Thinking about the new year

I knelt down to have a look at the remaining lettuce this weekend. Unfortunately, it looks pretty frozen. The weight of the snow and ice on the plastic cover pulled the sides up far enough that the lettuce was exposed to below zero wind chills. I will check again on Christmas Day when a high near 40 F is forecast, but I think this may be the end of the 2009 garden.

It is hard to believe that we will be starting seeds for the next garden season in only 8 weeks. It seems very close.

I have been perusing several gardening books online, they all receive excellent reviews on Amazon:
The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses - Eliot Coleman;
The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener (A gardener's supply book) - Eliot Coleman;
Backyard Market Gardening (Good Earth) - Andy, W Lee;
Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting - R.J. Ruppenthal;
Sprout Garden - Revised Edition - Mark Mathew Braunstein;

Happy Holidays to everyone and a happy and prosperous new year. The best is yet to come!

Final harvest...almost

I intended to make the final harvest this past weekend, however there was so much lettuce that I decided to harvest only half, put the plastic cover back on and get the rest next weekend. I was able to harvest several carrots, a beet, lettuce, kale and parsley. In future years with more planting, we should be able to eat fresh veggies from the garden right up to the New Year with nothing more than a thin layer of plastic covering the beds. We just need to get the timing right for the Fall planting. I believe that will be somewhere in mid-August.

Update March 23, 2011: Based on subsequent experience, mid-July would be the latest for us to plant in order to harvest greens through the winter.

Potato harvest

Last weekend, we harvested the rest of the potatoes. It was fun digging through the soil, a bit like finding Easter eggs on Sunday morning. My youngest daughter and her friend enjoyed helping.

With the Holidays quickly approaching and more left to do to prepare for Winter, I have decided to do a final harvest from the garden this weekend and then pick up again in the Spring. I will be reporting on my indoor kitchen gardening experiments in the meantime.

Late Autumn update

I have not figured out how to back-date posts so I will post something I wrote on October 27 and then continue with this week's update. October 27: This past week, all of the trees that were green finally put on their autumn colors. There are many trees that are bare now, but the garden is still growing and producing beautiful greens. I was especially impressed by the lettuce when I took off the plastic cover Monday morning. We are having a bit of a "warm" spell. I don't know if it qualifies as an Indian Summer, but the sunshine and relative warmth are appreciated. November 11: I harvested some kale, lettuce, parsley, carrots and beets Monday morning. We had beautiful weather in the 60's Saturday and Sunday thanks to hurricane Ida pushing the warm Gulf air up our way. It often happens that when there is a hurricane churning in the Gulf, our weather is as perfect as one can imagine. When I looked at the weather forecast for the week, it looked like it would stay above freezing, so I left the plastic covers off the garden frames. To my surprise, we had a heavy frost last night. I am hoping that the lettuce will survive. Because my last planting of lettuce did not come up, there is a lot of open space in the garden frames, but there is enough left to experiment with extending the season.