A handy list
Who am I to burden your encumbrances, but here is a list of challenges a gardener might consider as autumn approaches.
If you intend to plant a few winter vegetables, you’re almost late preparing beds for them, but do it anyway. Garlic should go in by the end of the month. Three decent size bulbs from this year should produce 30 cloves. Stir aged horsie and Her Majesty’s best compost into the bed where the cloves will live and prosper for the next nine months. Adding dolomite before you plant the cloves helps long-term.
Give garlic cloves ample space when you plant them. Think like a garlic. “I want to go a couple inches down at least, thank you, and give me and my neighbor five inches, please.” Garlics are polite, and the well-placed cloves need mulch right after planting, and every couple months, until harvest time in early summer.
If you have not planted winter radishes yet, hurry! Dozens of Asian and European varieties do well planted in late summer for maturing as weather moderates. They take two months or more to mature, and we could have a frost by then. Daikons, shawos and other long varieties require loose soil at least six inches down.
Winter radishes – which, by the way, cleanse livers, lower blood pressures, aid digestive activities while fighting bad, mean cancer-causing contagion – are colorful. China Rose radishes are bright pink and five plump inches long. Spanish Black can grow to baseball size. The Xin Li Lei variety grows to a three-inch sphere with a tail, has a greenish skin and is red inside. Americans call it a watermelon radish. Daikons are long and white. A Shawo radish is like a smooth green cucumber, and Pusa Jamuni are pale outside, purple inside.
It’s also time to plant greens, which sometimes are yellow, orange or red. There are dozens of Asian greens which mature quickly, and some can handle early frosts. Tatsoi, bok choi and Japanese red mustard grow well on my rocky hillside. Also with nutritious intent would be kale and chard, which, with care, might last till this time next year. Spinach also likes autumn weather, so gardeners have no excuse for not growing greens. Still time to grow lettuce. For fun, try arugula, chicories or mache.
Maybe you already made pickles. We have Christmas presents in December and pickle jars in mid-summer. Healthy cucumber vines embolden our homestead genes, and we don’t want to waste a single cucumber. A friend was excited to announce he had put up 19 quarts of pickles, and that’s impressive. That means his family could eat six pints of pickles each month before running out right at pickle-making time next year.
If, on the day you made pickles, you began a usage chart for the number of pickles eaten per day, my experience indicates the pickle-number line on the chart would plateau and fade sooner than you expect. I like pickles, but I don’t remember eating one lately and there are several happy homegrown jars in the cupboard. And, yes, I will grow more cucumbers than I need again next year because that’s the fun part.
But before that, pay attention to the flowers in your garden. Just pause beside the zinnias and pay attention. We learn things at every turn.
This time of year, pepper growers in a good year will be “full with bounty” as the locals say in a novel no one wrote yet. Some hot peppers dry well, and handy folks can string them into ristras. I grind up dried hot peppers into spicy paprika.
Along with all of this is the soil in your garden. Some of it needs to rest, some is ready and primed. All of it needs whatever time and attention you have available. Enjoy your pickles.