Karen's Garden Delights Journal
3rd week of October 2011

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This week everyone pitched in to scurry around doing garden clean-up whenever it was pleasant outdoors. There is definitely a chill in the air and we had to dodge the rain showers. We were pulling out weeds and old sunflowers, cutting back perennials, sending dying plants to the compost pile and digging up a few tender plants like stevia and lemon verbena to go to the root cellar. Olin disked the back patches and it's always sad to say goodbye to a garden and especially hard to let him disk down a bed of flowers that still were colorful. I know that frost is not far away and they will die soon but I still like to enjoy them to the last possible minute. Where he disked, we broadcast winter rye seed that hopefully will have enough warm days to get a start yet this fall. This probably would have been an ideal week to plant garlic but there were too many other things on the list and too few dry days to be planting.

It's also time to keep putting away the goodness of fall for our winter meals. We did several batches of kraut in Ferment-O jars again this week. The recipe is quite simple, just shredded cabbage and salt. Here we are pounding the cabbage to release the juices. It doesn't take long till you can pick up a handful and wring out the water. I also recently purchased a German crock at Lehmans that has a water seal with the lid. When we get enough cabbages ready, we'll fill that crock and put it in the root cellar. Now my family likes the basic kraut but my favorite is definitely the spiced up kim-chi version that includes shredded radish and carrot, onion, garlic, ginger and a touch of red pepper - oh so delicious and good for you. I guess I'll get to eat the spicy jars all myself!

Here is one of the interesting crops we tried this year - cotton! We had two cotton plants from a friend's greenhouse and it was fascinating to watch the plants bloom and grow. We kept waiting for one of the bolls to open and this week one finally did. They are a very long season plant adapted for the south so we just got a fun glimpse at what the slaves picked field after field of. We were surprised at how "dirty" the cotton looks and I'm sure most of what we wear has been bleached to a crisp white. It was also interesting trying to separate out the seeds and that made us understand the importance of the invention of the cotton gin. The children saved a pile of seeds with plans to plant some again next year.

This year I decided not to grow and make fall decorations as I did other years but instead taught several Amish families how to make them. Here are some lovely decorations made by the Zook gals, Amish teenagers with a real eye for creating beautiful things. These are wreathes that will feed the birds, squirrels and other critters. I took a box of them along to sell at some of my October talks.