September: A Month of Change in the Garden

Whiskerton garden has undergone dramatic changes through September - from an overgrown green garden wonderland to a dying, withering, browning garden. Even though the garden is dying back, food production is still high. We are still harvesting cucumbers, summer squash, winter squash, leeks, onion, garlic, figs, chard, arugula, beans, parsley and rhubarb.

Good view of the busy garden in September. Lots of growth, lots of food, and lots of change.

The sunflowers were enormous this year! The birds let us know they were ready because they started eating the seeds. The seeds also had black on them and had started to dry. The seeds can be easily collected for making tasty treats or saving for next year's sunflower crop.

Sunflower stalks can also be dried and used for building grow structures in the garden next year. they also make great compost, full of fleshy woody matter.

Sunchoke artichoke harvest! These artichoke are related to sunflower, but make potato-like tubers that grow beneath the soil. We pulled out the whole plant, collected tubers and threw some small ones back in the ground for next year. Sunchokes can be prepared like potatoes, but taste like artichoke!

Sunchoke up close.

Pumpkins are ready! The plants have almost entirely died back, pushing all their energy into the juicy sugar pumpkins. I'm excited to make pies, breads and pumpkin stir fry!!

Strawberries Everywhere!

Whiskerton Garden's strawberry patch, which was put in three years ago, has not been thinned out significantly. With a not-so-great strawberry year in the garden, it seemed that the plants had become too crowded. Each plant was competing for light and nutrients so they were smaller and produced not-as-tasty fruit.
So this year we are making a big effort to thin out the strawberry bed significantly. With all the extra strawberry plants - we have been extracting about 500 per week for several weeks now - I am giving them to other Urban Farm Collective garden managers to spread in their gardens. Hopefully in a couple years there will be strawberry patches all over the UFC that are producing and we will have a significant amount of strawberries at market - not just two pints like this year!

Collected strawberries and sawdust. We put strawberry plants in plastic bags with sawdust and water.

The wet sawdust keeps strawberry roots moist for the week they will be out of the ground.

The great thing about thinning the strawberry patch is some of the extracted plants are already 2 or three years old so new beds will produce fruit next year. Gardens won't have to wait for two years before getting a harvest. These established root crowns will also have a much higher transplant survival rate than first-year strawberry runners.

Summer's Bounty: What to do with all that Food

With so much food coming out of the garden in August and September, it becomes necessary to find other uses for some veggies that arrive in excess.
Canning veggies, salsas, and

So much food during the Summer!

Keep chard, kale, rhubarb, green onion and other veggies  crisp and fresh by making them the table centerpiece. Now this is an edible bouquet!

Using garden tomatoes, onions, cilantro and garlic with store-bought limes and mangoes, we made tons of Pico de Gallo. So good!! This is a great way to use lots of tomatoes that explode all over the garden in the dry, late Summer.

Pesto is a yummy way to use all the basil

So much pico de gallo!

Zucchini bread muffins. I made a vegan recipe, replacing eggs and butter with asian pear from the garden and ground flax seed. They tasted so amazing, who knew that they were vegan (and only have 1 cup of brown sugar for the whole loaf!)?

Pico de gallo, pico de gallo, pico de gallo, pico de gallo and pico de gallo