Hello, hivers and garden lovers!
Today is the second day of October, so it's time for my end of September-beginning of October garden post.
September was an interesting month. We still haven't gotten any frost at night, and there's no frost in the forecast for at least the next week. We usually have frost before the end of September, but not this year. It's looking like we're going to have a mild fall, a bit warmer than average. Of course, that could change pretty quickly this time of year, but I'll enjoy the nice weather while it's here.
As for the garden, Most of the crops are done, with the exception of the carrots and the tomatoes. It's pretty normal for the carrots to still be growing, they seem to like the cooler weather in the fall.
The tomato plants have been doing a lot better than I had expected for this time of year. They're still growing and trying to flower. The tomatoes are ripening more slowly than they had been, but I guess that's to be expected with the cooler nights and shorter days. I picked tomatoes today, something I don't remember having done in October in the past with our shorter growing season here where I live. There's still a fair amount of tomatoes on some of the plants, those plants seem to be long season plants.
Because I'm easily distracted while doing a task such as picking tomatoes, I ended up cutting back all the tomato plants that were done producing. It's easier to see which plants still have tomatoes once I cleared out all the plants that were done. It also gives me a bit of a head start on cleaning out the garden, the dreaded fall task.
Let's take a look at the tomato garden. I had already cut back the other plants when I remembered to take some pictures.
These are the plants that are still producing.
There's one plant at the end of the row that I cut out that still has tomatoes. It's a different variety from the rest of the plants in that row. You can see that the marigolds in with the tomato plants are really liking this weather.
These are the Roma paste tomato plants. I picked all the ripe and almost ripe tomatoes from these plants after I took the picture.
The green bean plants that I left in are mostly starting to die back now, but the seed pods are starting to get dry. I'll pick the dry ones next week. We're getting a bit of rain this weekend and I want the pods to be dry when I pick them.
Here my carrot patch. It seems to be doing really well.
The carrots that I planted are from a packet of multi color seeds, so there's a variety of different carrots in the bed. There seems to be a fair amount of white carrots. The tops of the white carrots seem to grow up out of the ground, and they turn green where they're exposed to the light.
My garden compost pile seems to be full of life. I threw a bunch of tomato seeds and skins in the pile several weeks ago, and I think all the seeds sprouted. There's also a couple of bean plants and some cantaloupe plants growing in there, as well as a couple of potato plants.
The marigold bed is continuing to flourish.
The borage plants seem to have started growing like crazy again now that the hot weather is gone. The local bumblebees and honey bees are happy about that. The dead plant behind the borage is another borage plant that bloomed during the summer. I think the August heat and dryness killed it off.
One more picture. This borage plant is at the end of the rows of tomato plants. I had been removing all the small borage plants over the summer because the grow everywhere, but I decided to leave this plant after reading something about borage being good for tomato plants. The combination of marigolds and borage is colorful, and the bees really like it.
That's all I have post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
