"Five Apple Farm: Growing It Larrapin"
Geek adventures with honey bees, gardens & more on a Blue Ridge homestead
A Few Good-Byes (Till We Meet Again…)
As the gold, silver, lavendar, brown and gray tones of winter set in, here are a few fond farewells, if only for a season:
• First lovely blossoms on a young apple tree planted in 2007 with two tiny apples in 2009…
• Fresh lettuce available by just walking out the door…
• Cherry blossoms and birds building nests everywhere…
• Flats of beet seedings just set out into an early spring garden bed…
• Bowls and stacks and buckets of green beans from the garden on every surface in the kitchen…
• Schools of butternut squash ripening along the vines….
May we all meet again as the seasons turn! As I say those good-byes, let me open new eyes to the (easily overlooked) gifts of winter.
What are you already missing from your garden 2009?
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Mid-November, no frost yet
Some days it looks like November around the farm. The wood pile, for one, is growing steadily. Since the ice storm of January brought down around 20 small to medium trees on our three acres, plus countless branches out of even larger trees, there’s been plenty of material to create an enormous wood pile that Mendy is steadily splitting and stacking for this winter. So that feels like November. But the balmy weather, t-shirt weather, doesn’t feel like November. We have yet to have a frost though the usual frost date is typically about October 20th.
Without a frost, there are some summer flowers still blooming away, like these Blue Sky morning glories planted to cover the corner of a chain link fence for the summer. They did a great job of doing that! While the cool wet Spring had them off to a very, very slow start…by late summer they were thick and bright.
True to their name, they open in the morning at sunrise and curl up closed in the evening. I loved this color. Next year I’d like to try the deep purple ones…
The yellow buddleia “Honeycomb” is still blooming beautifully. (The pink ones gave up the ghost weeks ago.) There are bees all over it all the time. In the mornings I find them curled up on the blooms, sleeping in them! Sleeping inside flowers, now that’s a good life.
Meanwhile, there are dahlias still covered with blooms though they are fairly raggedy by now. The bees are crazy for these dahlias too. I can’t think of the variety right now, but they are the kind you can grow from seed — Unwin’s mix I think? The other day I snapped this pic of a bumblebee enjoying a bloom.
And as I moved around to get the right angle on the picture, I noticed there was a different bumblee bee on every bloom on the plant—nearly a dozen! That’s larrapin!
Read MoreStarting Again, Again
I love the colors of Autumn in the Ozarks. Not just the trees, but how some fields take on new green, the sky is that amazing blue. Love it. Plus, late September and October means an end to the stunning summer heat, except this year the summer was cool and rainy alternating with wet and sweltering. My garden wasn’t too fond of this particular weather combination, though we did get lots of veggies as always. To be honest, the chickens probably got more that we did becuase there were so many things going on with my livelihood and life that I didn’t take the usual amount of time gardening.
So despite my heartfelt intentions to a) have a full-out fall garden and b) not fall off blogging around the dog days of late summer, I did not accomplish either of those goals. You’ll have that. Who knows what happens? This year it was a million things to do to take our little publishing company to the next level, a long October holiday back to our previous homeground in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina & Tennessee. Plus, I was just beat down by Bambi.
I’ve posted before about the deer/rabbit/raccoon challenges we’ve had since our old farm watchdog, Sugar Bear, died of old age in the springtime. We do have new farm dog named Ada, who is 8 months old and slowly growing (and growing!) into the job. But in the meantime, the onslaught of Bambi and her six best friends was just a bit too much. I faced a decision: fence or flee.
Since our veggie garden sits smack dab in the middle of the front ‘yard’ of our three acres, fencing seemed like an awful sacrifice to our viewshed. While it was lovely to look our from the living room or the dinner table onto the lush garden, looking out onto a deer-fenced garden would be less aesthetic, to put it mildly. I nevertheless priced fencing, envisioned lovely flowering vines along it, sketched out a quaint flower-covered gate arch in my journal. But no go. I just couldn’t do it. The garden has to move. And have a tall, tall fence that will not just keep deer from going over the top, but also raccoons from going over it to get to their favorite sweet corn and cantelopes. Things are about to change for Larrapin garden—a westward move by about fifty yards. More about that in the next post.
There was one thing that went really well in the late garden: a cover crop!! Finally, I got it together (ok, Mendy reminded me it was time and helped too) to plant the Soil Builder mix from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply. It has oats, peas, vetch and more. The cover crop protects the soil all winter from rain compaction and erosion. Equally important, the presence of live roots in the beds keeps the microbial life going over the winter. This is the main advantage over my second best covering system used till now: a layer of chopped leaves (6-12″) as a deep winter blanket. The bright green plants looks wonderful in the sunshine. One catch, the plants should be well over a foot high by now. While we did plant it a little late, there’s another reason I just figured out this week. The tops of the crop are snipped off as if with scissors. Bambi and her BFF’s are keeping it mowed to a neat six inches. ….sigh. But that’s OK. Westward Ho. Or rather, Westward Hoe!
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Squash on a Sunday at Larrapin Garden
First year growing spaghetti squash
The hens LOVE overgrown squash...
Butternut Squash -- my favorite!
Baby Cantaloupe (really a muskmelon)
If I’m lucky, this little bloom will grow into a delicious cantaloupe! I didn’t get it planted till late, but probably in time to still get plenty of melons if the raccoons don’t get them first. (The chew a nice hole in the rind then scoop out all the good stuff with those little clever paws…)
What I’ve always called a cantaloupe is actually a muskmelon, while true cantaloupes have a thick, warty skin and are more favored in Europe it seems. But muskmelon sounds strange after a lifetime of cantaloupe…so cantaloupe it is.
Like most melons though, this bloom will need about eight visits from a bee if indeed it is to become a melon. I’ve noticed the bumblebees LOVE the blooms and roll around inside getting completely covered in pollen. Go bees go!
So this pic proves the bees did their work — another good reason to have flowers in the veggie garden is it entices the bees to stay close. Here you see a baby muskmelon/cantaloupe in progress. This pic was several days ago and it’s about twice that size now.
As usual, the vine is taking over an entire garden bed and now spreading out in the rows. One trick with raised beds is to plant it toward the end or edge of the bed, then run the vine out into the lawn to sprawl. You’ll need to put down mulch or landscape cloth under it or the grass underneath will get huge by the time the melons are ready. I’ve read about dwarf or bush vines, but haven’t tried them yet.
I’ve found this is a good way to kill the grass where I want to put a future garden bed – grow melons next door and use the spot as the vine-runner space over a newspaper+mulch or landscape-fabric covered area. By the end of the season, the grass/weeds underneath are dead and it’s ready to be worked into a bed once you remove the covering! I tried a tarp once but, ooops, they don’t drain water and I had to put my cantaloupes on little life rafts after big rains…
Thanks for stopping by Larrapin – where we’ve had another whole day of soft rain and everything is SO happy about that!
Read MoreWednesday Wonder
The butterflies arrived so late this year, but finally, there are lots of wings in the garden. This little guy was willing to pose for a picture….
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