The biggest news since the last post is the snap of cold weather we had. A couple weeks ago it froze pretty hard here in Memphis. It was only three days later than the earliest recorded freeze here.  This is realy early so we decided to try to cover the garden and try to protect it from the 27 degree weather. We had three days with lows of 31, 27, and 32. We wrapped up the square foot garden in canvas drop cloths and plastic. We also made sure the ground inside was wet. The garden survived with the only damage being the eggplant which was bent down under the weight of the cover. I think the very warm ground and the water helped us out. We have not had any temperatures close to freezing since then so we are still growing. Here is a video of how we covered it up:

Even though we covered up the garden to protect it, it is time to harvest the sweet potatoes. We got six sweet potatoes from the two squares we planted. This does not seem like much except three of them were the largest sweet potatoes I have ever seen by far. The six potatoes weighed in at 8.4 lbs and the longest one was 10 inches long and weighed 2.3 lbs just by itself. Many vegetables don't taste good when they get large, but these potatoes were very good, at least the portion we have been able to eat so far. I was worried that the harvest would not be very good because the landscapers cut them back so severely in July, but they pulled though and did great.

I have also harvested most of the lettuce. The oakleaf lettuce was showing signs of bolting so I harvested it and then a few days ago the Romain was starting to bolt so I harvested it too. The Romaine had not gone bitter yet so that is good.
The oakleaf lettuce is starting to regrow where it was cut off so we may get another harvest out of it which would be nice. I left two Romain plants that were smaller so they will have more time to mature.
I picked .58 lbs of oakleaf and 1.2 lbs of Romain.

I pulled all the carrots a long time ago, but there was one I missed. I found it and pulled it. So add one carrot to the total.

During this time we have also picked 10 more cucumbers for another 5.34 lbs. The cucumbers are still producing and we will have more again soon.
We also harvested three more eggplant for 1.22 lbs. There are four more growing on the plant.
We got only 2 cherry tomatoes for a measly 0.02 lbs. This is because in the heat the large tomatoes stopped blooming. The good news here is with the cooler weather there are lots of large tomatoes growing on those plants again.

Here are the other things going on that are not harvest related.
The fall vegetables are growing well. The romaine lettuce has about doubled in size so far. The oak leaf lettuce started bigger so it has not grown as much relative to how it started. The cauliflower and broccoli are doing well.
The cantaloupe has another fruit on it and the watermelon has one too.
The sweet potato vines have recovered from being mowed off by the landscapers and are doing well. It is trying to invade the lettuce patch.
One piece of bad news, the potatoes are dead. They did not grow well and I think it might be because of the heat.
Also, if you remember last time I talked about how I needed to pull out some pepper plants because they had wilt. Well with the empty space I planted another cauliflower next to the ones from the previous week.

I always enjoy the transition from summer gardening into fall. I realy like to grow the cool season vegetables. If everything goes well we should have lots of them soon.

I planted the fall crops this week. I planted 4 cauliflower and 2 broccoli in the space that was taken by the totally non-productive green beans. They are planted one plant per square foot. I also planted lettuce in the two squares that were used by the onions earlier this year. Those are planted 4 per square. I planted 6 romaine and two oak leaf lettuce plants. I also planted a kale plant in a square that was supposed to have some potatoes, but they never came up. I planted all of these before I decided to take out the peppers because of wilt so I have two more squares that I will plant in. I have 2 cauliflower and one kale plant left over so I will plant them in the newly available squares.

You may remember that I started some cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce from seed, but they were eaten by bugs when I tried to harden them off, so they were not going to work. Luckily I was able to find replacements at the store.

I also sprayed the plants with Bt to keep them from getting chewed on. The bugs have had all year to multiply and they are looking for some late season snacking.

So, I am going to start with the bad news. We had two watermelons growing great....... until the landscapers got a little too excited with their weed eater. They cut one of the watermelons off the vine. So now we are down to one watermelon, but it is growing well and is getting close to the size of a basketball.  I am going to count the cut off watermelon in the total harvested on the right.
Also, while the landscapers were at it, they mowed down all the leaves from the sweet potato vines that were trailing into the space between our beds. The sweet potatoes will probably do just fine because they grow so aggressively. They are now growing the other way and trying to take over the garden.

One last piece of bad news. Two cantaloupes ripened, but before I picked them some animals picked and ate them for me. They left a little piece to tell me they were there. They must have been good. Just so you know I did eat the cantaloupe I picked a few weeks ago. it was good.

More bad news. The first part of the summer was hot and dry, but now it has turned into a regular Mid-South summer with hot and humid conditions. The tomatoes have been suffering from blight, quite a bit of it. I have been spraying, but it is hard when it rains every other day. The only tomato plant still setting flowers is the cherry tomato. Hopefully the others will recover when the weather cools down and we can pick another round of large tomatoes. 

