video: getting mulch

autumn projects in the vegetable beds

I'm still growing food, like my half-bed of lettuces (with appropriately fall-colored marigolds in the back of them)

and there are artichokes and basil (in flower) still looking happy (even after one 33 degree night)

I've dug holes for the currants I will plant in spring, so that spring's workload will be less, and marked them with sticks. I've found a FREE source of well-rotted wood chips, that had been chipped into very small pieces last year, so I'm spreading it all over. Here is the area where the melons were this year, and where I think I'll try strawberries next year. (well netted against birds and squirrels, for sure.)

I've built a leaf mould bin and chipped two bags of leaves from this year, and the leaves that hadn't yet decomposed from last year:

The leaves from last year that had decomposed into nice leaf mould as of the first of October this year, I spread under this tarp I'm using to solarize the soil (that is, kill the grass and weeds beneath it so that next year, I can plant food into it). I tried both clear and black plastic for that, and black works far, far better (though the internet would tell you otherwise, oddly.) The photo is blurry, not your vision. By the time the worms are done with the leaf mold, it'll be a great place to plant melons and pumpkins next year, and they can vine all over down there in full sunlight.

Down the slope from my back yard fence, I have coarse wood chips from deliveries in December and April, and all the way down/right near the street, a thin line of the new free mulch I found, which you can see is darker and prettier, so I'll be bringing a lot more of that home. There's another black tarp uphill of that, and uphill of the tarp, I'm trying cover crops: small turnips and two kinds of radishes I'll let rot in the ground, lentils, and crimson clover. (Deer or rabbits have eaten a lot of the radish leaves.) By this time next year that whole slope will no longer be grass, so I won't have to mow. (I'd rather spend 8 hours weeding than 2 hours push-mowing, partly because I can weed when it's cool, and partly because I find it much more pleasant work. Also, food--or even nice perennial flowers--make more sense than lawn to me. What is up with the affection some folks have for grass? It's BORING.

I tell you, I'm damned proud of myself. If I'd done a better job of taking pictures of the perennial weeds and dead trees and half-dead bushes and poison ivy that was there when I moved in, you'd see how very much I accomplished in just 17 months. Give me 30 months, and this place will be both beautiful and a vegetable and fruit farm that produces more than enough for me for a full year. I had 20 square feet of veg garden space in Year 1 and 800 this year. In Year 3, I'll have over 3000 square feet I reclaimed from weeds and grass.

Thanks to my aunt, I have a pressure canner for next year. She bought it in 2001, used it once, and never used it again, and she gets some of my veg bounty, so that works out well for us both. Today I'm getting a fishing pole from my brother-in-law so I can provide more of my own food next year. He's also giving me venison this fall, assuming he bags one, so I might have to buy a little chest freezer next year.

I have another three or four weeks of hard work to do with getting more mulch and spreading it, but I love working in fall--it's dry, it's cool, the mosquitoes are gone, the gnats aren't biting, and when you sweat, it evaporates right away. It's still work, but it feels good to do it.

Best heirloom vegetables I grew this year

Dwarf  purple heart tomato -- the winner

My criteria for these choices is:

A) Tastes great. What's the point if it isn't one of the tastiest in your garden?

B) Not disease or pest-prone. I like 'em easy. Admittedly, tomatoes will never be easy, needing pruning, pinching, and tying up, and then swaddling with tulle or other netting to keep the birds off the fresh fruit, but some varieties are easier than other varieties.

C) One plant gives me a lot of food to eat.

D) They're open pollinated, so I can seed-save.

E) They're pretty to serve. Admittedly, a strange criterion to some people, but if something looks good on the plate, your brain makes it taste even better, I believe.

