After the Rain + New Challenges

Hilda Van Netten
Sep 22
2 min read

We are trying something new for us in the garden this year. Instead of driving somewhere with our trailer and loading up cow manure, or mushroom compost or alpaca manure, we are trying a "green manure". We've been planting rye seeds as spaces in the garden finish for the year. Ideally, the rye grass will grow for a while this fall and be able to be integrated into the soil in the spring. We'll see how this goes.

Maybe we didn't think this idea through. Dozens of Swamp Sparrows have decided that our garden is their restaurant. I caught this one with its beak in the cookie jar.

Later plantings of Mesclun mix greens are doing well in the garden. We'll start picking some on Wednesday. "Cut and come again" We'll take the outer leaves and allow the centre ones to continue to grow.

I picked a lot of Swiss Chard (Perpetual Spinach) this morning and froze it for winter quiches.

Inside the greenhouse our fall planting of Mesclun mix greens will also be picked on Wednesday.

Eggplants absolutely LOVE living in the greenhouse....

... and Ted found a better way of ripening tomatoes at this time of year. He picks green tomatoes and puts them on our greenhouse shelves to ripen in the heat. It works really well and you don't get any rot.

Our third? planting of Bull's Blood Beets will be ready for picking in early October.

There are still quite a few tomatoes left to ripen. I am hoping to meet my goal of giving 2,000 lbs. of food to the foodbank this year. They will help bring up the weights. We are at 1958 lbs. so far.

Below is the first planting of the rye grass seed. The swamp sparrows left some seeds for us! Yay! It's a fine balance - making the garden a welcoming space for insects and birds vs growing food for us.

I left around 20% of the elderberries for the birds....

... and they've eaten most of it.

The pond area is looking pretty wild this month.

And, to keep with the red theme, below is the fruit of Jack-in-the-Pulpit. Very toxic. Nice to look at, but bad to eat.

There were around five or 6 different kinds of mushrooms springing up. I didn't notice the cute little insect on this one until I edited the photo.

And on this one.

Fall colours are beginning in the woods.

When I walked around with my camera, I also had my phone in my pocket with the Merlin app listening for birds. Merlin did not pick up this Pileated Woodpecker. I guess it was too busy pecking at the tree to make a call.