Dug 20 gallons of coffee grounds (plus a few peels and rinds) into the garden. Between now and freeze-up I want to dig as much as possible into the garden. With the nitrogen in the coffee grounds, all that will be well decomposed by the Spring.
I want to make a strong effort to harvest from the garden this weekend. I don’t want to be pulling an all-nighter the night before a freeze. We have carrots and potatoes in the ground (although the first freeze won’t hurt them), kidney beans, watermelons, peppers, stevia, etc. to get inside.
I’m also trying to figure out how to harvest my little patch of buckwheat. The seeds are maybe 60% brown, so I want to do it soon, but with the rain of the last week they’re pretty soft. I’m hoping to get a few days of sun, then I’ll just cut off the tops of the plants by hand and bring them under cover — maybe into the greenhouse — to finish drying.
There’s the amaranth also.
Update — Got most of the rest of the kidney beans inside and shelled. They’re in the dehydrator now. We have maybe a quart total. Again, I’m struck by the herculean effort that would be required to grow enough food for self-sufficiency. If we’d been paying attention (I barely knew there were kidney beans in the garden, since we never had a plan and M planted them), we would have gotten all those beans inside before the rain of the last week. We had a dry, warm month that must have left them in near-perfect harvest condition if we’d been paying attention. As it is, there’s a fair amount of mold going on.
Cut the seed heads off the amaranth and put them in the greenhouse to finish drying. I don’t think they’re going to get any better sitting outside, and I’m sure we’re losing more grain off the heads the longer they stay out there. I still don’t know exactly what to do to get the seeds off the heads, but at least they’re contained and in a dry place now.
Ending and Beginning 