Without further ado…. (drum roll), the best plants I grew:

1) Dwarf Purple Heart tomato. From the Dwarf Tomato Project, a 4.5 foot tall plant, with the darkest green leaves you've seen on tomatoes, and good production of fruits that were all above 8 ounces. Almost no seeds or gel—it was great for eating, for BLTs (there weren't excess juices to make the bread soggy), and for sauce. A rich, intense, layered taste. While it got a bit of late blight, that's normal here. You will want to stake it, but a single sturdy stake of 4 feet is all a dwarf plant needs. (A t-post is ideal, and a 1 x 2 would work well, but a single bamboo stake would be a bit too wimpy once the fruits begin to mature.) If you like the taste of Cherokee Purple and so-called brown tomatoes, or if you only have a balcony or container, get some of these seeds from Victory Seeds in Oregon.
2) Ping Tung eggplant. Lovely plants from Taiwan, beautiful flowers, and then long slender fruits that made my aunt say "oh, I'd love a dress that color!" One eggplant is perfect for one person, which is a bonus for me. Not bitter or watery like normal grocery store eggplant. I even ate some raw, and it was fine that way. (Though Hunan stir-fried eggplant and eggplant Parm are too danged tasty to do anything else with these!) It's a bit of a challenge to seed-save eggplants, as you have to let one of the last fruit get overripe before frost sets in, but I'll do my best to time that right before my first seed packet runs out.

Pintung ready for Eggplant Parm

3) Suyo Long cucumbers. They taste wonderful—not a hint of bitterness, and the seeds take a long time to get big. Ugly, some might say, but not once you slice them, when their ribbed form makes a pretty slice. I pickled with these successfully too. If you like hothouse English cukes but don't want to spend a dollar per on them at the store, grow this easy plant instead, as it tastes very much like those (but better, because you eat it fresher). It does need staking (but for free, you can use fallen branches, three or four of them shoved into the ground in a teepee, and wound around with twine for the tendrils to grab onto), and once they start bearing, you'd better harvest every other day, but that's normal for cucumbers. When they come, they come quickly and plentifully.

4) Speckled lettuce. I bought this from Seed Savers Exchange, and it's not the romaine forellenschluss that is more familiar but this leaf one: https://www.seedsavers.org/speckled-organic-lettuce. It held out to June 20 without bolting. The leaves are tender as can be. When it does bolt, you leave the last plant or two and seed-save from it, and for one expenditure on seeds, you can have this lettuce spring and fall forever. (Or if you're in a marine-effect zone 8 climate like coastal Oregon or London, you can probably grow it all year round, for it'll take some frost.) I'll put it in my winter garden too, under one 6 mil plastic tunnel, and see how long it lasts there. But for sure, it's worth it for two seasons, Spring and Autumn, of beautiful salads on the plate. I often had that, green salad bowl lettuce, and oak leaf lettuces for my salads, and they were gorgeous together and had not a hint of bitterness.
5) Grocery store spaghetti squash. Of all my squashes, winter and summer, this one did the best. I wish I could tell you the variety, but it seemed to come true to form, so it must be open pollinated. (It might not be any longer, as I grew a number of squash plants, but I'll seed-save them all anyway and see what weird stuff I get next year.) Fast-growing.

Runners up:

Boxcar Willie tomatoes. Available almost anywhere as seeds, this is a solid, medium-sized red tomato with a balanced taste, on the sweet side, good production, and with good disease-resistance. Other heirloom tomatoes I grew that were productive, fairly disease resistant, and heirloom (so you can save the seed) were Mortgage Lifter and Kellogg's Breakfast.
Long Island Cheese Squash. A beige pumpkin. I only got three of these from a hill of two vines, but the biggest one gave me 7 cups of puree, which is enough for a couple pies and a big batch of soup. Delicate, tasty flesh from a big pumpkin.
Chieftain red potatoes (I think that is what they were because of their leaves and flowers, but can't swear to it as they came from the Walmart eating aisle, not from seed potatoes). I've saved all the egg-sized ones for next year's crop.

Red and yellow late potato harvest

Aunt Molly's ground cherries. No-hassle plants that give a whole lot of candy-sweet fruit in summer. It took me a while to get used to the taste, and I found I like them best cooked with a couple tablespoons of lemon. Worst aspect: they're a hassle to harvest (you end up crawling around on the ground, and you still have to husk them before you can cook with them).