It's been weeks since I was here due to a very busy canning season. Now the garden is empty and the jars are full, canning kettles, etc, put away until next year. I still need to clean and reorganize my storage room in the basement but that will come later this winter when I am recovered from my second hip replacement and bored with winter inactivity. Surgery is scheduled for Oct 29. All of the saleable garlic has been sold and the seed stock has been planted. One of our granddaughters and her husband came to spend the weekend and help me plant. The three of us put almost 2,000 cloves into the ground in about 5 hours time, one clove at a time. The next day it was mulched with wheat straw and is ready for a winter of growing roots. The tops will come up through the mulch in late March. It grows quickly and will be all harvested by the end of July. I should have my new varieties arriving any day now. It will not take long to get them into the ground because I only bought a pound of each. They will be grown out for seed stock and replanted next fall for something to sell in two years.
A few frosty nights, one of them down into the upper teens, finished my garden. I was ready for it to be finished. Boxes of tomatoes, pears and plums piled up in the kitchen kept me busy. I pulled up and removed the worst of the weeds that were going to seed. Pigweed is the worst. I can get rid of that by just pulling the plants and hauling them to the burn pile. Bindweed isn't easy to control and I don't use chemicals, so it will always be with me, making a carpet between rows and plants, and climbing anything going upward. I spend a lot of time with a hoe and also down on my knees. You can feel blessed if you don't have bindweed. The roots break off easily and every one of them makes a new plant.
The ranchers around us are still rotating cattle through hay fields to use the last of the pasture. We had some rain about a month ago, followed by nice Indian Summer weather, just enough to get grass growing again. Our neighbor will bring about a dozen cows with fall calves to our place in the next week or so. Some ranchers are still cutting and baling hay. They can bale at 20-25% moisture without it molding when the weather is cold vs needing about 10% in the summer. No mold, no danger of a haystack fire. Then they feed it to the cattle before spring and all is well.
