Pretty much all we're bringing in from the garden lately is lettuce and green beans. We do have the benefit of row covers, but a hoop house would be the shit. Lately all of our garden plans have to deal with the reality that we will be moving in less than a year. We had discussed the possibility of building a hoop like structure where we're at, but the resources would be better saved for property we actually own. I swear it feels like we're on cruise control.
Call me crazy, but I think a spicy squash soup would be bangin'.
The garden continues to produce. After the tomatoes died back, the garden took on a shaggy look. It's quite embarrassing. There have been a few frosts, but the floating row covers have kept the greens and beans in check. I actually think the produce during the fall is much sweeter than its spring counterpart. That's probably wrong, but eh.
We took a step closer to Future House this week. I had an interview for a tenure position on Wednesday. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. The school is amazing and land in the area is affordable.
The moon this morning looked like the print of a thumbnail on leather-hard clay.
The nights have been getting cooler. This evening's low is expected to dip down to about 57 or so. It's been good sleepin' weather. The day's heat is also losing its intensity. The low 80's seems to be the norm. I just read El's post, which confirms it. Fall is coming.
The brassica beds were spent and man they looked like hell. A major drag about floating row covers is that they make a swell place for weeds to grow unnoticed. Actually, that's a lie. We did notice the weeds, bud it's a bit of a pain to take down and repitch the cover on a regular basis. On top of some desperately needed weeding we also wanted to reposition the beds to make the space a little friendlier for walking and running hoses. It was a shit load of work and well worth it.
After the pulling and digging, we planted some Fall seeds. The bed next to Meg is spinach and the one next to that is bush beans. There were a number of other beds that were put into rotation, and in those we planted lettuce, carrots, and chard.
The nights have been pretty cool so hopefully the greens will germinate. The rain harvester is at maximum capacity, so keeping these buggers wet for a week will be a cinch.
Meg and I usually have our schedules set up so we can maximize our home time together, but sometimes it doesn't work out that way and one of us will find ourselves alone at home for a good chunk of time. For me, today was one of those days.
I should have used the time to draft my syllabi for the fast approaching semester, but instead I spent my afternoon in the garden.
My first order of business was to find where a tomato eating groundhog was getting into our garden and plug the hole. When I look at this tomato it reminds me of The Old Man and the Sea. It's a little depressing.
I then spent some time clearing a few exhausted beds for our fall planting. The beds pictured above and below will probably be for greens and carrots.
We're not sure how we're doing on time, but our first frost seems to come later every year, so we're hoping that we'll be able to squeeze in a decent harvest.
Speaking of harvest, while gathering the green beans, I found this soon-to-be-smashed little fella. The beans seem to have caught a second wind. I was ready to give them a pull a week or so ago, but out of nowhere they just started to flower again and completely veg out.
You know when you get in to a picking zone and your eyes and hands just seem to hone in on whatever you've got goin'? Well I was in such a zone and almost picked this guy thinking it was a bean. This year we had a lot of these beauties call our garden home. Now we just need to work on attracting more lady bugs.
The plan was that we were going to plant a healthy amount of fall crops and when the temperatures began to fall we would cover those crops with some nifty new row houses. As you can see in the top photo, the row house construction went rather well. However, what the bottom photo shows is that the actual planting didn't go as planned.
Actually the planting did start out quite well, but we ran into some unforeseeable mishaps between the time of the first planting of greens in late August to when the covers went up in late October. The first unfortunate incident happened to our crop of greens. September brought about some unusually hot days in southeastern Pennsylvania. The heat plus one neglected watering and the entire crop fried. Then our bush beans and peas fell victim to some deer and rabbits with a case of the munchies. It's odd, we never had any problems with deer and very few issues with rabbits, then in one night our garden became a salad bar. By the time we patched the holes in the fence where the rabbits squeezed through and raised its height from five feet to seven feet to keep out the deer, the window for planting was over. We planted some desperation chard (because it's wicked hardy and Mmm, Mmm, delicious) sometime in October and covered the bean and pea corpses with our fingers crossed for a miracle.
No such miracle arrived. What we are now left with are some carrots, sage, spring chard (wicked hardy), and some mighty fine looking row covers.
We drew a nice variety of herbs and produce from the garden this afternoon. Pictured here are carrots, parsnip thinnings, celery, chard, thyme, and sage. I was the most excited about the celery because this was actually our first cutting. We had a good bit going earlier, but the damn deer managed to get in and make a salad bar of things. Luckily the celery bounced back enough to yield a few late stalks.
With the threat of frost forcasted, Meg and I set out to cover our fall crops. The frames are made of 1/2 inch PVC and the plastic was generously donated by Meg's father, Mick. When we have more time we'll fasten the plastic a bit more snug around the edges, but this should do for the time being. 
There's something about this photo that reminds me of when I was a kid and draped sheets over the kitchen table and pretended it was a fort.
