The last hurrah of summer and the winter garden begins

Changes are happening in the garden again. The first tray of winter garden seedlings was planted out into this bed (with some overflow into two other beds) yesterday morning. We're looking at many kinds of lettuce, some Georgia Collards, Red Russian Kale, and arugula here. The mixed mustards and the cabbages are in other beds. We're watering overhead, by hand, until they are established and then we'll use the t-tape that you can see installed.
So it was beyond time to remove the last of the summer crops. Here are the two beds of mixed winter squash. They still had blooms and growing squashes on them, but, truly, we don't need any more at this point, and we will need the bed space before long.
So, after yanking them out, we were left with this pile of vegetation! After it dries out, we'll run it through our shredding machine and have mulch for the new beds.
And this! The harvest from those remaining plants: a few more squash and some volunteer cherry tomatoes! They had to come from last year's plantings because we didn't even plant cherries this year. I thought I would save the green ones and see if they will ripen. The green heirloom tomatoes we harvested are gradually ripening, at a pace that we can use them.
Now the squash beds (on the right side of the photo are empty. It looks like the beds in the background are, too, but they have all been planted with cover crop and it is beginning to come up. The beds are full of little green things. One (or two?) beds are planted in fava beans.
Here are a few more of the winter squash that were harvested a week or so ago: Burgess Buttercup (dark green), Butternut, and the giant Guatemalan Blues, with a hint of one small Japanese Red Kuri peeking through!
And here is the next tray of newbies! Another round of lettuce, kale, and cabbage just poking their heads up. When they are big enough, these will go where the just-removed squash plants were.

I confess that I am still a gardener when the thought occurs to me to go and do something in the garden. I think with the number of beds we have I will need to become the kind of gardener who thinks of doing something in the garden every day!

Prodded to blog!

It has been two months since I have created a blog entry. I got a nudge today from Penny who came in and announced that she had taken some photos because there were things we have not blogged about! When last I reported in, we were in the thick of canning tomatoes. We are finally finished with tomatoes, although we do have a rack of green ones under the house that are slowly ripening. That gives us a few each week and keeps us from having to buy in the store. We are still harvesting winter squash, particularly butternut, and there are even four or five new Guatemalan blues. Send your favorite squash recipe! All potatoes are harvested and stored.

We have done two succession plantings for winter garden beds. We have two trays of green things (lettuce, arugula, kale, collards, cabbage, mustards), one planted on October 8 and these will soon be ready to be planted out into a bed. The second (same crops) was just planted this Monday, October 31. Directly in a bed we have planted four rows of spinach (two on October 19 and two on October 29) and two rows of beets (one on October 19 and one on October 29). So far not much is happening in those beds. Just three tiny beet sprouts. We tried some compost from an old composter of ours and it contains lots of bits of egg shells. Maybe there is something about it they don't like. Or....who knows.

This first photo is taken of our lower yard garden beds which are in the process of moving up to join the rest of the garden. As I type, Penny is hauling loads of dirt from the one big bed to a newly constructed one. (Let's see, which job would I rather be doing.....blogging or digging?) These beds were built over what we think is the septic field, and we concluded that was an error. Besides which, they get absolutely no sun in the winter so are useless for many months of the year. Soon we will have all our garden condensed on the sunny south side.

Here is the new bed that is receiving all that dirt Penny is digging and pushing.

The tanks are beginning to be set up for the winter rain harvest from the roof. One hot day Penny actually cleaned all these tanks out, which involved tipping them over and rinsing out with a bleach solution. We do have rain forecast for the next few days, but we probably won't actually start collecting until after a few heavy rains. We had a new roof put on this year and we want some of the asphalt sloughing from that to be done before we put it in the tanks.

We also have planted four large and two small beds in a variety of cover crops for the winter. Two have only fava beans, and I am hopeful they will yield a lovely spring crop to eat. I love favas! The others have a mix called "soil builder" which we have planted many times; there is some other plant that we added into that but I cannot remember its name at the moment.