Every morning I check the weather and it says the same thing for the next ten days: sunny with highs in the 70s. The weather man hasn’t checked the calendar apparently.
I’ve been stuck inside processing tomatoes all week. I finished up the most recent batch of spaghetti sauce and headed outdoors.
Since first frost seems far away, I tucked my broccoli starts into some former onion beds. I don’t know if they’ll grow to their full maturity before the weather gets really cold, but they’ll do better in the garden than they would under the grow light in the basement. I gave those starts plenty of compost and watered them in well.
I also planted a Fall and Winter lettuce mix I bought from Cook’s Garden. They sell seasonal lettuce seed mixtures and I planted some salad greens in an easily protected spot. Hopefully we can have salads well into Fall/Early Winter.
The nice thing about fall gardening is the low population of bugs and slugs. I peeled away all the slug chewed chard leaves and the garden instantly looked neater. If the broccoli really gets a good warm period to grow, the blue green broccoli and the rainbow chard should be just beautiful.
There are very few mosquitoes these days so I don’t have to coat myself in Deet to visit the zinnias.
The tomato plants are still producing and I bring in a colander full of ripe tomatoes every day to await processing on the back porch.
I pull carrots to be frozen daily and snip herbs for dinner recipes.
But it was nice to take a break from putting away food to plant some more food. I may be pushing my luck. I know that the expected date of first frost is right around the corner. But I am living my life one ten day forecast at a time and I plan to get outdoors to enjoy every last stolen moment of it.
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