fall gardening

Here's my attempt at fall gardening. Broccoli, Chinese cabbage and cabbage. Fall gardening is so easy. Fall gardening means stick it in the ground and ignore it. The broccoli is looking good, the cabbage is basically vermin attacked and useless. Of course that was the state of my cabbage last spring, too. The Chinese cabbage is amazing. It grows well in the spring even better in the fall. It could be the perfect garden plant. I use Chinese cabbage in.... Chinese stir fry. It works great. All three of these vegetables are frost resistant, they'll freeze when a bad cold snap hits, but they do fine in a light frost (which is what we get this time of year).

garlic and wheat

I'm trying something new this year. I planted winter wheat. This is one of those rare garden crops that you plant in the fall and harvest in the spring. The wheat looks like grass right now. I'll ignore it until the spring harvest. The other green growing thing is garlic. Easiest thing to grow ever! Stick in the ground in the fall pull out of the ground in June. I love this sort of gardening.

candy leaves

A fall-themed baby shower cake. I love how the leaves turned out. They are all made of chocolate and taste delicious.

down the rabbit hole

Proof that Frankie-jeff gets to live a normal bunny life. This is her awe-inspiring bunny escape hole. I stuck the camera as far as my arm would go and took a flash picture. You can't see the end of the tunnel. I have no idea how far it goes. She doesn't hang out inside the hole too often, but she does hide in there once in a while.

funky chicken

The chickens are taking turns molting. Molting means they are losing their feathers. This is a totally normal yearly process, but they sure look funny when it is happening. There are feathers all over the yard. The new feathers look like paint brushes as they grow back in. This chicken is the last to molt. The rest of them look fine now and their new feathers are even softer then they were before.

Nigel

One last picture of me hugging Nigel. I am such a fiber geek. I love meeting the animals whose fiber I'm spinning up.

Llamas and Alpacas, oh my!

Another magical day. I spent all summer spinning the fiber of Lumina, a black alpaca. It was so much fun. I got to visit the farm where Lumina lives and got to meet her! She's in the bottom picture, the black alpaca with a fair amount of white on her neck (her brother Nigel is in more of the pictures, looks very similar but only has bits of white on his neck). I gave her a carrot and she spent the rest of the visit following me around. Now, I know she was looking for another carrot, but it felt like she liked me and it was so endearing! I traded some of Lumina's spun-up fiber for more fiber and got to choose to take Nigel's fiber. He's Lumina's full brother. I LOVED visiting Wierworld (the farm) and meeting the llamas, the alpacas, and the wonderful owner. To see the llamas and alpacas roaming around, grazing in the meadow, stampeding past me to get to the meadow.... it was a magical day.

October totals

October
49 eggs x 2.1oz = 102.9
tomatoes 149
beans 7.7
peppers 72.5
yard long beans 7.4
bok choy 34.7
chinese cabbage 13.0
onions 1.0
sweet potatoes 310.4
October total 698.6 = 43.7 lbs
2010 year to date total 752.1 lbs

Things are slowing down, gardenwise. I am very impressed with the bok choy and the Chinese cabbage. Both of those are fall vegetables that did better than I expected.