What a fall, I am so grateful to live in a place with seasons. After that phenomenal rain the other day, it feels particularly sumptuous. The air feels fresher, the sky a more gorgeous blue, and our trees around town are so brilliantly colored you cannot help but grab a flannel shirt and a pumpkin spiced latte. As I mentioned before I am one of those pumpkin-and-all-the-fall-things loving gals. I am super enjoying everyone gleefully sharing fall foliage photos and pumpkin patch/corn maze visits on social media. I cannot think of an autumn I have seen the flowering pears down Maine Street look more striking. Walking thru my garden this morning, cup of coffee in hand, I thought about digging out a long-ignored garden journal, to do a little record keeping. Record keeping for me really means doodles and sketching with a few scribbled notes. When I look at old journal pages from years past, I am pretty confident I had some divine intervention when it came to my biology degree.
If you’re lucky enough to have a garden mentor, ask them if they keep some sort of journal, most will probably say they do. Some record their successes and challenges digitally on a blog, social media accounts, or on various apps. Others prefer a garden journal that is a stuffed, spiral-bound notebook filled with magazine cutouts, plant tags, and receipts. For me there are sketches and quickly scribbled notes that Kevin and I laugh at come harvest time when we need a decoder ring to decipher them.
All kidding aside, it is good garden practice to keep a record. Besides detailing what and where you planted, you might want to record events like the first and last freeze, other temperature extremes, or maybe monthly averages. In the spring, most of us put the seedling transplants we started inside out after nighttime temperatures level off around 50 degrees. That date hovers around mid-April into early May. Including pictures is a nice idea as well. When I look back at our first garden after moving into our house, it is a gratifying reminder of how far we have come and how much work we have done. A garden journal might also make a good Christmas gift for a dirt-digging friend. You might include a nice pen too. A well-loved journal might become a cherished family heirloom down the road.
Friends keep asking if we’re all done in the garden this year. It seems like a long fall. I am surprised about how well our cool-season crops are doing. I shouldn’t be really, I had shorts on yesterday after all. Beets, kale, mustards, Bok Choi, and other greens we have not even covered are thriving. We will for sure plant more of them next year, late summer. We are still planting garlic, row by row. If you are raking leaves, they make an excellent soil-enhancing cover for your freshly planted bulbs.
We know the trees change color because they stop the “food making” process in their leaves, without chlorophyll production, we get to see the other pigments the tree manufactures - bright yellows, browns, and oranges. Taking a cue from nature we can slow down a bit as well. Talk a walk in your garden to recharge and enjoy the fall color, it will be gone before you know it.
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