Lots of fall color this year.
This is a Japanese Maple that I dug up as a volunteer from my old yard, on the left. On the right, the lower yellow leaves are a ginkgo I grew from a seed, and the higher yellow leaves are an aspen tree that I planted ten years ago.
Here my truckload of leaves from my generous neighbor.
Some of these went onto the refurbished, topped off, raised bed, after I mixed chicken bone meal, crushed eggs, and coffee grounds into the top layer of soil. Now that will sit until Spring to mellow and settle.
More will go around the miniature fruit trees and onto containers, as a mulch, then the rest onto the fig tree and forsythia and wildflower border.
Tree leaves are the best soil protector, enricher, weed prevention, soil conditioner on this green earth.
I harvested the last of the ripe chili peppers. They were a mixture of about 1/2 Serranos, and the rest about half Cayenne and half Thai with some Tabasco peppers too.
This is the recipe I used, mostly. It's from the this website.
1 pound washed and sliced chili peppers (as above)
1/2 cup peeled garlic cloves, sliced into 1/8 inch thick slices.
1 1/2 cups distilled white vinegar
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp fine sea salt.
I sliced the chili peppers to about 1/4 inch slices. Then mixed in the salt, sugar, and garlic in a pyrex bowl. Then I added the vinegars, stirred, and covered with plastic wrap. The recipe called for letting the mixture sit in the fridge for one day. I let it sit for two days, because I needed some rest the next day.
Then I transferred the mixture to a stainless steel pot, used the outdoor stove to bring to a boil, and simmered for 40 minutes with occasional stirring.
Then I carefully transferred to the big blender, put on the top, put a towel over that, and blended to make a smooth puree.
Here's how it looks.
I pruned and cleaned up the main clump of Triple Crown blackberry. I removed all of the spent canes from this year. I had already tipped the new canes at about 5 feet high. I left those in place.
The main weed problem is a wild clematis. It vines around everything and sends long underground runners. I pulled out and cut off all I could. Then I applied a tree leaf carpet, about six inches or so thick. I left last year's in place, they have mostly rotted away.
That's most of the maintenance I do each year. Maybe two hours today, maybe an hour of little things in the summer.
I also cleaned up the newer clumps, the same way. That area has two younger Triple Crown clumps and a dwarf variety, Ponca. I didn't add the leaves yet, because some grass clumps need to be removed.
Here is the Nikita's Gift persimmon tree at ten years old. It doesn't really get any maintenance now, other than minor pruning.
Here is the Saijo persimmon tree, same age.
Now I just need so e good persimmon recipes.
I was able to collect some tree leaves from the yard. Most are yet to fall. It was enough to cover the garlic beds.
Now the work is completed. They are ready for winter. The leaves will even out the soil temperature and prevent weeds. This year's garlic needed almost no weeding at all for the entire growin season, a big benefit.
This raised bed is completed now. I finished stapling in the plastic chicken-feed bag liners. In total, I've added ten 5-gallon bucket loads of good garden soil, to raise the level. I mixed in some chopped marigold "green manure". The soil surface is now smoothed.
I'll add more eggshell, then cover with a nice layer of tree leaves. Then it's ready for winter.
When dry season begins in Spring, I'll stain the "new" treated (reused) 2x4 braces. I think this is the strongest, most likely to last, method to keep the sides vertical and square for the long term.
About every ten days, I make a big batch of dog food with chicken thighs as the main meat ingredient (for the taurine). I portion it out into 7 oz portions, refrigerate a three day supply, and freeze the portions to because later. As a vegetarian, I don't have bones from my own meals.
The chicken thighs are slow cooked overnight, and the bones just fall off. I dry the bones. In the past, I threw them into the woodstove, to supply minerals in the ash, which I scattered onto the garden beds. We decommissioned the woodstove (breathing is a good thing), so now what to do with the chicken thigh (femur) bones?
After drying thoroughly, I pounded and ground them using a granite mortar and pestle. The came out like this.
They are a bit crunchy and a bit fluffy. Not that different from purchased bone meal, except less dense.
I also grind eggshells the same way.
Bonemeal is mainly a phosphorous source, especially good for bulbs, roots, flowers. From wikipedia, the NPK is about 3:15:0 and calcium content is about 12%. (a sobering, sad, macabre comment in Wikipedia, "In desperation, farmers collected the bones from major battlefields like the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of Austerlitz to crush them and refertilize the soil.")
