Winter Garden 2014/2015

Most of my summer garden has gone away but I'm still picking hot peppers and making hot sauce, about 1 bottle per week. These plants should last into December when we re likely to get frost. I may not need to plant peppers next summer as I have so many bottles already.

Remember I was saving garlic and potatoes? Well, I planted the garlic for my winter garden and much of it has sprouted. I'm pretty happy about that. It makes me feel all self-sufficient to plant my own saved seed (clove in this case). Garlic is a winter crop here so should be ready to dig up around April. Potatoes get planted around February so I'm hoping that my luck with garlic carries on to spuds.

I haven't planted anything else for winter yet, not sure if I will. I've been focusing on my section-day-hike of the Florida Trail and that is taking a lot of time, energy, and funds now that the sections are more than a 4 hour drive away.

My summer garden is gone as well. I still have some carrots under the ground as well as some escarole in cold frames for late season picking. My garlic has been planted and it will winter over for larger bulbs come next summer. Anything else is a perennial like asparagus, strawberry, and a few herbs.

My gophers are inactive at the moment.
Duane

Interesting the different growing seasons in different geographical areas. Here in eastern washington everything is dormant. Although, my elephant garlic is starting to poke out the ground. Summer planted kale, now dormant, should start producing again late february.

Fortunately, my ground is soft loam so I don't have to rototill or dig much so I can plant my spuds in late feb even if the ground isn't thoroughly dry.

It is time now, today, to prune grapes, peach trees, plum trees and spray the peach trees to help prevent leaf drop in spring. Need to also cut out last year's raspberry canes.

True packlite. My neighbor's raised beds are full of greens at this very moment. As I type, the weather report says it's 69 degrees outside (but that's really warm this time of year, even for us, and it did freeze last night).

My garlic is doing great, should be lots to dig up in a couple of months. I spent last weekend preparing th rest of my garden for planting, tilling (Mantis mini tiller) in compost and sprinkling a little organic sulfur. I will plant potatoes in one section in the next couple of weeks. I haven't decided what to do with my third section. I still have plenty of ghost pepper hot sauce from last season so may do something other than peppers, although a mild (to me) jalapeno relish might be OK. I'll be using my Earthbox for tomatoes. That worked well for me last year. Tomatoes need to be on the porch as it get too hot for them in the garden in the summer.

I may try expanding my garden also, we'll see. Instead of three 8x8 squares, make one long 32 by 8 plot.

Onion bulbs are growing great for me right now.

Where are you located?

My onions never do much. We have wild chives and small green onions that grow all over so I do scrounge those, but the ones I've planted didn't grow a bit. They lived, but didn't get any bigger.