The Fall Planting is DONE--a mini-Trailer Park Hometead update

My little helper pulled out 2 onions by himself!  Both of them knocked him backwards, he had to pull so hard to get them out of the ground!

I may be a bit behind my self-imposed (well, maybe Mother Nature imposed, but whatever.  I have ways to thwart her for a while when it comes to gardening!) timetable for getting the fall planting done, but I did it!  Well, mostly did it.  I got everything in the ground that needs to go in the ground, but I still have some containers to fill once I pick up some more compost from a friend's house.  I'm not too worried about getting such a late start on those though, since I can haul them inside on cold nights, either the house or garage, depending on how much I value them to avoid nasty freezes that would kill off the frost resistant cold weather crops that I'm planting now, as weird as that seems with the next few days to be forecasted to be in the 90s again!

I started the day with the brilliant idea that I should clean out the worm bin.  We've been getting some horrid little fly things in our bathroom lately, which is right across the hall from the laundry area, where the worm bin was stored (that's right: I said was).  I figured if I cleaned it out, I could get rid of any nasty flies, maggots, and anything else in there, use the castings in the garden to refertilize areas that had something just growing in them, then start the worm bin fresh ucky-critter-free.  When I went through the slimy (hint that something was seriously wrong!) contents of the bin, I only found one worm!  There were bunches just a few months ago, but I managed to kill them all off (wormicide?  Wormslaughter?  Does this carry criminal penalties, and if so, should I really be talking about it on my blog?).  I figured with just one bad-boy (girl?  Both?  Not sure how that really works with worms, since you can't see any dangly bits to tell you) wormy in there, it probably hadn't properly taken care of...whatever I put in there, I probably should just toss the whole mess, worm and all, in the regular compost bin outside and let nature take its course out there.  I'll try again with vermicomposting in the winter, when I have more time and don't want to be running outside all the time to take out compostables!

Fortunately, at this point I still had some alternative compost I could use to add nutrients back to the soil, so I happily (no remorse!  Didn't even mourn the poor critters!  That definitely sounds like maybe 3rd degree wormicide at least.  If it was wormslaughter, I think there would be some more remorse) started harvesting and ripping out plants that no longer served a purpose (the heat wave last week turned all my lettuce super bitter!), making room for the fall planting (that I was terribly behind on).  I ended up pulling the second to last broccoli plant, the last of the peas (just left there for seed anyway) and harvesting a couple gallon buckets of onions, about a quart of carrots, 8-9 cucumbers, a few handfuls of ground cherries, a tiny head of broccoli (soup!  Yay!), a zucchini, and about a pint of beans.

Many beans, ground cherries, and cucumbers were gobbled right off the plants and so are not pictured here

Since it is supposed to rain the next few days, I spread the onions out on my work area in the garage to cure before putting them away...somewhere for long term storage.  I probably should figure out where I'm going to keep them for the long haul sometime in the next few days!

Overall, I'd say that isn't too bad for such a tiny area to garden.  Especially when you consider that many of my larger crops of things such as tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, potatoes, and ground cherries either are just starting or haven't ripened at all yet!

Once I got the areas that had the ripped out cleaned up, weeded, and put some fresh compost down, I planted a bunch of carrots, spinach (okay, that isn't late at least, but I'm hoping to be able to freeze some for this winter, so was hoping to sneak in at least a couple plantings of the stuff), and snap peas.  I also transplanted the cabbage and broccoli I had previously started (almost on time!) to their new spots in the garden.  So now I'm officially done!  I can sit back and relax *snort*...okay, we all know that isn't going to happen!  So now I'll work on other projects, probably mostly indoors with 90+ degree temps predicted for a few days and then it will be time to do more stuff outside, then inside, then outside....yeah, I don't know the meaning of relaxing, do I?