There are several things that need to be done in the garden to prepare for next year’s crops. The ground should be prepared, and some plants and seeds should be planted. Now we are planting the strawberry plants. The first picture is the strawberry patch in June, during the peak of the picking season. The next picture is the same patch, but in September when they have made many plants. Each plant makes runners that make a plant at the end of the runner. The third picture shows one plant that sent runners outside the fence for more space, set down roots, and made new plants. We pulled a few plants to make a bigger patch. These are planted before the cold weather, giving them plenty of time to take root before freezing weather. Sometimes it is hard to get the right time, as they don’t do well if it is too hot, and if the cold comes too soon, they won’t do well next spring. During the cold winter, the plants stay covered in snow. When spring comes, we pull up the plants in the middle, replace some of the old plants that don’t look good, and discard the extras.
The picture below shows the plants that were pulled from the middle of the rows in the strawberry patch. We used these to plant a double row where we dug potatoes during the late summer. The other ground is being prepared for more new plants. Something sad happened! My son, by accident, plowed over a mouse nest. When he saw the baby mouse, so little it had no hair, he felt bad until he remembered he didn’t like mice coming in the house. It is very common for a field mouse to find a way into the house when the weather starts getting cold, so he kept plowing. When he looked back, he saw the mama mouse frantically digging in the plowed dirt, trying to find her babies. This happened several times as he turned at the end and came back with the tiller. She would run into the grass until he passed by, and when he looked back again, she had returned and was frantically digging. After 3 times he felt so bad that he left his tiller and walked away so she could find her family. Later, he found her dead. He said maybe she died of a broken heart because she couldn’t find her babies. It demonstrates the intricate love that God has when he created mankind and animals to love their offspring. I don’t know how much animals feel, but they are born with instincts to care for their young.
This has been a very unusual summer. The warm weather came late, and we could not plant the tomato plants outdoors until late in the spring. It has taken the remainder of the summer for them to make tomatoes and ripen. Now the cool weather is coming; it was 41 degrees this morning, and when I picked the tomatoes, it felt as if they had been in the refrigerator. Over half of the crop has not ripened enough to pick and preserve by canning. I will do the same as my mother did years ago, just before the first frost, she picked the remainder of the tomatoes (green ones) and saved them. She usually had tomatoes that ripened slowly until Christmas from the ones she saved. If you pick the tomatoes as soon as they begin to turn pink, they will still have that good vine-ripen flavor. When my Dad was young, he said that many farmers down south grew tomatoes, picked them green then they were shipped by train to Chicago.
Last week we had a very strong wind that tore the plastic on the 2 small greenhouses. The fig tree is loaded with figs, but it will be cold before they ripen. We are having a very short growing season this year. We tried growing some popcorn near the greenhouse, but none of our corn has produced much because we didn’t get rain when it needed it to develop the ears of corn. When I was young, I remember my Dad growing a small amount of popcorn at the edge of the field corn. We enjoyed popcorn. I enjoyed it so much when I was older and in the 5th grade at school, with my mother’s help, we popped a large pot of corn each morning before the school bus came, I bagged it in small bags and took it to school to sell. The students would race to my desk at break time to buy a nickel bag of popcorn, and even the teacher would buy a bag.
We learned by accident that carrots do fair during the winter. They don’t grow, but will stay in the ground covered with snow until you want to dig a few for eating. So I planted a winter crop of carrots in plenty of time for them to develop before the cold weather arrived. This picture shows my carrots doing quite well on the right side of my basil. First row is Holy Basil, second row is regular basil, then my carrots. The second picture is what the deer left after a night of feasting. They left only the grass and a few carrots that they pulled up. Oh, this third picture is one they missed; they didn’t leave me much. No winter carrots from this patch.
