Autumn Tidy up

End October - begin November is for me one of the most beautiful season of the year when leaves are turning golden, yellow, bruin, orange and red; and the temperature is still mild, a great time to go for a walk in the woods, enjoying the wonderful colour display the nature is offering us, for free! Even in my garden with little trees and plants, colours are still everywhere: the golden yellow/bruin foliage from my beech hedge, the wonderful yellow from one of the neighbour’s ginkgo tree and the golden red from the neighbouring trees. The world would be such a boring place without the glorious display of those colourful trees and shrubs.

I am not a keen winter vegetable grower, it is now time for me to clean up my vegetable patches, harvest or check what are left in the ground, and plan ahead for next year.

I've cleared away all left-overs and weeds from my raised bed 1 and spread grass clippings in the bed to cover it for the winter. Raise beds 2 and 3 are now fully covered with green manure Phacelia sowed in September. They all need to be dug in to rot down during the winter. Raised bed 4 has been the bed for root vegetables + tomatoes this year. I’d lost all tomato plants to blight in the summer, the blackened plants were cleared away, and in their place, I sowed some carrots 'Japanese Wucunshen' and some Chinese red radish 'red Siji Shuiguo' in July and August. The carrots are looking great, but the radish has been suffering from severe root fly attack, resulting in small tunnels all around the root ball:












In raised bed 5 and 6 (these are smaller beds), I sowed some Chinese Pak Choi 'Bai Cai' in July and in August. Those sowed in July have been marvellous, producing healthy and juicy plants.
I have been harvesting them since August; but those sowed in August are looking very sad for the moment: small holes are spotted all over their leaves, yet no pests have been detected. I have no clue what disease or pests this can be.
A wild guess would be that these are results of cabbage flea attack. I’m afraid the plants have to go.

The growing season for my vegetable garden is coming to an end for 2007. But this does not mean an end to my gardening jobs, as I’ll be busy in the next months or two planting trees, fruit trees/bush and shrubs. I will still be out there: in the garden.