#37 Samhain

                The madman finally came to terms with the frost. He simply said, “After all it is almost Samhain”. Sounds like another excuse for a bonfire to me. In another reference to our Wheel of the Year, Samhain is the ending of the harvest and the coming of the darkness.

Celtic Celebration

                Midway between the Equinox and the Solstice, the holiday occurred at the end of harvest. While the ancients were running around trying to get all the crops in, their unattended hearth fires went out. As was the custom, the Celts celebrated major marks on their wheel of the year with bonfires. Samhain was no different – at the center of the celebration was a bonfire. At the end of the celebration, everybody brought home a piece of the community fire to restart the home hearth fires. The Celtic day began at sunset so the celebration carried on to two of our days which just happen to coincide with Halloween and All Saints’ Day. The harvest was stored, the seeds were deep in the ground and the dark days of winter were just beginning. The days are getting shorter, we are busy with final harvesting and gathering of seeds.

Good-bye to Warm-Weather Crops

                Our warm-weather crops are long gone and a fond memory in the madman’s mind. As the nights get longer and the days get cooler we notice that the quality of our warm weather crops declines. I love the taste of fresh summer tomatoes, mushy October tomatoes, not so much. You all know what I’m talking about.

                Anyway it is time to pull out those tired plants and get ready to prepare our soil for next spring. In the vegetable garden, we remove all plants, leaves and fallen fruits. Good hygiene is important. By taking away all debris, we lessen the chance that disease or insects will overwinter in our beds. The madman insists that one of these days he will defeat the striped cucumber beetle.

Changing Cucumber Beds

                After a less than stellar harvest of cucumbers, the madman decided to dig the soil out of the cucumber bed. He replaced it with the compost we sifted earlier this year. In his quest for better cucumbers, he has decided to replace his trellis netting posts with taller ones so he can get a straighter vine. The old fence posts were 5’, giving us 4’ of vertical growth for the vines. Replacing them with 7’ posts gives us 24 more inches of vertical growth. He knows he should only make one change at a time because that’s the scientific way to do it, but he says he doesn’t have the patience. Speaking of 7’ posts, he made similar changes for the pea trellis.

                Now is also the time to do a fall soil test if you want to. We prefer to wait for spring, but many gardeners like to test in the fall. As with everything, there is no right or wrong; do what you want. The madman feels that the soil is not truly dormant over the winter and can change by the amount of rain, snow and temperature swings. So, we wait for the spring thaw before sending a sample off to UConn.

Planting Garlic

                The Garlic Festival has passed and the madman has some new varieties to try. I have to keep reminding him – not yet, not yet. It is still too early. According to Petra Page Mann of Fruition Seeds most people make the mistake of planting garlic too soon. The key is to plant them early enough to develop a root system, but late enough to not grow above ground. Also, according to Petra, the madman had not been planting his garlic deep enough – the cloves should be at least 3-5” deep. In his previous rush to plant, the madman often just poked the cloves into the ground. Guess he will be using my trowel with the inch marks this year. As proof that there is no right or wrong in the garden, fellow master gardener Jim Woodworth said that he planted his garlic on October 22 last year and had his best crop ever. But he did admit that he planted his cloves much deeper. Thank you, Petra.

Preparing Beds

                While we are waiting to plant the garlic, we have to prepare a couple of beds because the garlic will go on the edge of each as a rodent control. The first is the potato bed. The other day he dug up a fine crop of reds and whites. The whites were planted in July and the reds on the first of August. Since you can’t get seed potatoes during the summer, the madman just went to an organic grocery store. We all know that in our climate, potatoes are planted as early as possible in the spring, but the madman has been experimenting for the past few years and has been really happy with the later crops. He says, as long as they are in the ground by August 1, they have time to grow and tuber. Since potatoes in one area had some scab, he has amended the soil to lower the pH. At the same time, my folly plants need to be moved from the roof to a winter storage bed. This bed, formerly used for growing potatoes has become a work-in-progress. Since the potatoes had developed more scab than the madman would tolerate, he began to rethink the use of the bed – since it was 4’ by 40’, it required a lot of rethinking.

Thank You Mr. Hubbard

                First, he decided to plant Blue Hubbard squash because it is preferred by a variety of cucurbit loving bugs such as the striped cucumber beetle, squash bug and squash vine borer. He doesn’t particularly like Hubbard squash so he was using it as a trap plant. Thanks to Mr. Hubbard, this year we had our share of zucchini; definitely a new notation for the journal.

                While rummaging through his seed box he found some corn seeds which he planted at the end of the row. A dismal failure. We aren’t sure if it was the growing conditions or old seeds (he never throws anything out and these seeds could have been up to 10 years old). My bet is on the seeds.

Tomato Experiment

                This bed was also home to a tomato experiment. The Experiment started in early February when he germinated a handful of tomato seeds. Half were placed under his old standard florescent lights; half were treated to his new LED lights. He wanted to see which produced the best seedlings. By mid-March they looked the same. About this time, he attended a lecture at the Master Gardener Symposium by Matt Mattus. According to Mr. Mattus, tomato plants can do quite well in 3 gallon nursery pots. Since the madman couldn’t bear to toss the tomato plants he had started, he placed each one in its own 3-gallon nursery pot. By mid-May he got tired of tripping over them and said “Aw, let’s just move them to the long bed.” He was amazed at the fine crops of tomatoes they produced. I am sure we’ll have more potted tomatoes next year.

Not Just Our Garden

                We won’t bore you with the specifics, but we have been spending our days pulling plants, raking debris and generally getting our vegetable beds ready for winter. The only plants we don’t pull out of the garden are the beans. We snip the vines at soil level because the madman believes that they will continue to add nitrogen to the soil.

                During all this, we took a side trip to Haddam where we helped clean up the Middlesex County Model Garden. In addition to the same clean-up routine we follow, the gardeners in Haddam also plant spinach in a couple of the freshly-cleaned beds. Plants will be ready to harvest next spring. We haven’t had much success with spinach in our garden and the madman has put his spinach growing on hold.

Presents in the Mailbox

                The mailman just brought him a couple of presents – catalogs from Otis Twilley and Dixondale Farms. It’s all I can do to get him to focus on finishing the garden cleanup – we’ll have plenty of time to look at the new onion varieties later.

                But first, we’ll finish the clean-up, then have some cocoa.