Some of my garlic emerging in the fall

It is around the time to plant garlic so I ended up putting them in rows, about 10 inches apart, while their individual distance is usually about 6 inches just to ensure they get nice and big. I tilled up the soil, and made separate beds so the cloves can dig their roots into the ground further which will result in larger bulbs next summer since they can take in more nutrients.

Here's one of my beds for soft neck garlic with last year's bulbils, and new cloves that haven't emerged yet.

Growing angled luffa (loofah) gourds from seed

By around late May of this spring, I planted a few luffa (chinese okra) seeds in the ground, and eventually only 2 of them survived until maturity, but here's a complete picture documentation of the 4 months of progress since they were planted. I may have been able to get harvests faster if I started them indoors under a strong metal halide, but that's OK because I'm still able to get over 100 fruits per plant. The key to getting heavy yields is tons of water, lots of space for crawling, and good fertilizer. I fertilizer with manure, compost, and azomite. These plants produce lots of vines and take up a lot of space.

9 June 2012: Just barely coming out

Setting up the Solar greenhouse

One of the fall projects I have worked on is creating a completely solar greenhouse. I built this right over my moso bicolor so I can protect it as well as speed up its growth. I'm also using it to place some of my bamboos so they can grow a bit more through the winter. My objective is to insulate it well enough so that additional heating will not be necessary here in zone 6a. At this time of the year, the greenhouse typically raised the greenhouse about 5-20F, but those numbers typically increase in the middle of the winter.

Here's the outside of it.

Peonies going dormant for the winter 2012

By late summer or fall, most of the peonies have already stored as much energy as they can for the year and go dormant. This means that their leaves will change colors, fall off, and the tuberous roots will likely shed their feeder roots as they go to sleep. Another way to tell is when the buds for next year really start swelling up in preparation to sprout by next spring. Tree and itoh peonies should have completely woody stems by this point.

Here are some of the seedlings

Most of them will produce more than 1 bud as a 1st year seedling, even if they are weaker ones which only have 1 leaf.