October has been a busy month around here. One of the projects I have taken on is raising my raised bed – higher. You can see in the photo below that I have finished about half of the beds. I was really pushing to get them all done before I left for Minnesota and Wisconsin, but that just didn’t happen. In fact, I still haven’t finished them.
Raising the beds higher
I have two full beds of pepper still growing and producing, and I can’t bring myself to pull them out just to finished those two beds. I haven’t been able to find onion sets to plant yet, and usually don’t plant those for another 2-4 weeks anyway, so the peppers can keep on growing. The seeds I have started (winter veg) are so far behind that I broke down (again – happened last year too) and bought things from a local nursery so I could get some of the beds planted and started before I left town. We have been still quite warm here (high 80′sF) with warm nights in the 70′s and very humid over the past few weeks. I haven’t even thought to start lettuce yet, but that’s alright, some of the volunteers are coming up in the walkways between the beds and I have transplanted them. They are growing really well and I can start picking lettuce!
planting some winter veg
The cabbage, lettuce and broccoli in the photo above where planted 2 weeks ago and are growing really well. They are growing so well that you can’t even see much of the exposed dirt anymore, they are filling out nicely!
Time to harvest the lemon grass (and some comfrey too)
I have epazote (above) that has gone to seed and lemongrass that still needs to be harvested. The comfrey is looking very very happy with the cooler temps of fall. All of my herbs have really perked up after a long, hot, dry summer. I have taken cuttings from some of them and they are ready to get planted around the various herb and flower gardens. Little by little I will take more cuttings of the different herbs to use for plants swaps and also around my gardens.
Peppers are still growing
The pepper plants are also thriving in the cooler temps. I am always thrilled if I can keep the plants alive through the hot summer months because I know once the temps get into the low 90′s and 80′s that those plants will just take off and go wild. They haven’t proven me wrong this fall and I have a counter full of peppers. The hyacinth bean vine is also showing off, finally. It grows well in the hot summer months here, but it doesn’t bloom until late September or early October. Sometimes I get frustrated waiting, but when the temps drop (again, below the high 90′s) the vines really improve overall and the flowers start blooming.
I have many more things to plant and look forward to a wonderful fall/winter garden.
Thursday night we dipped down to 60F (I know that would be a heatwave for those of you living in the north part of the Northern Hemisphere) and all day Friday we hovered around 60F. I finally feel fall!
What is growing in your garden right now?
Sincerely, Emily
You can see what else I am up to over at Sincerely, Emily. The topics are varied, as I jump around from gardening to sewing to making bread or lotion and many things in between.
Sadly, we are freezing here. This was my first year and I didn’t prepare for the cold. we still have a few carrots but other than that all we have are weeds. Those little boogers can survive anything. next year I want to do hoop covers and put lots of warm mulch around the plants. Id also like to see how long we can keep lettuce.
Hi Nature Chic. What part of the world do you live in? Ah, yes, those weeds. Since we moved into this house I have spent a lot to time getting weeds out of the gardens, enlarging them and adding a lot of compost and mulch. It has made a big difference, but it is still ongoing. I have hoops over some of the veggie boxes. I don’t need to use them a lot down here in South Texas, but they do help from time to time and I am glad that I have them. A few winters ago I used them a lot and they helped.
I’m in the Utah valley. We had a long growing season which was great for my first year into the gardening world.
You are ramping down for the winter and we are ramping up for our summer. I love your garden! I love the idea of your cuttings and sharing at plant swaps. Thats what we want to do (as well as offload a lot of our now unwanted potted plants that we just can’t fit on Serendipity Farm even though its 4 acres!). I just found a really amazing tip for taking cuttings from thinned seedlings. It really works and Bev is messing about with tomato thinnings and pinched out bits, capsicum etc and its apparently much faster than growing from seed. Check it out here if you want to…
Again, love the garden and am about to check out Epazote and Hyacinth beans as I know that one is a Mexican culinary herb and the other one looks interesting…just have to see if we can get them here in Tasmania is the next hurdle! 
http://foodnstuff.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/more-mini-cuttings/
you can work back through the links in this post to the original mini cutting post. Its all very exciting and I can’t believe, as a horticulturalist, that I haven’t heard of this before? THAT is what makes hunting around online and following like minded bloggers so fantastic
Hi Fran. I hope your summer garden grows well for you. Summer is a really hard time to grow things here – it is just so hot. My best garden lat year was in the fall and winter and I am hoping for that again. I just finished raising another one of the existing beds and am ready to plant more.
Thanks for the link. With a spring and fall growing season here many people (including me from time to time) do take cuttings from their spring tomato plants and get them started for the August planting. I love doing cuttings from many of my herbs, but I have never taken the time to do them with other vegetables, other than tomatoes.
Here is a link to some information on the hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus) vine.http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/890/
I can start it from seed outside and it does well in our hot full sun. It doesn’t bloom until late fall, but it is beautiful when it does bloom. I would imagine you can grow it in Tassie, you just may have to start it indoors to get a jump on its growth. I collect all my seeds, because it tends to reseed easily.
Cheers for the heads up about the lablab beans. Hopefully we can grow them here as we have a pretty short growing season. I think that they are the same beans that were growing over a shed at an Asian ladies house that I used to go to to learn how to cook Asian food. Are they perennial? They look a bit like a flat snow pea but they are not sweet? I have been chasing what they were for years! She used them in heaps of things but it WAS a lot hotter in Western Australia than here…more like Texas to be honest!
. Our sun might give us a short season but we have the hole in the ozone layer directly over us (cheers world!) and our sun is deadly. We have a heat pad for growing our seeds on which gives us a better germination rate and I tend to soak them in my sprouter first before planting them out after they sprout. At least you know what is and isn’t going to sprout 
Cheers for your great comments Emily, we need all the help we can get with our veggies 
[...] the end of October, over at Not Dabbling in Normal, I posted some photos and notes about what was happening in our garden. There was a photo of one of the beds that had recently been raised higher and planted with [...]