Fall Garden

I wish I had more pictures today, but the truth is that it has been extremely rainy  again this past week.  On Tuesday we got two inches of rain in a single afternoon!  In two days we had gotten five inches.

The garden seems to be coming back to life a little now that the nights have been cooling off.  The peppers are producing again.  I found some blister beetles eating my eggplant, and the plants look happier now that they have been removed.  There was also an unpleasant discovery of squash bugs among the pumpkins, but it doesn't seem to be slowing them down much.

Most of the corn has been harvested at this point.  I did a germination test and we got a 99% germination rate!

The fall starts I planted seem to really appreciate the rain.  The test is to see if we have enough warm days left in the year for them to mature.  The first frost is unpredictable, often it's 80 degrees out and humid at Christmas, but occasionally we'll have a chilly October, too.  It makes it hard to plan Halloween costumes.  I remember from my childhood one year being a woodland elf in a little leaf skirt and short-sleeved tunic and freezing.  I also remember being an old fashioned ghost with lots of draping white cloth and pouring sweat.

The most vibrant thing in the garden right now is the yuca (or cassava or manioc, which ever name you prefer), which is becoming very tall and thinking about flowering.  I have three whole rows of it this year.  I started last year with just two stalks from a friend.  We've gotten stalks before, but for various reasons they always dried out before we planted them.  I grew five plants last year from the two stalks, and this year we had so many!

That's it for the garden right now.  I'm still working on cleaning up the summer beds.  The winter starts look nearly ready to transplant.