The Wintergarden: Autumnal Equinox Update

Since it's raining and I'm stuck inside, I feel inspired to write up another garden update in lieu of the actual gardening I'd otherwise be doing.

Things have been going great since my last update: The intense drought we had all summer was no match for the high-quality soil I put in last August, and the produce just keeps coming...

Produce Junction

Carrotsparov Gets Deep Blue'd

If you've read the last garden update, you know we've been battling some furry little grandmasters for the last month.

I'd sent Hoppy Fischer and Pentala Harekrishna packing pretty quickly, but Garry Carrotsparov proved to be a more formidable adversary...

He learned all the ins and outs of the garden and was crawling under the deer fencing to have his own private Thanksgiving Day feast every night of the week: I'd come out each morning and find our almost-ripe tomatoes gone, or an entire pepper plant gnawed down to a three-inch stub poking out of the soil line.

Carrotsparov prides himself on his ability to think so many steps ahead; but, it was time to remind him that it wasn't by accident that I named myself after a sentient and super-sophisticated AI!

Carrotsparov was about to discover that I don't bother thinking ten million steps ahead: I think one step ahead and just make sure it's a big one.

Step 1: Checkmate the enemy.

I've had a roll of a chicken wire laying right next to the garden for weeks now and was just too lazy to set aside half an hour to install it. So, at Athennia's behest, I finally stopped pushing it off this past weekend.

She actually took the lead on the project—insisting that working with chicken wire is a lot like splicing optical fiber (just bigger, far less sharp, and not made of expensive glass).

Afterwards, as Athennia and I admired our handiwork, she remarked...

I think we'd be just fine homesteading!

...which made my heart smile :)

Black Gold!

I spent a few hours this past Tuesday and Wednesday screening our finished compost to get it ready to apply in the garden...

Four trash cans filled to the brim versus maybe two inches of twigs and wood chips in the bottom of a tiny five-gallon bucket? It would seem that the entire screening process was 100% superfluous! :)

(And, that's not even all of it: I just ran out of spare trashcans.)

But, the compost bin where I let our kitchen scraps and shredded junk mail neutralize a bit before going into the open pile has been jam-packed for the better part of a month—and starting to go anaerobic from lack of airflow—so, it was time to start the pile anew...

Supercharge

I did get outside for half an hour earlier this morning and applied three cans' worth of compost to the garden before the downpours rolled in...

We're sort of directly between the summer garden and the fall garden; so, there's not too much else to report on for now.

I've been giving my parents' neighbors John and Tamar a steady supply of black soldier fly larvae from the compost bin: They're a high-quality meal for chickens—which we don't have yet ourselves—and little more than a mild nuisance otherwise; so, why not?

BSFL are photophobic (aversion to light, not to having their picture taken—though I suppose both manifest the same in this case!); so, it's tough to get a lot of them in one shot. There could've easily been close to 1,000 in this milk carton.

And finally, here's a grasshopper that was on the compost frame one day back in August. I don't think he ever made it onto the blog...

That's it for now... See you again later in the season :)

~wintermute (or autumnmute, for now?)