In The Garden … Sunny Point Vol 7

One thing you can count on with a garden is change. Weather it’s the changing of the seasons, the cycle of plant life, or the change that comes to the soul through working in the garden, change is gunna come. This time of year we’re saying goodbye… to summer, and hello… to fall. Up here in the Asheville area we’ve had plenty of nights down in the 50′s lately. Which means big changes to the summer garden. Yeah, it’s still dry as can be… nobody can remember last time it rained for any length of time. But it has cooled off a lot, especially at night.

The tomatoes have slowed production due to the colder nighttime temps. Still, over all tomato production has hung in there with a daily average of about 23 to 25 lbs. The highest single day tomato harvest this past week was about 31 lbs. We pulled the Floridor squash plants… I was amazed the plants were still producing squash and squash blossom because after pulling the plants I observed signs of two or three squash vine borers on each vine. The squash vines were about diameter of a baseball, so maybe thats why they could hang in there as long as they did. In the beds the squash plants vacated we sowed arugula and dinosaur kale. We’ve also been sowing as many peas as possible… carrots, chard, radishes, mustard greens, and collards as well.

A really cool thing about growing in Asheville… has been the ability to grow lettuce through the summer. We had some kind of lettuce growing in the garden this entire summer… something I never would have been able to do in the Piedmont area of North Carolina…

Btw… my favorite lettuce variety this season is Merlot