Lawn seed

We pulled up sod, roto-tilled, and raked-in Eco-Lawn seed on a 10x20ft strip behind our house around November 28. Here's a picture of our first watering.

We hope that this lawn will be weed resistant and require less water. If it looks good this Spring, maybe we'll use it in more places of our yard, along with native and drought resistant plants.

Guavas

We have a pineapple guava bush growing next to our fence. Thought it was just a hedge until these things started to fall off into the lawn around mid November.

This year, the individual guavas are pretty large and sweet. One was about the size of a lemon, but sweeter, of course.

Garden Wrap Up

Still growing some Arugula in the Earth Box. I expect I can continue through November, until we have frost at night. But the patio is warm in the mornings, and may be protected from frost, so I'll give it a try as far into the winter as possible.




Here is my last tomato plant. We ate all those red tomatoes in arugula salads during all last week (October 25-30). Some animal (raccoon?) helped finish off some of the tomatoes we didn't get to.





Today, I pulled up the tomato plant and chopped it up for the compost bin. I was so happy and excited to see actual compost in the bin! This is the first time I "turned" the compost. It is not a "hot" compost pile, but it is still compost never the less!

Fall Clean-Up

The small garden boxes did well this year. There is still asparagus growing in the back planter, but the front two are cleared out for next year.

I raked into the front two planter boxes some compost crop mix seed from Bountiful Gardens. It is a mix of wheat, vetch, rye and fava beans. It is supposed to fix nitrogen into the soil.

The large planter box did poorly. This is the second year in a row. I pulled up the plants and, again, there is a grub infestation. It seems the Japanese beetles will reproduce here every year. However, I cannot blame the grubs for the poor spring, because they were not there until August this year, because I manually picked them all out before doing the spring transplant.


I suspect the soil is diseased (blight?), because of the black spots on my tomato leaves. But just to make sure it is not lack of nutrition, I tested the soil today. The pH test reports the soil is still 6.5 (slightly acid). That is the same pH I measured in 2005, which was one of my best years.

My plan is to bring in new dirt and rebuild the planter box this spring. No sense in putting compost seed into this dirt.

Canning

Cooked down the last two to three weeks of ripe tomatoes to make 6 pints of marinara sauce. My own recipe simply adds onion, olive oil, garlic, red wine and spices to the tomato sauce. I like to reheat it with sliced mushrooms and use it over pasta with Parmesan cheese.

Old Garden Pictures

Here is a link to my garden pictures from 2005 to 2008:
http://www.pbase.com/ercarlso/garden

Ripe Fruits

Harvest has been a bit late this year. First batch of melons came during the end of July, and continued for a month. Second batch seems to be coming.






Have had cherry tomatoes for several weeks, but this is the first big batch of normal tomatoes. Cooked these down into sauce.