October Archives - The Gardening Adventure

October 2020 harvest

This month I reached 1,000 lbs of harvest for the year!!!

October 2020 was much better than last year. This year’s harvest was 2.5 times more than last year. Total harvest for the October 2020 was 163 lbs.

From the total harvest for the month, only 12.5% were vegetables while last year 53% of the harvest were vegetables.

The persimmons accounted for 69.5% of the entire harvest for the month with 113 lbs.

The main 3 producers were: persimmons, eggplants and pomegranate, which make up for 84% of the harvest.

As it is the case with all the fruits this year, the guavas are starting to ripe a month earlier and I also have a few fruits that I didn’t have last year, like papaya and dragon fruit.

Garden journal – October 2020 part 2

The spider mites invaded about half of my eggplants. I removed most of the leaves and I will wait to see if they will recover this late in the season, usually they have no problems regrowing the leaves and producing fruits during the summer and early autumn months.

Below are a few before and after pictures.

I removed most of the celery plants that were growing between my pepper and eggplants to give them more light now that the days are sorter and the weather gets cooler.

Another project was to remove the leaves that were attached by the spider mites from my potted tomato plants and spray them with neem oil.

I removed the papaya plant which dried out and rotted. I was surprised by the look of the roots and how easily they came out of the ground.

Because this year I had a lot of Fuyu persimmons I dried many of them. I cut the fruits in half, then cut them in slices about 1/4 inch thick and dried them for 12 hours at 135 F degrees. My food dehydrator was very busy this year since it was a very good year for fruit trees.

This month I also planted my garlic between the cauliflower plants.

Garden journal – October 2020 part 1

In the month of October, I continued planting the cool season vegetables: onions, cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce, arugula, carrots, spinach, Fava beans and peas.

I also transplanted the sequoia strawberries in a bigger container. The small plant purchased last year multiplied and I had to move it into a bigger container. I transplanted 6 plants in a big rectangle container.

I removed most of the remaining basil plants and amended the soil with steer manure. Afterwards I prepared the rows and planted the lettuce, arugula and spinach seeds. I also planted yellow onion bulbs and transplanted the broccoli and cauliflower seedlings.

Another project was to remove the weeds from another space in my garden where I had the summer squash and zucchini and plant cool season plants. I amended the soil with steer manure and planted carrots, arugula, radishes and Fava beans.

The last project was to plant the peas in 5 gallon pots. They are growing very fast: they spouted in 1 week and 3 days later they were already around 4-5″ tall.

Garden update – October 21 2020

The papaya fruits are starting to ripe. I harvested 4 papaya this month when their surface was about 30-40% yellow and left them to fully ripe on the counter. I ate 2 of them and they were the tastiest that I ever ate.

Vegetables

After I removed most of the leaves from the potted tomato plants, now they are full of leaves again. A few of them are have spider mites and I will have to clean them up again. I treat them with neem oil about once a week. The glacier tomato is full of tomatoes.

Two of my garden bed are full of the cool season plants: arugula, parsley, onion, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, lettuce, parsnip, carrots and radishes. I have two tomato plants and one basil left from the warm season in that beds also.

The peppers are having the second round of crop and the eggplants are continuing producing. I had to removed almost all the leaves from about half of the eggplants because the spider mites were taking over.

Flowers

The dragon fruits finished flowering and I have a few fruits that I’m waiting to harvest in a few weeks.

Berries

The raspberry and blackberry plants that I transplanted last month are doing very well and growing nicely.

I still have to split my chandler strawberries from the rectangle container but I don’t have space for them yet.

Trees

Some of the cocktail grapefruits are starting to split which is a sign of over watering. I also had a ants problems on the trees, I used tangle-foot paste on the trunk of the tree to discourage them for climbing up.

I’m continuing to harvest the persimmons and try to find different ways of consuming them. I dried a few of them, made jam from the Hatchia persimmons and we also ate a lot of the Fuyu persimmons. We never thought that we will ever have more Fuyu persimmons then my family can eat, this year we might have.

A nice surprise was to find out that I can dry Hatchia persimmon when they are still hard and nor ripe and get some very sweet dried persimmons as a result.

Some of the guava fruits are starting to ripe also. I finished harvesting the pomegranate fruits but from far away it looks like it has more fruits on the tree. All of them are empty, as it can be seen in the closeup picture. The squirrels ate the seeds from inside and left only the shell.

The figs are producing some fruits but the rodents or the birds eat them before they get fully ripe. I was able to save a few by using some protection bags but, it’s too much work to get just a few fruits. I have many other fruits that I harvest these days so I’m not that worry about the figs.