Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty

It all happens at once:  killer frosts, the end of the gardening season, and the last gardening column for the year – sigh.

Here at Rancho McGinty, we experienced a pretty good year in the garden, with only minor setbacks.  Our tomatoes were planted too late, but we learned which of the tomatoe varieties WILL produce tomatoes with even a shortened season:  Matt’s Wild Cherry, Ildi, and Valencia (my new favorite high-acid tomatoe – great with bleu cheese dressing!).

Our squash and melon plants worked overtime to produce large, ornamentally colorful veggies:  Boston Marrow, a big orange squash, was especially productive, while the Small Sugar plants pumped out a dozen or so 9-inch-diameter pumpkins perfect for decorating and pie-making.  My gardening partner and full-time wife Pat says the Baby Blue Hubbard-type squash “are perfect for two adults” (one of whom must be secretly poisoning the other with dangerous “food”), and the “Porcelain Doll” pumpkins were huge (averaging 36 pounds).

In the potato patch, the German Butterball spuds are SO good in soups and stews, the Red Lasota potatoes are crisp and perfect for slicing and frying with onions and garlic (a meal in itself!), while the Purple Viking potatoes still make the best-ever mashed potatoes in the whole world (slight hyperbole, there, but not much).

Radish enthusiasts might want to try German Giant radishes – they grow to be huge, and do not turn pithy (thay that again?!) over a long thummer.

Even the Doyle thornless blackberry plants produced gallons of delicious berries, this despite a late June frost that killed the initial flush of flowers. 

If you have excess veggies or fruit, please remember our local food bank (here in Elk, the North County Food Pantry is located at 40015 N. Collins Road – you can call them at 509-292-2530 for hours of operation and other details).

With the removal of the dead plants, vines, and assorted veggie debris, it’s now time to plant the garlic crop for harvest in July 2019.  I like to rototill the garlic patch a week or two before planting, using various manures:  chicken, goat and sheep, horse, and cow manures all contribute differing essential nutrients for optimum garlic bulbs.  I also add layers of straw and barnyard litter, maple leaves, and pine/fir needles (no, despite all those unfounded rumors, the needles are NOT acidic).  Once the rototiller stops, I rake the garlic patch surface smooth with a bow rake, and start hoeing 4-inch-deep, narrow trenches, about a foot and a half apart.  In go the individual cloves, pointy-side up, and about 6 inches apart; then I rake the dirt back over the trenches, tamp the surface flat with the back side of the bow rake (to improve soil compaction, and contact with the garlic cloves), and overhead water, overnight.  As I collect bagged maple leaves from friends and neighbors, I mulch the garlic patch about six inches deep, and let the winter snow do all the work until early April, next year.

This is also a great time to remove all the spent berry canes:  you can prune out the brown canes that produced berries this year, leaving the purple or green canes for next year’s harvest.  Be sure to burn or dispose of the spent canes, as they sometimes harbor cane-boring insects.  

If you have an overcrowded rhubarb plant, now is the perfect time to divide and conquer:  with a sharp spade or shovel, merely chop out one quarter of the main root, then fill in the opening with garden soil, or even better, with compost.  You can replant the rhubarb “plug”, or pass it along to your favorite pie-making gardener (if you think strawberry-rhubarb pie sounds pretty good now – just wait until spring!).

In the open garden, now is the time to pick up all the spent plant wastes, and compost them (if the plant mass is free of disease or pests), along with some fresh manure, and the last lawn clippings – add water, and leave it alone until March.  Once the garden surface is free of debris, you can layer on the animal poo, the hardwood tree leaves and pine/fir needles, add available compost, scattered straw (NOT hay, which has several bazillion baby hay seeds just waiting to turn your hard won garden into a hay field), and turn it all under – overhead water if you desire, or you can just let the winter snows do the work for you.

Almost free of garden chores for 2018 - “almost” as you really need to take care of those expensive garden tools:  clean, oil, and safely store those rakes, shovels, hoes, trowels, and more, and also remember to drain and store your garden hoses, and fittings.  

 If you have small-engine driven machinery such as rototillers, garden tractors, lawnmowers, etc., now is the time to consult your owner’s manual (if you have lost your manual, they are freely available on the internet – ask your favorite 12-year-old kid for help with this task) to see what the factory recommends for winterizing your wheeled money pits.

GARDEN CALENDAR

Our local garden club will hold its last 2018 meeting, and its annual Harvest Dinner at 7 p.m. in Camden Grange on Oct. 9.  This evening offers a chance for club members to cook and bring to the meeting a dinner item featuring produce from their own gardens and orchards.  Our club will provide the protein main dish (historically ham, chicken, and reasonably fresh automotively processed wildlife), while club members are asked to bring a side dish, condiments, salads, bread-like items, and desserts.  Fortunate gardeners (club members and the local public) who have a much-sought-after club Garden Gnome, are asked to bring the little guys along, as they hold their annual Conclave while we overeat.

You can find more details on the Harvest Dinner here, or on our facebook page.

That’s it for this month, and for 2018 – see you out in the garden, next year!