Progress

This afternoon the asparagus bed got fertilized (manure, compost) and mulched (crumbled leaves), so that part of the garden is done for the year. I also spread mulch among the garlic bulbs that have sent up green shoots. The soil they are planted in needs to be kept as loose as possible for the bulbs to achieve their best growth. Considering the tight clay structure of the original garden soil, the mulch, even though I had already added a lot of organic matter to that bed, is pretty much non-optional.

We've been eating the bok choy, and there are still three big heads of it out in the garden to enjoy in future meals. It is great to have some greens to cook this early in the fall!

By the time the bok choy is gone, we should be pretty close to having broccoli from the garden. The little heads are slowly getting larger.



We can add lettuce to our meals, too. These leaf lettuces are plenty big to donate leaves to a salad:



A lot of the tomatoes that have ripened so far out on the ping pong table in the garage have been made into salsa, using cilantro and peppers from the garden. The cilantro has been growing well enough in this cool weather that it is hard to tell that we've used as much of it as we have. We REALLY like cilantro . . .



Another herb "in season" right now is the saffron. The individual flowers are short-lived, so even though there are a lot of them in the yard, I have to pick the red stigmas when I see them, because they won't be there tomorrow!



The carrots are still small; they are mostly about an inch across the top, which seems adequate, but they are also only about an inch and a half long. Barring catastrophe, though, we will have home-grown carrots on the table in a few more weeks.