My poor garden . . I feel so bad for these plants. They want to grow so badly. We’ll have warm days and the rhubarb sends up new leaves.
Then we have a hard freeze and it all dies back. I see there’s been some digging going on. It’s probably squirrels burying walnuts but we have raccoons, possums, rabbits . . you name it and they get in the back yard and dig and tear things up.
The walking onions are surviving. I had hoped to be able to get green onion tops from them through the winter but that isn’t happening. There’s some major digging going on in that back corner there too.
I have three of these very pathetic looking brussels sprouts. I’m still getting more than we can eat. We like brussels sprouts, but not every day. The ones on the lower end are the ones that grew when it was still hot. They’re fluffy and not tight little balls and not good to eat. I probably should have removed all those but I didn’t.
Last year I had the single car side of the upstairs garage full of plants – totally full! This year, I only tried to save the bay leaf trees and the rosemary plants. In the blue tub are the ginger lilies. The orange tub has lemongrass. Vince pulls out the rosemary and bay leaves on the warmer days and brings them all back in when the temps are going to drop below about 30 degrees.
This is an area where I’m going to try to do some lasagna or deep mulch type gardening next year. I’ve been saving boxes and probably in late January or early February, I’ll spread the boxes out, cover them with a deep layer of straw. I’ll keep it watered and add high nitrogen fertilizer to breakdown the straw and get it to sprouting. Once the straw has sprouted, I’ll add more high nitrogen which should burn up whatever has sprouted and help breakdown the straw more. In April, I’ll add all the compost and leaves that are in bags and it should be ready to plant by the first of May. We’ll see how that goes.
I want to plant pie type pumpkins, maybe a couple of big, decorator type pumpkins, Seminole pumpkins, Thelma Sanders squash, hopefully, in a couple of years, the soil will be deep enough to plant the sweet potatoes there. I can let all the vines run wild and not have to be walking through them til time to harvest. Probably another one of those ideas that works way better in my head than it will in reality.