The Pilgrims aren't going to make it through the winter
In the spirit of the "practical skills" queries...
Every once in a while I have a garden failure and it gets you to thinking, if I had to survive the winter, now what do I do.
This year it was a whole series of things gone wrong, starting with a load of composted cow manure that was so spent it was useless, to missmarked mail order seeds, to two weeks of steady rain.
Today I had to rototill under about a third of my garden.
I'm sure I could have salvaged the missmarked beans, if I'd been paying better attention. Supposed to be Yellow Romano bush beans, it soon became apparent they were pole beans. I put up a fence for them, hoping for yellow romano pole beans (just as good) but the flat green pods didn't turn yellow, at first, and when they did, the were huge inedible gnarly nasty things. I did manage to salvage a potful of the younger green ones when I ripped them out. And had I thought about it harder, I might have let the gnarly things go to dried beans instead of composting them.
Because the beans were pole beans, the fence they were on shaded one bank of cucumbers. The vines mildewed and died. The second bank of cucumbers, because of the rain, swelled to round orange baseballs too quickly. I can use these for sweet pickle chunks by peeling and scooping out the seeds, but these are usually kinda mushy and not as good.
The pumpkins and winter squash, planted on raised beds built over a layer of composted cow manure, are not growing vigorously enough. The manure I got didn't have a good strong smell and looked like it had been cut with something, maybe chopped leaves, but that observation was sort of after the fact. When even the yellow summer squash do nothing, you gotta wonder. Checked and the pH was totally wrong. Too acid. I've corrected with wood ashes and the winter keepers are coming along better but might be too little too late. The summer squash didn't make it.
And the weeds. The rain helped those along very nicely. I also had to take a weed wacker to the paths to tame the clover I grow there.
On a good note though, I have onions and beets coming along. Lettuce is petering out cuz of the heat but has been doing great. Carrots are almost ready. There are tons of tomatoes and I did get about 24 packs of string beans put up in the freezer last weekend, with the second planting coming on. I also have a row of hulless-seeded pumpkins in a new garden started this year. The soil there still sorta sucks (not enough compost material) but they seem to be starting to run.
Tomorrow, I'm going to do an emergency planting of beans and summer squash (seeds in reserve) in the empty plots. I put some 50-day pea seeds on the outside fence today too. We'll see if we can beat the frost.
I always keep some seed in reserve. It's a good practice for just such occasions. Should have made the decision 2 or 3 weeks ago though. I've got barely 65 days to Oct 1 when the hard frosts start.
