Lettuces were pretty much the star of our fall garden. I amended them with rabbit manure and eggshells for calcium. This mesclun mix in this washtub grew amazingly fast. If I hadn’t seeded SO much lettuce, I probably could have gotten by just from harvesting/reseeding this batch continually.
The downside of so much extra lettuce is that I didn’t already have a market for it and you can’t preserve it. Luckily I managed to find a source in need of bulk donation and gave away a total of 14 grocery bags stuffed full of Yugoslavian Butterhead, Lolla Rosa Darky, mesclun mix, and especially Amish Deer Tongue. That stuff grew like crazy. Can you imagine if I’d had to just watch it go bad while we tried frantically to stuff ourselves with lettuce? I can’t be as sure of a donation source next time, so I’ll consider that a lesson.
The strawberries were lovely and grew in tiny spurts all season long. This handful is the only one that made it more than ten feet from the plants.
Our amendments for the carrots and beets worked out really well, too. Rock phosphate and bone meal for the beets, wood ash for the carrots. We had germination issues (from so many cool, wet nights, I think) and I’m going to try sprouting them with a burlap cover next time to see if that helps. I learned about it from the awesome Tiny Farm Blog entry on starting carrots.
Dispatches From A Field 