4 2009-10-26T09:34:53+11:00 false Yesterday I harvested a bowl of salad greens and about half a cup of broccoli--enough for dinner for two. The arugula is amazing. The lettuce outside has all bolted; I'm leaving it to see if I have lots of fun little volunteers in the spring. The mustards and the chicories are flirting with powdered mildew; I have to be choosy about which leaves I harvest. One chicory was bad enough that I pulled it out, tossed the leaves in the compost, and took the root to the basement to experiment with forcing over the winter, the others are worth stringing along with the possibility of salad. I harvested and dried all the parsley and several radishes while my folks were in town. The pictures were on my camera, so I'll record those here as well. The brussels sprouts are starting to look like they might be flirting with the notion of thinking about considering the possibility of producing real, actual sprouts. There are bumps on the stem where the sprouts ought to be, anyway. I don't know if I have enough growing season left for them to pull it off, but we'll see what they manage in the next month or so. Otherwise I'll just leave them over the winter and see what, if anything, happens in the spring. One of the artichokes has a bud, which suggests that artichokes are hypothetically possible here, although I probably should've started them a few months earlier if I wanted it to do it's thing before winter. Next spring, I'll find out if they survive our winters, which will tell us if it's at all worth devoting bed space to them. Some honking geese are flying over exactly now. My attempts to get in some hours at the food coop today were a fail. I dunno if it's synchronicity, but there was an editorial in the NY times today about how damned difficult it is to get hours at a completely different food coop. In any case, that meshed well with this being a beautiful day and Xan's timely warning about the dangers of putting off fall cleanup on the precious warm sunny fall days, so when I got home I started in on the tithonias, which were mostly frost killed and looking pretty hideous. I managed to find 3 flowers near the ground in the back that had somehow evaded frost and were worth sticking in a vase, the rest of them I chopped up neatly and stuck on the lawn; eventually they'll make their way to the compost pile. My partner got home just as I was finishing up and offered to help. Somehow this didn't result in the tithonia bits making their way to the compost pile. Instead, it resulted in pruning the trees between us and our neighbors (I've read that pruning early in the season encourages growth and late in the season discourages it), cleaning out the pumpkin patch, and trimming the hedge between us and the house behind ours, and other general cleanup. Most of the heavy lifting is done, but there are still piles of tithonia on the front lawn. Tomorrow he can clean them up. 2 false 70055 false false false Entry 2009-10-25T15:00:00+11:00 DMY 85517 Public 2009-10-26T09:34:54+11:00 1237 Sunny 50 F