Weeding Between the Lines

By Jim McGinty

As singer/comedian/entertainer Jimmy Durante would have said, “I’m mortified!” – a few measly 25-degree-Fahrenheit nights, and the tomato, pepper, bean, and basil plants in the open garden changed from green to black in color, and just turned up their toes! The same plants growing in the Earth Boxes on the deck are draped with Ree-May® frost blanket, and are still producing food, so though we cannot control the weather (and our growing conditions), we can at least moderate some of those weather effects.

This has been another amazing weather year, with new records set for high and low temperatures, number of days without moisture, pollen and particulate counts, and more.  Moderating and adapting to our local weather conditions may well prove to be very important in the gardening future – learn to be flexible, if you enjoy eating.

Here at Rancho McGinty, we learned a number of new gardening techniques this year, and we also trialed a number of new (to us) food items:  seed tape (individual seeds “glued” to long strips of biodegradable paper) was a hit, especially as my gardening partner Pat and I were pressed for time in the early part of the planting year.  The seed tapes for carrots and beets were excellent, producing beautiful, large produce, and were a snap to lay in the raised bed soil, cover lightly with more soil, and water as necessary. One can easily make one’s own tape (some see us at our local garden club meeting next spring for a show-and-do class), or one can buy tapes from Gurney’s, Burpee, and other seed merchants.

The successful, new food items include Golden Cross cabbage (smaller, softball-sized heads perfect for two hungry folks), Doyle thornless, trailing blackberries (three plants produced literally buckets of delicious berries), Sweet Pickle peppers (our pepper bushes are still covered with dozens of small, perfect-for-pickling, colorful peppers), Melenzana eggplant was a hit with our chickens, and even for the taste-bud-confused human diners, and in the tomato category, Chadwick cherry tomatoes were the first to ripen (and tasted, therefore, all the more delicious!), and the Megabite, Silvery Fir Tree and Scotia tomatoes were BIG producers. The Scotia tomato plants (a true cool-weather variety) loafed through our hottest months, but produced a bumper crop of fruit when all of the other summer tomato plants were shivering and complaining.

For the balance of this year’s gardening season, you still have time (for the next three weeks or so) to plant garlic, and any of those remaining potted fruit trees and bushes – just remember to provide each tree or bush with an identification label so you will know, next year, what you planted this year.

This also the time to divide that humongous rhubarb plant down into manageable size: just chop out a quarter of the root with a sharp spade, fill in the “wound” with compost or garden soil, and replant the liberated root into it’s own place – or maybe donate it to a neighbor.

If you have not already pruned the spent raspberry canes (the canes that produced berries this year), this is a good time to cut out all those brown and black canes, leaving the greenish/yellow fruiting canes for next spring.

Final chores in the garden include pulling up and composting those blackened or spent plants (no bug infestations or plant diseases in the compost bin, please), adding manure to ferment in the roto-tilled soil over the winter, mulching any over-Wintering plants, such as the afore-mentioned garlic, strawberries, assorted herbs, and other such (we use seed-free straw, pine needles, and maple and/or ash tree leaves for mulch). If you use drip irrigation (polypipe or T-tape), this is a good time to pull up the drip systems, drain them (so they don’t freeze and crack over the winter), and safely store them – this task is true for garden hoses, nozzles, and fittings (splitters, manifolds, etc.) as well.

One more chore is to gather all those scattered garden tools and check them over for damage or wear: cracked or splintered shovel handles, dull pruning shears, bent fork tines, etc. One would be advised to clean and oil the metal parts of one’s garden tools, and be sure to make a note (not a “mental” note, as one will forget during the required Winter nap) to repair, sharpen, or replace one’s expensive tools before spring.

With all of the autumn leaves and pine needles falling all around us, I trust you are bagging and saving these garden treasures for next year’s endeavors? Your ill-informed neighbors would LOVE to donate their forest and orchard “litter” to you – just ask.

Whew!  That’s a lot of chores and work – good thing those precious tomatoes taste so much better than the store-bought, red, cardboard-tasting produce we will avoid until next July.

GARDEN CALENDAR:

On Oct. 7, I will be teaching a Garlic 101 class at the Newport College Center from 6-8 p.m.  Just in time for autumn seeding, we will talk about garlic selection, planting, encouragement, and harvesting. You can call the Newport center (located at 1204 West Fifth Street, Newport) at 509-447-3835 for more information or to register for the class.

On the 13th of October, our local garden club will hold its last meeting for this year, and feature our annual Harvest Dinner, at Camden Grange at 7 p.m. We encourage all our local gardeners (members of our club and members of the general public) to cook up something grown in your garden (enough for four hungry gardeners), and bring it to the meeting for an evening of excellent food, entertaining company, and stories of the woes and joys of growing food in our challenging location.

On the 14th of October, I will be teaching a Backyard Chickens class at the afore-mentioned Newport College Center from 6-8 p.m. We will talk about the best methods of raising your own chickens for eggs, meat, and entertainment. Once again, you can call the center at 509-447-3835 for more information or to register for the class.

Finally, I will be teaching additional gardening classes for the Community Colleges of Spokane (in the Newport Center), starting in way, way-off January 2016:  we’ll have educational fun with subjects including old school (19th century) gardening, crosscut saws, fruit tree grafting, fruit tree pruning, seed starting and drip irrigation. You can call the College at 509-279-6025 for a printed catalog illuminating classes that are scheduled into March 2016. You need a good excuse to get out of the cabin confines anyway, so I hope to see you in class!

That’s it for this month AND year – enjoy your autumn and winter, and don’t overdo the snow shoveling – remember what I said earlier about staying flexible.