September in the Garden

**Late September garden harvest.** Photo by Tenley Nelson

Tenley Nelson - CRR Staff

After a summer of barely keeping up with my garden to dos, the month of September has been a busy and productive one. Some of that is thanks to passing the 8-week healing milestone Sept 16 with my broken finger that allowed me to engage in more heavy-duty projects. Some of it is thanks to hard working farm helpers.

Having assistance on the farm has been something of a revelation. It is amazing what three people can accomplish in a day, or several days!

**Sam and Hazel on the gravel piles.** Photo by Tenley Nelson

While the fine days of fall were few and far between, it was not a cold month, and the harvest has been slow and steady. It first frosted September 7 and while we have had a couple other mild frosts it has not gone below 27°F here yet.

I still have radish, Asian greens, and lettuces doing well in the main garden the first week of October. I need to harvest and process the Brussels sprouts that have not grown much this month with the cool temps and lower light levels. I had hoped for a few weeks of warm, sunny fall days to fatten them up as well as late planted cabbages, but it was not to be. Lots of extra plant material for the compost heap!

I harvested the potatoes and carrots the third week of September while remembering the snow and early onset of winter in 2021. While I am not loving working out in all the rain, I very much appreciate the warmer temperatures and later fall this year. I just shut down the greenhouse October 2 and harvested the last of the cherry tomatoes and all the peppers.

It was a spectacular tomato harvest this year. I have struggled in past seasons to make myself hard prune my plants but was inspired to do so this year and did not experience any late season molding in my greenhouse. I harvested so many tomatoes that I started roasting trays of them to freeze as we could not keep up with fresh eating. I am now sold on pruning to a single stem and removing leaf growth from the bottom up as the plant grows.

This worked well with my cucumbers too. 393 garlic cloves were planted Sept 25 after cutting down the barley cover crop at soil level, broad-forking and then amending the bed with several wheelbarrows of compost as well as blood-meal, colloidal phosphate, and organic slow-release fertilizer. This year was not my best garlic crop with significant damage from onion root maggots. I hope the rotation to the west side of the garden will help for next year.

“I am now sold on pruning to a single stem and removing leaf growth from the bottom up as the plant grows. ”

The main project accomplished this month was not exactly garden related. Eight years ago, I dug a root cellar hole under our cabin. I had a pulley I used to pull out 5-gallon buckets through a hatch in the house (that weighed over 50 pounds) during the winter and ended up removing 25 tons of rock and clay to make what I had hoped to be an epic garden vegetable storage space.

Sadly, all that work was wasted when, before permanent walls could be built, the cellar started collapsing. Melting permafrost in front of our cabin has exacerbated our issues with a house that now has a corner sinking away from the rest of the structure and this year I made the hard call to stop trying to fix the root cellar and fill it in so we can level our home.

Tom Lambert brought me 48 yards of gravel and my helpers Hazel and her husband Sam worked with me to get the material under the house. It was quite the project trying to figure out how to get so much material through two small openings in the pony wall. Sam came up with the plan to use the backhoe to pile the gravel up as high as possible next to the house and use feet and gravity to slide the material in. It worked far better than the elbow breaking labor that standard gravel shoveling can be. It took four days of our combined effort to fill in the hole.

Photo by Tenley Nelson
**Sam and Hazel under the house. Almost done and running out of room to move.**

It was Sam who stuck with the project while Hazel and I took breaks to work in the garden. We prepped the four 100-foot tunnels beds for spring while Sam moved most of the gravel. Over 50 tons of rock went under the house, and I am officially done with back-breaking projects (I hope.) I will greatly miss having a root cellar this winter and hope to come up with a plan to build one next year. With the backhoe this time.

I also had Tom bring me some gravel to make a pad near the garden for my 20-foot conex that I use as garden storage. It was starting to sink into the ground with all this rain and I wanted to move it about 50 feet to a better location.

“Garden helpers really are the best thing ever (Thank you Sam and Hazel!) and I am now scheming ways to get more of them on the farm next year! ”

My backhoe could not quite pull it up the slight grade to its new placement area with wet, slippery ground so I was ecstatic when Tom brought his loader over and helped me move it in place. A couple more loads of gravel extended the pad and now I have a great spot for parking, backing in trailers, and generally avoiding muddy messes. Things are really looking up at the garden with my organized storage!

**The new pad for the conex and parking.** Photo by Tenley Nelson

My helpers came back to assist me with more fall garden projects and after crimping down the cover crops (for the second time), we drug the heavy silage tarps uphill into place, an unpleasant job I could not have accomplished on my own. We also ticked off a lot of neglected chores: weeding and edging the perennial beds, pruning out the spent floricanes from the raspberries, taking down the pea trellis, removing pea and spinach plants to the compost, and digging holes for more perennial plant relocation.

All my rhubarb plants moved down to the main garden mid-month and chives and peonies are next on the list for relocation. Garden helpers really are the best thing ever (Thank you Sam and Hazel!) and I am now scheming ways to get more of them on the farm next year!

The warm weather is not going to hold much longer so I hope to spend this week finishing up garden harvest clean up and perennial weed removal as well as mix together the batches of seed starting soil that I need for the starts next spring.

I have lots of processing of vegetables and fruits to do as bowls and crates of produce sit under the house and on my counters and herbs hang from the ceiling. It is a good feeling after this challenging season to be surrounded by such bounty.

From my garden to yours, I hope you too are enjoying delicious homegrown meals from a successful gardening season.