Groovy Kid Stuff

Today I put away my spring/summer living room curtains and put away the spring/ summer decorations and got out the fall/winter stuff.

Then I got out my fall/winter bag and cleaned out my spring/summer bag and put the necessary stuff into the winter bag.  In case you’re getting the impression from all this that I’m super organized I  took a picture to prove otherwise:

These rocks in my bag were from our trip to MI this summer. The were picked up on the beach and put in my bag and rattled around at the bottom for the last 4 months! The acorns are only a week old

Another changeover from summer to fall. These are the last (?) of the Italian tree tomatoes with the crocheted pumpkins I got out this morning.

My garden has experienced a few changes too. Most notable is the change in scale - I used to have a few reasonably sized raised beds. I now have what I half-jokingly call my Y2K garden - and it is huge! This is the kind of vegetable gardening I always wanted to do but some combination of babies, jobs, and trying to sell the house prevented it.  Oh, and an enormous ancient peach tree that was in the middle of this space is now mostly dead and 80% of the branches dropped off or died this summer so a lot of real estate that was shady is now sunny.

Summer veggies are (mostly) gone and the winter crops are going in. I’ve planted clover and a cover crop mix in some of the beds and in others I added a lot of composted chicken bedding and planted onions, radishes, carrots, kale, collards, broccoli, bok choy, parsley, cilantro, lettuce, turnips, spinach, fava beans, snow peas, and garlic.  I have more than 1 variety of most of the veggies, so the variety list is actually a lot longer.  Some of the veggies I’ll have to cover with a floating row cover or some type of cold frame, but most will be fine through the winter here.

This is my main carrot bed - interplanted with radishes.  I dug the soil, placed the raised bed and filled it with good soil, compost and sand so my carrots will have room to stretch.