From The Spruce, bone meal promotes flowering, fruit, and seed production, and is slow release over about four months. I imagine that is slower in winter months, and is retained in the soil for later. There is also some magnesium and zinc. Acidic soil (which mine is) is needed to break down the bone meal.
Eggshells are mainly a calcium source. They are 95% to 97% Calcium Carbonate (Wikipedia). My soil tests low for calcium, due to Pacific NW rains and other factors. Eggshell is also a soil conditioner.
Here I added both additives to the recently planted German garlic bed.
It would be better to add before planting the garlic, but I didn't think of it. I used about a cup of each. Then used a small stirrup hoe to work it into the top inch of soil, well above the planted garlic cloves.
Here's the first raised bed with growing Nemagone mustard.
So far, so good. I don't know if they will grow through a hard freeze. Time will tell. They are reported to die with a 26°F freeze. If they don't survive, I'll just cover with leaves for weed prevention.
I'm growing the Nemagone as a sort of biofumigant. Also here. It's meant to reduce potential pest and disease load in the soil, as well as being a ground cover to reduce weed seed load, and a green manure crop to return nutrients and humus to the soil. That's a lot to hope for. It also may not be necessary, since I don't bring in plants or soil from elsewhere (except tree leaves) and I rotate my crops. But I don't think it hurts, and it might help.
I had these through the winter, two years ago. They survived, and then grew very well in late winter / early Spring.
These are the bearded irises that I planted early to mid Sept. in containers. I've kept the containers on the walls of the cement block raised beds, where they get the most sunlight and also are very easy to pick out tiny weed seedlings before they establish.
These are the rhizomes that I cleaned up from my old iris plantings, which had become weedy and I could not care for the last couple of years. So far, I think they look excellent.
I don't know if it's good they are putting on so much growth before hard winter begins. Just have to wait and see. Irises are rugged. I don't know that they are even as prone to rot as some writers state. My main challenge has been fungal and bacterial leaf diseases. I hope that growing them in a well draining, fresh, potting soil helps with that.
A couple of those rhizomes are quite large. Fingers crossed for blooms next Spring.
These are the new varieties that I bought, which I planted in mid Sept.
They haven't grown quite as much as the old rhizomes that I cleaned up, but they seem to be establishing nicely too.
I've also been removing all of the old leaves as they turn brown and soften. Maybe that will help with disease prevention.
Here's the hot peppers sauce. I filtered it through a sieve for liquid hot sauce, like Tabasco sauce. I like this better, It's hotter and richer due to the added garlic and fermentation. Fermented hot sauce contains lactic acid (like yogurt and sauerkraut), whereas the commercial version has acetic acid (like vinegar).
This time it was mostly Serrano peppers (especially the hybrid variety, Altiplano) with some Thai and Tabasco peppers for extra heat.
The pulp is also good for cooking, so I saved that too.
This is a really rewarding project, from starting seeds to making sauce.
Today I installed about 90% of the plastic lining for the renovated raised bed.
My helper poured two buckets of good garden soil in the trench on one side. I smoothed it. That will get some trench composting of kitchen scraps for a few weeks, before fully covering.
If one is going to use this type of slotted cornerstone / 2x6 structure, the higher rebar with drilled 2x4s for strengthening are necessary. I learned the hard lesson, without those strengtheners it will gradually splay outward and fall apart. Then it's a LOT of work renovating it.
I do want to stain the 2x4s and maybe the sides, but that has to wait for dry season, maybe April or May.
Today I raked red maple leaves and spread them on the Music and Lorz garlic bed.
Before spreading the leaves, I scattered coffee grounds on the surface. I usually throw the paper filters into the compost, but why? They are just wood cellulose, which is most of what is in the leaves. So I laid the coffee filters on the ground before spreading leaves on top, so they would not look untidy.
This year, I kept the leaf mulch on the garlic bed until harvest. That meant, zero weeds. Great garlic crop, too.
This year's supply of garlic is already getting low. I decided to plant another four rows for next year.
German Red is described as pungent and highly flavored, which we would like. The bulbs in the package had about 9 cloves each, so four bulbs made almost exactly four rows of nine cloves each.
German Red is a hard neck, Rocambole type.
This being German garlic, maybe it should be called "Knoblauch", but I'll probably forget that.
This half of this raised bed had tomato plants until I cleared them out today.
I gave them organic vegetable fertilizer, but no other soil improvement. I'll save coffee grounds and eggshells for a surface treatment, before covering with tree leaves for the winter.
