Ending and Beginning

Chopped off the approx 29 corn plants at ground level and chopped the stalks into 6″ pieces with machete so they’d rot faster and left them in the garden. Dug 5 gallons of coffee grounds into ground where the corn had been. Found another 3 smallish ears, bringing total to 33 ears.

Dug up 60 medium-to-large onions from the 2′ x 8′ onion bed and spread them out on plastic on the lawn. Intend to let them dry in the sun for 3 days per Carla Emery, then store them. Got all the perennial weeds out that I could, mostly dandelions.

Dug 15 gallons of leaf compost into the ex-onion bed. That should be about all I have to do — next year that’s going to be the purslane bed. Wonder if I should buy seed or just depend on the seeds I know are mixed into the soil already.

Watered the swiss chard-beet-kohlrabi-kale bed. It’s been quite dry for last ten days.

I also watered the butternut up by the house. There are some very nice squash there — if we could have another ten frost-free days, I think we’d get some beauties.

Dug the last 8 feet or so of the first row of potatoes — not much yield in there, getting over close to the silver maple tree in the neighbor’s yard and its shade. Some potatoes had finger-sized pits eaten out of them, apparently the result of thin, 1/2″ long white worms. Don’t know what they are.

Picked another 6 ears of corn today, the last of it, making 30 ears total. Not much, but didn’t plant much — have to count the plants and measure the rows.

A few days ago, I pulled up all the blighted tomato vines, after picking lots of green tomatoes with the intention of letting them ripen. No such luck — they all have the blight fungus inside of them and are all rotting.

Got the ex-tomato area all turned over with a shovel, mixing in 7 gallons of coffee grounds and quite a few grass clippings. Then put another layer of grass clippings on top.

I’m planning to compost all the rotten tomatoes. I can’t get rid of all the blight in the soil, it’s already widespread in our garden, it will be another 21 months before we use the compost, and I don’t know what else to do with them. We’ll be looking to get blight-resistant tomatoes in the future plus adopting some blight-fighting cultural practices (mulching, wider spacing, training the tomatoes on structures to keep them away from the soil).

Picked another 8 ears of beautiful corn today.

Buckwheat is blooming and about 18″ tall.

Yesterday we harvested another 5 beautiful ears of corn. The first harvest was 5 ears about a week ago.

The tomatoes have blight and all the foliage is dying. We’re harvesting lots of ripe tomatoes from the dead vines so far, but that’s going to be it for tomatoes for the year.

Watered buckwheat, kale, chard, beets, kohlrabi seeds/seedlings. Mowed lawn and dumped about 20 gallons of grass clippings into garden to cover areas of bare ground.

Had the idea of using the ‘pit,’ the space just south of the greenhouse, as garden area. Why not? It gets full sun and isn’t used for anything else.

Kale is fast becoming one of my favorite vegetables and I’ve been eating it twice a day at least. It’s good raw or cooked, tastes good with many things or by itself in a salad, is nutritious, frost-tolerant, and very easy to grow. It’s one of those rare vegetables that is not constantly looking for a reason to die. I want to try growing some late and early in the greenhouse.

Also, saw two honey bees (and several bumblebees) visiting catnip flowers in the garden.