Gardening · Homesteading · Urban Homesteading

September In The Gardens

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September was a mix of rain/dry/warm and cold. So basically? Normal this year. And the harvest was good, up until a week of cold weather brought blight into the main tomato bed. Still, we harvested a lot, and did a red pile, a ripen pile and a green pile. It was a busy week canning after that.

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More tomatoes!

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My entire side counter was covered in plates of them for days. I don’t want to smell them for a long time…lol!

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The fall bed, coming up, early in the month (it was planted on August 1st). The main tomato bed was on the right of the greenhouse and hadn’t been pulled yet.

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A couple of weeks later, and the tomatoes were gone, but the fall crops were growing fast.

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Peas, and two kinds of beans.

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The first flowers on the fall beans came in the 3rd week of September.

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The bees have been very busy. Between one hive trying to steal honey and sugar-water from the other, there is also them getting ready for winter by culling the numbers of drones and even worker bees.

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The apples were a good harvest, and I only lost a couple to worms.

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Even at the end of September the hardier basil plants were still in bloom – and the bees still thick on them.

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As the month wound down, my smallest first year lavender plants (that came in 4″ pots) have grown quickly as the heat of the summer left, and have put on blooms for the first time. The bees have been very happy over it.

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We planted the wheat we had harvested in summer, and mid September planted winter wheat (meaning it will go dormant in winter, then shoot up strong in spring). It has sprouted like crazy!

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The pumpkins….well, whatever happened this year, they were not overly spectacular. None of them got big. The only ones that grew correctly were the Jack Be Littles, which are minis. Was it the heat? More likely it was the soil. The bed they were in was not kind to plants, and I know I didn’t water enough.

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I found a few Evergreen Bunching Onions (green onions) hiding out, and they had flowered and gone to seed. I collected the seeds for next spring. I’ve always thought it interesting how onion and chive seeds resemble hard lava, as if it was chipped off.

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And apparently the lawn is coming back to life.

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A few more rains and I’ll be able to start turning under more of the lawn, to expand our beds!

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In the final week the maple tree out back went to red. It lasts only a few days, then the leaves drop. It’s one of the prettiest parts of the year. I have no idea what the tree is, it is one of only two trees we kept out back when we moved here. It and the Japanese Blood Maple, they are both gorgeous. They got a pass on the “if you don’t produce, you go” we practice.

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Tidied up for fall, I moved my pot bench over by the greenhouse. My berry plants we grow for sale are getting full sun now, and are better off from wind.

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And as the month ended, I had my first festival with the store. Met a lot of people and sold a lot of pretties.

Now….back to adding compost to the beds, getting the garlic, shallot & onions in…and the October practice of mulching for the cold.