Yes I know it is fall, but the spinach that I planted on September 19th, will be overwintered and be the first greens out of my garden come spring. I usually plant earlier, but the bed still had sweet potatoes. I still think it will be big enough to survive the winter. Right now they have their first set of true leaves. Hopefully they will get a few more before the ground freezes.
Of course they won't survive if they are covered in weeds, so MondayI went out and weeded the whole bed. The weeds are all from my compost that I added, except the morning glory weeds. They were dropped there by the morning glories that shared the bed with the sweet potatoes. My compost always has lots of weeds. Most of them are edible. Dill is by far the most common weed. Second comes cilantro. I also always end up with some borage and squash seedlings. And for some reason there is always nightshade seedlings. I don't let nightshade grow in the garden at all, but it is a common weed in the neighborhood. I always wonder how I get that many seeds in my garden since it never ever goes to seed here. It must be the birds.
It took a while to get the whole bed weeded out, but it was a nice sunny time and I was very happy to get out into the garden. I'd been stuck flat on my back for a part of last week when I hurt my neck. Thank goodness it didn't last too long. I was going stir crazy.
I decided to remove the row cover for a while (hence the sticks to keep the cats out). Maybe permanently. Some of the spots without spinach was because of damping off. I think the 80F day we had on Saturday confused everything and weakened the plants. I never intended to leave the row cover on all winter, but I do like to keep the leaf miners off when the plants are young. I'm guessing the leaf miners are long gone by now. Usually they attack in September, but not October.
And speaking of row covers, I'm wondering if it is time to take the row covers off the carrots now. I'd love the row cover off to give the carrots a bit more light to size up before the frosts come. I want the carrots to see a frost or two before I lift them for the winter. It will make them sweeter. Usually in Massachusetts the carrot flies last through September. We normally have two hatchings, May-June and August-September but we don't have a third hatching here and October is usually safe. But has the weather been messed up enough this year that we will see another hatching in October? It is so hard to know. The insect pests have been about three weeks early this year, so we might have time for a third. Oh the dilemmas.
I see your watering system in the picture and I was wondering if you ever add more soil to the raised bed and how do you do it without burying your pipes. For me, pulling off tomatoes or eggplants etc., will mean losing soil and also the soil in the bed seems to settle down, requiring more soil every year. So I dump a lot of soil into the bed every year. I wish I could set up a watering system like yours!
ReplyDeleteMost of my beds I use a sprinkler for. It is just a couple weird ones that have the in ground parts. This one has the ends all on one side. When I add compost or dig the soil for instance removing the sweet potatoes earlier from the bed, I just pick them up and put them off of the bed. The lines are T-tape which is flexible so it is easy.
DeleteI am having the hardest time with spinach this year; getting it to germinate indoors under 24hr lights. Finally broke down and bought transplants. I think the soil is just now cool enough to direct sow; so I will try that as well.
ReplyDeleteoh heck, now i find out i should have planted my spinach seeds in late-august, early-sept. oh well, at least i got some mache in. boy is mache slow growing for me.
ReplyDeletelol I swear I blogged about putting in spinach seeds when I took out my sweet potatoes. But yeah I do usually do it earlier.
DeleteMy spinach is almost as big as yours! I am so happy to know that I did it right!
ReplyDelete