Fall weather
The garden really loves this Fall weather. The cole crops are churning out new leaves – they would be beautiful and lush if the caterpillars didn’t think they were so tasty and make lacework out of them.
Burgeoning baby Brussels sprouts
While it sucks that all our tasty greens have holes in them, it makes Sofía really excited to go out to the garden. She loves looking for “calla-pitters” and feeding them to the chickens one by one. She found an old magnifying glass and totes it everywhere, supposedly “looking for bugs”. She doesn’t really use it so I think she just likes it.
The strawberry bed has really taken off since late summer – I think I only planted 25-30 slips there this Spring. The runners are going everywhere. If I weren’t so lazy, I’d pot them up and transplant them to the sides of Backfill Hill, where we could really use some non-sucky groundcover.
The grassy things you see are some of the un-harvested onions and garlic poking back up through the soil, ready for another go. They probably won’t make it through the winter, but in the mean time they’re an organic pest repellant. Supposedly.
Matted-row-method strawberries kind of kick ass as a weed suppressant.
My second batch of fava beans are just poking up their heads:
The deer ate the first batch, planted more than a month ago. I don’t know if there’s time for these to get big enough before frost, now. We’ll see. I’ve never grown, nor eaten, fava beans before.
My lettuces and spinach are coming along nicely. I seeded red-bottomed scallions between each variety. The kohlrabi has sprouted and might just make it before first frost, though the chard, leeks, and carrots (top right edge – can’t hardly see them, can you?) look like they’ve stalled. I probably started them too late.
In fact I’m pretty sure I started just about everything a month too late; remember caterpillars completely and utterly wiped out my first crop of 2-300 Fall seedlings. So… sow the seeds again, late, or just give up? I bought some seedlings at the farm store and started the others over again. You don’t get into gardening if you give up easily. 
There’s a couple volunteer potatoes in the background too; I figured I’d let them be and see what happened, though I’m sure there’s not enough time for them to produce anything.
I love Fall. It’s my favorite season, and I love the garden’s last hurrah. I just wish the promised dearth of insect pests would arrive; though I could almost believe that it isn’t going to happen on our strangely pest-accursed property. After all, the pests here have completely ignored all of Nature’s other deadlines.