The fig trees have produced a lot of figs to dry, over the past two or three weeks. Oven the Brunswick and Smith varieties. The Brunswick figs are larger and have tan centers. The Smith are richer flavor, red centers, but both are very sweet.
I'm dehydrating most of them for use this winter.
The pepper plants that survived the winter, did go on to produce peppers. There was "good" and "not-so-good".
The Thai peppers did the best of all. They were much larger and much more productive than my first year Thai peppers.
The Tabasco peppers also did well. Also better than first year plants.
The Serrano did not do well at all. First year Serranos did better (No photo). Similar for the Jalapeño, below. Not bad, in the end, but no really better than new plants.
I'll have to see if the Cayenne labels are legible. I'm not sure which is which.
In the end, it was fun seeing if the pepper plants would overwinter. More than half survived. Some did really well, and others just "OK". I wont do it this winter, opting instead for new plants.
Also, one first year plant that was unlabeled looks like it might be another Tabasco. Or maybe, Thai. It was a very pretty plant, and made lots of tiny peppers.
The large growing bag containers, contained in a planter and with drip irrigation, worked out nicely for the peppers. I think the really small ones - Thai and Tabasco - might do equally well in a container flower garden.
I harvested enough hot peppers to make a couple of batches of hot sauce.
That's good, because that's the main reason I grew them. Most are a hybrid Serrano type called "Altiplano" but there are also some non-hybrid Serranos, Thai, and Tabasco peppers for more hotness. Also some red-ripe Jalapeños, which sweeten when red. The hybrid Serranos are much larger and more productive, than the non-hybrids, and have good flavor and hotness.
These are in a brine, with some crushed garlic, a touch of sugar to feed the fermentation, and a sauerkraut juice inoculum (1 tbsp) for lots of lactic acid bacteria. After three days, there are lots of bubbles.
Soon I will process them and filter for liquid hot sauce and save the solids for cooking.
This is another of the raised beds built with tinker-toy-like method. I think the corner stones are a product called "Old Castle" stone planter blocks. The center has a hole, for rebar to make them stay in place. The sides have slots for the boards.
Unfortunately, the blocks tend to settle. I think moles undermine them. I don't think they are intended to be stacked three-high, but that's the height I want. After a few years, the sides were sloping outwardand soon at risk of falling over.
Above photo is after repair. Below photo is before repair. I dug out the soil on one side, so I could move the blocks and boards. Unfortunately, I wound up having to dig out and move all four sides and corner stones.
The longer rebar goes a little deeper, but also sticks out the top. I cut 2x4, preserved boards (upcycled from fencing) to make braces. After drilling holes for the rebar, they look like the top photo. They won't let the corner blocks lean outwards, and wont allow sideways movement either.
Next, I'll replace the plastic liner so wood is not against soil, to delay / reduce rotting. Then add a few buckets of soil to replenish settling effect. Finally, I want to stain the 2x4 braces so they last longer, and because I like the look better, lime the bed in the foreground of the top photo.
The 2x4's give a nicer finished look, and I can also sit on them for so e garden tasks.
This is a bit delayed. Last week I harvested green beans, the last of the sauce tomatoes, and some nore figs.
I cut, blanched, and froze the green beans. I spread the beans on a sheet pan to freeze, then transferred to a freezer bag.
I didn't weigh them, but I estimate the green bean yield as about 15 pounds this year, spread over a few harvests. It was a lot of beans.
Last week I harvested all of the green beans, and cut up all of the plants. Then I added chopped marigold plants to the soil, covered by leaf mould from last fall.
This area will have tomatoes next year. The soil level has dropped, so I added about three inches of soil from a fallow atea that has nit grown to atoes or potatoes for several years. Then I sowed Nemagon mustard seeds, for green manure crop / winter groundcover / soil benefits for tomatoes. I watered them in, and in a week there are mustard seedlings germinating.
Here's the completed tropical shirt quilt. I'm pretty happy with the result.
The chestnut trees are making some nice nuts now. I planted the trees about six years ago, They are grafted varieties, hybrids of Japanese with European species. They are disease resistant, and can pollinate each other.
The pawpaws surprised me by making a nice crop. I did hand-pollinate them. All of the grafted tops died off, and now they are multi-trunked trees of the rootstocks. I put protective mesh bags on the fruits this summer, and thinned them to a few per bunch.
The pawpaws have a nice flavor, mild, sort of like mango. The texture is like avocado.They are nicecto have as a treat.
The chestnuts are starchy, like potato. Roasted in the air fryer with some oil and salt, they remind me a bit of French Fries.
