The Fall Garden

 The Fall garden is going to be very scaled down - not because I'm getting smarter but because my beds are all full and I have very little free space for planting.

So, here's a little garden tour and pictures of what I got started today.

Last year I left the arugula as long as I could so I could get seeds for this year. By the time I gathered seed pods, the plants had dropped a lot of seeds on the ground so by mid-August, we had a lot of arugula. We've been eating it almost every day. I didn't plant more today but I will get more planted this week.

These are the seeds I planted:

And . . 

I want to plant komatsuna, which is kind of a spinach/mustard combination that is frost hardy. Not sure if I want to plant those in the mineral tubs or in one of the raised beds, which are all full at the moment. I'll probably plant komatsuna in two tubs and then plant more in the bed where the basil is. Never enough garden space!

Obviously we love greens. I was able to put a thick covering of straw over these, then cover them with a moving blanket for the first few frosts we had and it wasn't until late January that the freeze killed most of the greens. As soon as I got the mess cleared out, I spread more seeds, covered it all with straw and by very early spring, we had fresh greens again. I'm hoping these will sprout and produce some decent greens before we have a hard freeze.

There's hardly a place in the garden that doesn't have a volunteer tomato growing.

This is a bed where I had cucumbers growing but two tomatoes have popped up. They're big enough that, depending on what variety they are, they could produce a tomato or two before frost so I left them. I planted Tatsoi in this bed. I love it so much that I also planted it in two of the mineral tubs. I could easily have a grilled chicken breast or a hamburger patty and a big bowl of Tatsoi and just eat it raw. It supposedly is a good source of Vitamins A, C and K, calcium and Iron. It's actually my very favorite green. Almost all winter and up until it bolted in the late spring, I would pick it and eat it every time I walked by it.

Everything else I planted yesterday was planted in the mineral tubs.

That's five tubs and there are five more behind where I was standing. 

We still have two 4 x 8 beds with okra in them.  You can see where I cut off some leaves today. There's a fig tree just to the right of this bed and it was getting hard to walk through there without getting smacked in the face by those big okra leaves. We're now getting enough okra to eat almost every day and still have enough to freeze dry a full load about twice a week.

I don't want to say this too loud but I'm kinda ready for the basil to stop growing. There are four plants in this bed and nine more in buckets. I don't think I'll need to grow much basil for the next couple of years (but I know I will!).

And there's a tomato growing in the basil bed.

There's a 4 x 8 bed that I'm going to plant kohlrabi in that bed.

Probably the first or second week of October, I'll start growing lettuce, broccoli and radish sprouts in the basement. I can also grow a decent amount of leaf lettuce under the grow lights so we'll have that for when a hard freeze takes out our other greens.

Waiting for seeds to germinate and plants to start growing is so exciting!