I have a few balls I’ve dropped, most of which I haven’t talked about much here. This week I hope to go back over my still in draft form posts and finishing up those before it gets too close to fall.As we’re now rolling downhill towards fall, I’m growing curious about what we’ll still get out of the kitchen garden this year, and how different things will go next.
I’m currently refreshing myself on tips about how to know when corn is ready to pick and such. We’ve brought some beans in already that really did dry out quite nicely right on the vine as I’d read they would. I’ve got them as a last stage dry out in the kitchen using one of those multi tier bamboo steamer sets before I shell the beans to store until we start cooking with them. I still need to read up on what to do with our herbs. I’m still trying to hold out some hope for the pumpkins, but I know it’s an incredibly long shot that we’ll even get one fruit this year.
I did find a volunteer milkweed that sprouted within days of when I last cleaned our “curb” edge at our street front side. I transplanted it by the front stairs, as I do want to spread out our milkweed overall going forward.
The mullein looks like it’s finally wrapping up its blooms, so I hope to gather seed from it soonish.
I’ve been pulling a lot of lady’s thumb weed, and we might also have a similar variant that’s not native and can easily turn invasive if we’re not diligent pulling them up. Fortunately, both come up rather easily with a bit of patience to make sure as many of the shallow roots as possible come up in one pull. We do definitely have some Pennsylvania smartweed. It’s not in the way, and the pollinators like it so I’ve left it in place for now, over by the compost.
We still need to finish constructing the fence around the compost pile so we can move same to it (not far to move). I can’t find some hardware I had set aside, but hope to find that in the next few weeks.
We have a rough plan of what we’ll be transplanting out front. Our front will be the biggest changes at first as we head into fall. As the kitchen garden peters out, then we’ll hopefully still have time to focus on what we want to do back there.
Time will tell.
