The Natural Life - Chapter 12 - Transitioning to Cooler Weather
Fresh Free Groceries
Hello Frens,
Welcome back to The Natural Life, where I talk about everything on the farm. It’s Monday and we got a whole new week to mess up, lol! Crypto world seems to be taking off again which is making many people’s portfolios look much better hopefully bringing moods up with it.
I think we need to get a little competition going so I want to have a Jungle County Fair Contest, where you can submit a picture of your best vegetables, fruit, animal, or food that you created or grew yourself. There will be one winner for a quart of our Fresh Raw Honey we just jarred up a couple of weeks ago! I want this to be simple and easy, so just dm a recent picture (has to be from 2021) of your entry and we’ll have a twitter vote on November 1st to see who has the best looking Tater, Mater, or Hog.
Transition to Fall:
By this time, the garden has produced a bountiful amount for our family, we have a pantry and freezer full of peas, beans, canned tomatoes. We are now making jelly and preserves with all of the fruit we have gathered over the summer and we will start to pickle the peppers and cucumbers we pick over the next months up until frost.
We still have 2-3 months of hot to mild weather before frost so the vegetable garden is in no way slowing down right now. However, the heat does take its toll on plants and after a few weeks of producing heavily you will notice the leaves and vegetables begin to look dried out and not as big as they were producing earlier in the season. This is a good sign that it is time to pull the crops, once you pull the crops you will need to decide what to do next.
Depending what part of the country you live will determine what you do next. You will need to look up your first frost date and see if you have enough time to grow more warm weather vegetables before the first frost date. Find where you live on the map, and then look up the first frost date on the chart… below.
So if you live in Tennessee, you can see that you have until the end of October before you will start getting frost danger, which will kill most of your summer vegetable crops. If you planted some peas right now, you would only have about 2 months before frost danger, this is not enough time to produce vegetables so you will now want to start preparing for cool weather crops.
WAGMI Note: Even if you don’t have access to a piece of land for a garden or equipment like what I use you can still get into gardening. Alot of people use raised beds and have small pots in the house or on their porch. I am going to cover all of the different ways of gardening in the substack, don’t worry! If there is something you want me to cover, please reach out!
Until next time, remember, We all gone make it! I’ll holler at ya’ll later…
Your Fren,
Farmer
There's also guerrilla gardening for the urbanites.