Autumn Archives - Growing and Gathering

Autumn Harvest

It’s hard to believe that where I live, we are in Autumn already. The year seems to have only just begun, and I had lost track of time with all the glorious Summer days, yet here we are. Sometimes it’s …

Harvesting Yams – When To Dig Up Your Yams

We’ve had 3 or 4 good hard frosts already this Autumn. Jack Frost has definitely started his rounds .

Which means it is time to harvest the Yams!

I have to be honest and say that when I see those first frosts, my mouth starts watering thinking about the fact we can soon harvest the sweet morsels hiding beneath the earth.

Now I have to be careful here when I talk about Yams because Yams are referred to as different things in different parts of the world. The Yams I’m talking about look like this –

Mint Refurbishment

Things have got a little out of hand in the Mint department. Our Mint patch is looking rather unruly right now which means it’s time for the bi-annual herb refurb. Every Autumn and early Summer our Mint patch gets a good haircut …

Autumn Beauty In An Edible Garden

Growing an edible garden doesn’t mean missing out on all the beauty of Autumn.

The yellows of the Cherry tree leaves…

The oranges of the Nectarine tree leaves…

Growing Garlic From Last Seasons Bulbs

As you are eating your Summer harvest of Garlic, don’t forget to put aside a few cloves from each bulb, for planting in Winter.

Garlic bulbs are grown from individual cloves like the ones in the picture above. With the right growing conditions, each clove planted goes on to produce a single Garlic plant with a bulb containing as many as 20 cloves.

Which makes growing Garlic wonderfully self-sustaining.

Pruning Blackberry Plants

Among the many berry plants we have on our 1/4 acre, we have four Navaho Blackberry plants which are an erect, thornless varierty that produce large crops of delicious, fat, sweet black fruit.

Well normally.

This Summer, we didn’t get such a great crop from two of our Blackberry plants.

The fruit was dry and sparse and the plants weren’t looking that healthy.

The other two plants did really well and produced a fantastic crop. But as always in our garden, we want more!