various october stuff

various october stuff - le deux

Medie Haziran 01, 2022

jambaloney here again - yes it is november, but these pics were from last month... i have been working on the porch (more to come) , but i wanted to share some other stuff..

like the fact that we will NOT know when our cat Frankie Blue Eyes has kicked the bucket because he sleeps like this:

and these - potatoes!!! we have been gorging on them - it is that time of year..

here are the plants in august - we planted 32 tires with 5 plants each in them, 160 plantings in all, 150 came up - that is a good yield! we use tiny potatoes and cuttings from the previous year so we never buy seed potatoes...

and there is a volunteer mustard plant - the seeds number the thousands on a big plant and they are popping up all over the yard!

in july i went to the basement and found some tiny seed potatoes we hadn't bothered to plant in the spring - they had shoots on all of them so i planted them in two unused beds - here they are in early sept..

the whole point was to plant them anyway to get extra seed potatoes

here is the same bed in october

here it is afterwards..

here is the second bed afterwards...

and here is the yield!! these are only planned to be used as seed for next year, but a lot are big enough to eat... left to right are:

irish cobblers
brown russets
red chieftans

a lot of them can be split in two, in any event there are 100s of new seed for next year, all from leftovers - if you don't plant all your spuds in spring, keep them in a dark cool place and if you have time in summer, find a separate spot to plant the rest, more the merrier and costs nothing! plus a backup if there is a crop failure

hey look - LOTS of comfrey!!

here is a fall-tilled bed...

here is comfrey..

here is a bunch of seaweed..

i started rinsing it, but the leftover water wasn't really salty, plus it is fall, plus our soil is slightly acidic, plus our soil is clay based and could use the extra sand...

so i stopped rinsing - from beach to bed

extra seaweed..

onto compost pile!

after i dump comfrey and seaweed on the beds, i put a little layer of dirt on top - in spring i will cover with black plastic until planting and then we will add a thin layer of composted soil when we are ready to plant - so hopefully no spring prep at all - big bonus! 4 out of seven beds are done so far!!!

wildlife time- these little guys only show up is sept/oct

they are tiny fluffly blue flies

that are really delicate and pretty - only around for a month, i have nevere seen more species of flying insect than i have here - with the temperate temps the only three months without something buzzing around are dec, jan and feb.... there are hatches galore from mid march right through october and then stragglers right through nov... pretty cool!