We got another squash. In previous years the squash plants have all been killed by squash vine borer by this point. I wonder if having so many plants so close together makes it hard for the borer adults to find the squash plant. Also, I am not sure why they are so small. It may be because they are often the shade of taller plants or it could be that they have more competition than usual from the roots of other plants.
Also, one squash bug has found the squash. I found a set of eggs on a leaf. i tore off that part of the leaf and threw it away.

To round it out I have also picked another 2 eggplants (0.8lbs), 13 full size and 32 cherry tomatoes (2.8lbs), and a little basil (0.05lbs)

So we have two new kinds of vegetables to harvest this week. First the eggplant exploded and only about a week after first noticing small fruit, two of them were ready to harvest. In fact, the fruit was heavy enough that it pulled the plant over so I had to stand it back up and stake it.  We should be getting more eggplant over the next few weeks as it does not look like it is slowing down.

I also put the potatoes in the ground. Confession to make, these were potatoes that I purchased at the store. You are not supposed to do that because of disease. Unfortunately there were no local nurseries that had any fall seed potatoes. One I called even said they can't get them anymore. I had to go to several grocery stores to find a bag of potatoes that had some good eyes on them. I cut the eyeing potatoes up and put them on a plate to scab over.
To plant them I dug a hole for each that was about 10 inches deep. Then put a piece of potato in and only filled the hole about half way. Potatoes need to be hilled several times and the first hilling will be filling the hole the rest of the way. As a side note, there were lots of roots in the soil as I was digging the holes. I tried to not break the larger roots. Overall I planted three squares of potatoes with two plants per square. With potatoes you can plant 1,2, or 4 plants per square. The fewer the plants the larger the potatoes. I thought 2 was a good compromise.

I have needed to put in a trellis for the cucumbers for awhile, but I have not been able to figure out the best way to do it. The trellis for the peas was okay, but it did not work as well as I would have liked and all the peas ended up sliding their twine to one side. I decided to go with cattle panel like on the tomatoes. We also have cucumbers growing up cattle panel in the main garden and it has worked very well. I attached the panel with wire. It had to be mounted under the t-posts because the tomatoes were already on top of the middle t-post.

To plant the potatoes I pulled the rest of the carrots in those squares. I have been pulling them as they grow. I pulled about 16 carrots. most were a good size, but there were a few realy small ones that I did not even keep long enough to take a picture of. After removing the tops they weighed 0.94 lbs. That about wraps up the carrots for the year. There are a few more growing around the garden where the odd seed fell. If any of them turn out to be good I will update the numbers.

I pulled more carrots (11 carrots for 0.94 lbs.). Early next week the potatoes are going in the ground for a fall harvest. The rest of the carrots will come out then.

We have also picked another 16 full size and 16 cherry tomatoes for 3.42 lbs.

The cucumbers are growing well. I need to build the trellis for them. The twine I used for the peas did not survive pulling up the peas. I may use another piece of cattle panel like I used for the tomatoes. It is strong and lets the cucumbers hang down so they are easy to find as they grow.

The cucumbers are up, but the germination was poor (about 50%) so I have planted replacement seeds where they did not sprout the first time. I am not sure why we have had such poor germination on some of the brand new seeds we purchased this year. We have a larger in-ground garden nearby and there were two whole packages of brand new corn seed that did not come up at all, while a section we planted in 5 year old seed had almost all of them come up.

Like I said in the video I would be harvesting some of the veggies. This is the first tomato harvest of the year. I picked 6.78lb of tomatoes. There were 21 large tomatoes and 10 of the black cherry tomatoes as well. There are a few more that are about ready so there will be more soon.

I also pulled 11 carrots for 1.05lbs. Most were straight, but there were two that had forked.

I got a few green beans for .084lb

I trimmed the basil and got a very large harvest for only four plants, .38lb. I took it home and made two cups of pesto which is very good.

With the hot weather of late the peas shriveled up and died. They have done well with 3.72lb of peas produced. You may remember that we have only about 50% germination on the seeds we planted (17 out of 32)  so we could have done much better. Late in the season they were affected with powdery mildew and aphids, but we did not treat because they had only a little time left.

With the peas gone it is time to plant cucumbers in that space. We planted so we would have 2 plants per square. The cucumbers are located here because they can use the same trellis system that the peas used. This allows them to lean out over the lawn. Also, it is the north side of the garden so they do not shade any of the other plants.

We ended up letting the peas go longer than we originally intended because it was a cool spring and they kept producing. The cucumbers will be done long before the frost so there was no rush to get them switched out.

The rest of the garden is doing well and in the next update I will show how all the different plants are doing.

Also we got some of our first carrots. One of the great things about having a raised bed when you have hard soil is the carrots don't have to fight the soil so they end up straight and long. These carrots are a little small so we will leave the others in the ground a little longer.

Also we have been picking a small amount of basil. The plants are continuing to grow and we will have larger harvests in the future. What we are getting now is enough to add to a meal.