Although my summer carrots are still not ready, the planting calendar says that it is time to plant winter carrots. If feels a little early to plant winter vegetables, but a quick check with the Lunar Calendar confirmed that August 13&14 are auspicious planting days, so I pulled out my seed packets and headed into the yard.  Last year’s winter garden was an “epic fail”, as my kids would say, so I am hoping that an earlier planting will yeild better results.

The only planting space I have available right now is the area formerly occupied by the garlic. After adding about 40 litres of sifted compost (by volume) and about 15 pounds of steer manure, I dug everything under and watered well. I planted nine alternating rows of purple haze, little fingers and bolero carrots. Finally, I gently covered the seeds with light soil and watered again.

The challenge will be to keep the rows moist until the seeds sprout. One of the seed packets recommended a floating row cover, but I haven’t quite reached that level of sophistication with my gardening, so instead will give the bed a light watering each day.

Other news…

• Most of the lettuce is finished – it has either bolted or stopped producing or has turned brown. This week I am going to start pulling some of the spent plants out. I am not sure if I am going to plant anything there for the winter yet, as that bed could probably use a rest.
• After a fabulous run, the fava beans are finished. Last night I pulled the last few pods off the fava trees and pulled out the fava forest. Most of the plants had nodules on the roots, which is how they do their magic nitrogen fixation thing. There were a lot of dried black pods on some of the plants, which I saved, shelled and am drying.
• Kale is (finally) starting to grow fast, and I look forward to turning that into stir fries. This has been a late year for many things; yesterday we enjoyed our FIRST swiss chard of the season.