mom and dad's vegetable garden

On Saturday, I helped my parent's with their garden. Mom is still recuperating, but doing GREAT. She was the supervisor with her captain's chair. Dad and I got the garden all set for fall.

We removed all the old plants: tomatoes, squashes, and cucumbers. Picked green tomatoes. Pulled a few onions that had been hidden.

We left the big curly kale plants, a bunch of 4 foot tall bell pepper plants, a nice patch of basil, rows of bright yellow marigolds, a 3 foot sage plant, a big tomatillo plant, a row of rainbow chard, and a row of red beets.

There were a lot of garlic sprouts coming up from heads that didn't get harvested. I dug all these and moved them to the other end of the garden. So many it made a triple row!

As we worked the air was quite chilly - maybe 50*F and Skippy had stolen my sweater again. We marveled at an enormous V-formation of geese that flew overhead. Must have been more than a hundred, all honking to each other and heading due south.

I moved a row of lettuce and beets that were in the area we wanted to rake and seed with cover crop. I put them in with the garlic row. The greens will be harvested within a month so they won't bother the garlic. I also added a few new spinach and escarole Frisee seedlings. Then I covered this row with hoops and row cover. I'm curious to see how it will fare as the cold weather comes. The row cover lets light and air in, retains humidity and warmth, and protects from wind. It will stay on for a couple months, or maybe all winter.

We seeded about half the garden with a mix of clover and winter rye.

There was a frost warning for their area, so our last job, as the sun set, was to spread sheets on the peppers, basil and flowers. These sheets will come off tomorrow morning.