Raised bed planted with garlic, lettuce, spinach and chard - the fall/winter garden

I really enjoyed reliving my 2021 garden while writing down my three garden updates. It is still hard for me to believe that this packed, enjoyable, busy garden season is now in the rear view mirror. As I like to say, however, gardening is a 12 month hobby. For me, this means more assessing and planning and seed sending and writing, and less playing in the dirt. The picture above (and the one at the end of the blog) show the extent of my fall/winter gardening.

We are enjoying a glorious autumn. Sue and I (with various combinations of our beasty boys - and girl) are hiking as often as we can. It is remarkable to have so many beautiful places to walk close to our home, and we will never take it for granted.

The rest of October and November will be about fulfillment of seed requests - I am about to roll my my sleeves and start working on that early next week. There hasn’t been time to assess the status of the Dwarf Tomato Breeding project, so seeds I send out from the project for future work will be prior to full analysis of the status.

I’ve sent my last 2021 newsletter draft to my daughter and that should be published and sent out very soon. I will be intermittently blogging, but my social networking presence in general will be greatly reduced.

After that comes logging in of seed samples that folks have been sending me over the last few months - either dwarf project varieties or other heirloom types. I still have last year’s efforts of one of our main project contributors to log in to my seed database. That will happen over December.

The comes January, which means planning. Full assessment of the Dwarf Tomato Breeding Project - what remains, what is complete; sending seeds off to Mike Dunton at Victory for future spots in his catalog, and deciding what goes in my 2022 garden will all take place then. But that is 2022, and this is still 2021 - it is a bit too early to talk any further about that!