Harvesting Onions and a Few Sunflower Photos

Welcome back. October is here and the gardening season has officially ended as we had a kiling frost on Saturday morning October 6th. The temperature plunged to 27 degrees here in the Central New York countryside.

I will be in the process now of continuing garden cleanup over the next few weeks. The lower garden is in pretty good shape since the potatoes have been dug the garden is prettty clear. I still have to clean out the lettuce/greens bed. there is still kale that will survive temperatures down to the low 20s.

The upper garden is another story and will require much more work to pull all the plants including tomatoes, peppers, and more.

In my last post, a few weeks, I wrote about digging the potatoes
I pulled the onions as well a few days later. This year i grew Stuttgart which is a traditional yellow onion, and also Sweet Spanish which is a larger sweet onion. Both varieties did very well and should store well for the winter.

After pulling the onions, I let them dry for a few days in the sun before putting them away for storage. I then store them in the cellar in plastic crates for the winter. The cellar says in the 40s during the winter which is an ideal temperature for vegetable storage.

Finally, a few sunflower photos. This year was again a struggle growing them. First of all, after planting the seeds, the birds love to pick them out of the ground before they have a chance to sprout. To prevent this, I placed netting over the rows after planting which helped. I then left the netting on to prevent other critters from eating the pants as they grew. I have found that woodchucks love sunflowers, and even burrowed under the netting to destroy the plants much to my surprise. So after a few re-plantings i at lease ended up with a few in the fall.

Next year I will build a raised bed wooden box (with netting) as i did for the lettuce and greens; this will prevent the critters from destroying the sunflower crop. At least that is my theory.

Thanks for reading. Until next time.