The heat wave that prompted my rant a few weeks ago produced some wonderful results in our garden.
While we normally get our last tomato in October, it’s not normally mid-month. This one still has a buddy on the vine, and our cherry tomato plant has tons of blossoms and tomatoes.
The weather is confusing so many parts of the garden. Hillary‘s peach tree has fruit … in OCTOBER!
We did have to wait several weeks later than normal to start planting our winter seeds – we didn’t want the heat to kill them off early.
Each winter we have had great luck with carrots, snow peas, beets and turnips. Last years favas did well. All of those except the turnips are already in the ground, and some are making their presence known.
Russian Red beet sprouts
I have thrown in the towel on parsnips. It saddens me to know they have defeated me, at least in this gardening space. In the future I might be back to optimistically attempting that delicious root vegetable.
I have a new veggie to take the parsnips’ place. For my birthday, my fabulous vegan friends gave me some broccoli seeds. They have sprouted already!
 Between those seeds and the birthday gift of gardening supplies that I received from Rebecca, we are well set for the season.
Our main challenge over the last few months besides the heat is a nocturnal friend. Yes, we have a digger. Some varmint keeps coming in and digging to China.
He hasn’t been eating the plants, but on several occasions we have found plants on their sides with their roots completely exposed.
We covered everything up with plastic for a couple weeks during the heat wave. Hopefully we have broke him of this bad habit.
Anyone else ever have a peach tree produce in October? or Varmint is our word for disruptive creatures in the garden. What is your generic term for these critters?
Grown Up, Now What? 
Well, let’s see if I can comment today…fingers crossed!
I’m a bit jealous of your late season tomatoes. I haven’t nearly had my fill of tomatoes this year (our CSA farm had a bit of a blight problem) and I completely lost out on green tomatoes for fried green tomatoes. Bummer.
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I’m so glad you were able to comment this time. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what went wonky.
This year we did pretty well, much better than last year. Hopefully next year your CSA will rebound and you’ll have your green tomatoes.
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Yay! Love that the broccoli is sprouting! So fun!:)
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Thank you so much for the contribution. I checked on it today, and we have four little seedlings. I’ll have to pair it down to two. It’s survival of the fittest!
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Well we DID call our couple of acres in Colorado Varmint Kong – since there were more moles than we could keep up with. And deer. Instead of fighting the deer and losing money invested in some plants over the years, I learned to work with them and plant perennials that were toxic to them so they left them alone. good thing animals intuitively know what’s toxic for them.
And yes, I just got back from Palm Springs and was surprised to see several Dahlia buds still looking forward to blooming here in my little patch of ground in Oregon. It’s so nice.
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I love that we even use the same words! Varmint Kong – sounds like a whack a mole game in real life! While there are moles in San Diego, they are not very common. (Knocking on huge amounts of wood.) I like that you used natural deterrents for keeping away the deer. They seem to have more survival instincts than humans!
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I love the digger friend. Well, I guess he’s not really a friend, is he? Anyway, it reminds me of my parent’s garden when I was growing up. They had animals digging in it too. I haven’t really got into gardening as an adult, but I remember helping my mom out here and there when I was little.
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While we had a visit from the varmint right after I posted this, he has been kindly absent since then. One of our beds is protected, but the one in the picture is still exposed. There are lots of new plants in there. i hope he doesn’t get another wild hair!
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