give the correct angle.

Yah I looked into digging something right into the ground but the water table is so high here that I'd just be digging a pond. We're going to build are cold cellar in the basement and do some ground venting to keep the temperature constant.

I initially had plans this year to be able to put up some cold protection for my tomatoes to extend the season but they have grown way to big for how I planted them and it's not going to work. It's been a bit weird for me this year because I've been dealing with problems coming from plants that have grown twice and sometimes thrice the size that they grew last year. I've got two tomato plants that have broken the 8ft mark. I measured my squash plant vine again today and it's now 35ft long. Never seen anything like it in my life.

And to note the tree technique is called 'espalier'. I planted a couple of apple trees last year which we're trying out with that technique. It's making a comeback. I've seen articles about it several magazines this year.

[ 17 September 2008: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

I read that Paw Paw tastes like a cross between banana and kiwi. I'm not much of a fruit eater, and while I like banana flavour, I cannot eat banana's because of the texture. Kiwi, I like.

I'd like to have the Paw Paw because the only place it grows in Canada is in the Carolinian zone in South Western Ontario. And even here, I believe it is rare. If I liked the fruit, that would just be bonus. Similarly, I'd like to have a shag bark hickory growing in the yard. Last fall I collected lots of hickory nuts from a stand of shag bark hickory, and allowed them to sit outside all winter to stratify, but none sprouted. I will collect a bunch again this weekend, when I visit my niece who lives in an area described as the Ekfrid forest.

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Originally posted by Boom Boom:
[b]I love just about every fruit I've ever tasted, the exception being kiwi fruit - that one doesn't do anything for me.[/b]

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Hey, you're supposed to peel it!

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Originally posted by Boom Boom:
[b]Speaking of fruit, I think strawberries are overrated. I like raspberries and blueberries more. [img]smile.gif" border="0[/img] [/b]

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A neighbour gave us a hanging, potted strawberry plant as a thanks for a favour, and it has been producing a couple of delicious, fresh strawberries every few days for weeks now. What a treat to be able to harvest that one delicious berry straight off the vine and savour the taste! Especially since strawberry season is three months past.

It's a great gift idea, BTW, as it really keeps on giving!

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
[b]So do lima beans. I happen to love them, but nobody else I know does.[/b]

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I have a funny relationship with lima beans (don't go rushing to YouTube, I haven't taped it) in that sometimes I can't get enough, sometimes they are unpalletable. And I don't think it has anything to do with how they are cooked.

I buy good quality frozen lima beans (never tried the canned ones - yech!) and boil them till tender. Drain, add margarine to get 'em all greased up, then salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste (I prefer more salt rather than less).

I could eat two cups of those suckers at a sitting!

Same here! Me old mum cooked a great roast beef with Yorkshire puds and gravy. Triful or rice pudding for dessert. Potsa tea and cup after cup laced with sugar so thick that the spoon stood up by itself. Bangers and mash or stovies for leftovers was delish. Toast and more toast with Robertson's marmelade or raspberry jam, and about a thousand pots o black tea, by gum those were the days.

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Originally posted by Tommy_Paine:
[b]"Lion's Golden Syrup"[/b]

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Actually, it's [url=http://www.lylesgoldensyrup.com/lylesgoldensyrup/default.htm]Lyle's Golden Syrup[/url] and it's still available in stores.

A lot of kids used to call it "Lions" because it has a picture of a lion on it.

It's not corn syrup, but sugar syrup - much sweeter. My mum used to put it on our pancakes. I never had maple syrup until I was in my 20s and it was a big disappointment after Lyle's.

Mmm, bananas. I actually don't buy them that often because I can't eat them fast enough and I hate it when food goes bad. But I got some tonight.

One of my favorite ways of eating bananas (besides just by themselves) is slicing them up and making a sandwich out of them with buttered toast. Nothing else, just plain toast with butter and sliced bananas between. Mmmm!

Michelle got me hungry.

I'm off to make a peanut butter and banana sandwich on whole wheat toast.