weathering hurricane Sandy
We were fortunate with almost no storm damage, though it was WINDY!! The garden is wet and leaf-strewn. Many houses nearby fared worse, though nothing like NJ. Here’s a slideshow of my neighborhood after Sandy.
digging sweet potatoes
Yesterday I dug about half of my sweet potato bed. It was drizzling on the eve of Hurricane Sandy’s arrival. I told myself I wouldn’t get my hands dirty as I planned to shop afterwards. I often fail at this plan. My hands got really muddy. I dug a nice pile of sweets.
filming how-to videos
Yesterday I made a series of “How To” videos in my garden for E-How. It was perfect weather and I was lucky to have a great video producer, Alan from Spinning Horse Video Productions, do the shooting. Skippy and Alan’s cute little female black lab Coby hit it off immediately, ran all over the garden and gave us lots of great dog-in-the-garden photo ops. Alan is putting our videos together now. We did: “How to harvest perennial bunching onions”, “How to save seeds”, “How to plant peas in the fall”,…
butternut squash harvest
My squash box is FULL! From 6 plants that I trained up and over my trellis, I got a total of 17 squash, adding up to 44 lbs. That’s about 3 squash per plant. The biggest squash is 4.4 lbs and the smallest is 1.4.
Marian’s visit
Writing a blog is an interesting thing. Usually it’s just me, going on about my garden or photos I took. “I did this, then that”. But the best part for me is getting comments. Sometimes comments come from gardeners on the other side of the world.(OK, it can be really hard to hear about summer in Australia when we’re under a foot of snow.) Sometimes I get comments from gardeners with more experience than me, or who have a good idea to describe. Sometimes a new gardener comments with a…
bluestone patio
When I published a photo of these great bluestones that I recovered from someone’s trash earlier this year, a reader commented that he/she would lay them in a pattern with stones between. This sounded like a great idea to me. I’ve never done this, so I am experimenting. I loosened and racked the soil, laid the bluestone and then piled on extra dirt. After stomping it down and working in more soil under stones that wobbled, I swept the extra soil of off the patio. I’ll gradually work in more…
fall vegetable garden
These are photos of my vegetable garden plot today. “Before” the storm. I am hearing reports that we may have a “super storm” coming our way in a couple of days. Wind and rain. I think most of my vegetables will be OK with this. There’s really not much left to blow around. The tall sunflowers and trellised squashes are gone. Today I cut down my asparagus ferns and laid them flat on the bed to protect the roots during the winter. Tomorrow I will dig the dahlia tubers, harvest…
Brussels sprouts growing
October 26 October 18 October 13 I am growing Brussels sprouts for the first time. Maybe I planted too late. Maybe not …. My sister has a recipe that she would like to make us for Thanksgiving. I am hoping these will keep growing and give us a nice harvest by Nov 22 – 4 weeks away.
garden after the first freeze
Yow! It was a hard freeze at my community garden plot. Talk about microclimates. My parents garden 30 miles north of me got a light frost, my home garden stayed above frost temp – it went down to 33*F (when I woke and looked the the thermometer at 5 am) BUT my community garden plot (1 mile from my house) had a HARD freeze. I tried to protect my fall peas with row cover – to no avail. I wish I had picked the pretty little pods. They would have…
freeze warnings
Freeze warnings tonight – and right on schedule. Its hard to know what to expect for my gardens. Boston is predicted to go down to 36*F, Worcester to 29*. Everywhere in between depends on your microclimate. My home garden is a few miles from Boston and is very protected between tall houses and trees. It tends to be warm and I don’t think it will frost. Even so, I picked my green tomatoes and the beans I had ripening for next year’s seed. But my community plot is a mile…
This is a journal of my vegetable gardens. Skippy thinks the garden is his, even though I do all the work. We're located near Boston, in USDA zone 6. I have bees, chickens, fruit trees and berry bushes, too. I use all sustainable organic methods and strive to grow all of my family's vegetables myself. -Kathy
weeks and counting until my last spring frost
My garden this week
Skippy’s vegetable of the month – Egyptian walking onions!
