Where has the summer gone?
Fall is officially here. The garden is still producing a few veggies like tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and Brussel sprouts, but I don’t expect most of it to last through the anticipated freeze next week. Soon, we will need to go through and pull all stocks & leaves, then cover the rows with chicken/duck manure and burlap. This will help add nitrogen to the soil and keep the weeds down over the winter. The past two years, we have spread a cover crop, but rather than keeping the weeds away, it filled the entire garden with weeds. If you’re not familiar with cover crop, it is a combination of different legume seeds. The primary purpose of it is for fixing nitrogen into the soil. Once the garden beds have been cleared for the year, you spread the cover crop seeds and sow it into the soil. In theory, it grows, adds nutrients into the soil, and keeps the weeds out. When it is time to plant in the spring, you just leave the cover crop in place, smash it so it dies and plant through it. Well we have tried this method twice. Both times, the cover crop grew like crazy alongside the weeds, and we had to pull it all out before planting. Smashing it or planting through it wasn’t going to work for us. There was so much of it, it would have been easier to just pull out straight weeds.
Another way you can tell it is fall around the ranch is that canning has been in full swing. Over the last couple of weeks, we have canned spaghetti sauce, salsa, stewed tomatoes, squash, pears, beets, and carrot soup. We have also fermented the cabbage that we will eat throughout the fall and winter. This is living sauerkraut (not canned) with healthy probiotics.
We are already planning our winter canning projects of pinto beans, black beans, chili and bone broth.
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