Autumn is finally here! Or, for Americans, Fall is finally here! (I like both terms, but being a Brit I stick with Autumn, even though I now reside in North Carolina.) I'm looking forward to the cooldown - we had a 90 F day just two days ago. Next week the temperatures will be low 80s, which would be scorchingly hot by British standards but cool by NC standards. The first thing I need to talk about is Hurricane Florence. North Carolina suffered a direct hit and crawled over the State. I got wind, though nothing much above 40 mph. The main problem was rain. Some towns on the coart received over 30" of rain. Blimey. In my area we got about 7.5". This caused me some problems. My pumpkins were already under attack from leaf mildrew, pickle worms and lots of other types of bug. The large amount of rain seemed to just about finish them off. Yeah, I'm disappointed but they're dug up and on the compost heap. Oh well.

As for my tomatoes, I harvested nearly all of them and put all the green ones into brown paper bags. This is an old trick that seems to help them ripen. Certainly seems to be helping mine. I've started preserving them; the method I'm using is freezing. I've repeatedly stated that I'm on a budget thinner than a super model on a diet and buying equipment to can/jar costs - gasp! - money. Freezing is a cheaper option and I have a chest freezer. This is the method I use: put the tomatoes into boiling water for 60-90 seconds, drain, put tomatoes into an ice bath. This stops the cooking process and helps split the skins for easy removal. Take the skins off, core and dice and place into ziplock bags, juice as well. Squeeze as much air as you can out of the bags - this stops freezer burn. Then freeze. They apparently keep their taste very well and, given I used tomatoes a lot in my cooking, it will be very useful having lots of frozen tomato in the freezer. The plants themselves pretty much survived Florence and are still producing fruit. Hopefully this will continue for a month or two.

As I said, the pumpkins were dug up, along with the remains of my other squashes and the bean plants. The beans were spectacularly prolific, I planted bush beans and picked beans daily. Lots in my freezer and they taste fantastic. Anyhow, I was left with a lot of space in my garden and I spent a couple of days weeding (groan) and recreating wide, raised beds that I've previously talked about. A lot of effort, yeah, a few painful ant bites (not as painful as the huge wasp stings the other week, those buggers mean business) but worth it as I looked as the freshly dug/raked earth ready for Autumn crops. I chose to plant carrots, beetroot and two types of turnip. All these crops will be okay if we get an early frost. I already have broccoli growing, the seedlings survived the rain and seem healthy. If the frost comes before they're ready I'll cover them up at night with tents of plastic or old towels. I should have enough time to harvest them before the weather turns cold, though.

With nice timing, there is a talk at my local library this thursday, the 27th September. Here's the description for the talk: Lauren Hill NC Cooperative Extension Agent for Cabarrus County will be sharing her love and knowledge for fall gardening. She will be covering tall fescue lawn information, canker worm prevention, and fall vegetable gardening.' The NC State Extension is an educational resource, they also have programmes on the Public Service television. Good stuff and I'm looking forward to the talk; I will be there with noteboom in hand. I'll blog after the talk and let you know how it went. Again, thanks for reading.

TTFN!

SEX! Yes, you read that right. So far, Amateur Idiot Gardner has been rambling, bumbling entries about how I blunder about my garden, attempting not to kill everything I try to grow. But I thought to myself, I want more pageviews, I want more hits. How to achieve this? I pondered for a bit. I drank some coffee. Ate a piece of cake. Pumpkin cake, as it goes. I looked at the cake more closely. It seemed to be trying to tell me something. No, not 'you're getting fat' (though if it had it would've been a fair cop) - it was the pumpkin element. 'I'm growing - ahem, attempting to grow pumpkins' my one and only braincell thought as it feebly fired a few neurons through my noggin. 'Pumpkins . . they're flowering. Both male and female.' Then it came to me - 'sex sells!'

Well, what works for soap operas, the adult movie sector and those adverts for Cabbury's Caramel featuring that disarmngly seductive rabbit might work for my blog, I thought. So here we go. The sex life of pumpkins. Corrr! It goes something like this. No, it's not 'a daddy pumpkin and a mummy pumpkin have a soecial kind of cuddle and nine months later along comes a baby pumpkin'. Nor is a pumpkin stork involved. So clear your head of those notions. Okay? Okay. What pumpkins do is produce separate male and female flowers, in common with many other plants - for example, the squash family. Other plants do things differently - obviously the plant world is less hung up with gender issues than we humans. Tomatoes, for example, like so many other plants produce flowers that have both male and female reproductive parts.

Not so pumpkins. When the vines are large and mature enough they start putting out large flowers, on long stalks that project them up above the leaves of the plants. However, at this stage no female flowers are produced. This occurs a little later and by now the bees and other pollinating insects are well used to visiting the pumpkin plants. This is vital as without the busy little visitors to the garden, you'd be wasting your time trying to grow anything. Basically the insects visit male flowers, pick up pollen and may visit a female flower before heading back to their hives or wherever. This pollinates the female flower#and voila. That's it. No wining and dining. No chocolates. No Barry White music. Just a busy bee and a quick rub against its legs.

At the top of this article is a picture of a tiny baby pumpkin with its withered flower still attached. Here's a couple more shots. It's easy to tell the female flowers apart from the males - they have tiny fruit ready and waiting to swell and grow upon pollination. I've put my fingers behind one of the mini pumpkins for scale. If the flower has been properly pollinated, the bloom will die and drop off and the burgeoning fruit will grow. If not, it'll wither itself and go to pumpkin heaven. You can pollinate manually as it were, using a soft brush to gently transfer pollen between the flowers. So far, though, I've not needed to do this as my volunteer pollinators are quite efficient.

That's it. Once they're pollinated you can watch them grow and, already, my tiny first few pumpkins are growing at a fast rate. I'm feeding them weekly and giving them plenty of water and, this being North Carolina, they're certainly receiving plenty of sun. Of all my crops, pumpkins are what excite me most and yes, it's childish and yes, I keep picturing Linus from Peanuts sitting in the pumpkin patch at Hallowe'en, eagerly awaiting the Great Pumpkin ('You bloackhead!') I hope I get a few decent ones, I will surely keep you posted. I hope you've enjoyed this edition on my blog detailing how pumpkins get it on. You may now uncover your children's eyes.

TTFN!

Left: A visitor to my garden.

Hello! The soggy weather has ended, leading into another hot spell. Today the heat index is pushing 100F. Muggy. (I do like that word . . it sounds exactly like the condition it describes.) I've planted broccoli and I hope the high heat tails off soon, broccoli likes cooler temperatures. We'll see. I have loads of tomato plants filled with large, ripening fruit. Can't wait, fresh home grown toms are brilliant. The pumpkin plants continue to grow like cousins of Little Shop of Horror's Audrey. Feed me!My last few butternut squashes are ripening nicely and the green beans and crookneck squash are slowly tailing off. The cucumbers, after a magnificent effort, are finishing too.

This is okay as I have Autumn crops in mind. Particularly carrots and beetroot, that won't mind the colder weather. I also intend to plant parsnips. Parsnips apparently actually improve after going through a few frosts and I love roast parsnip, delicious. I had trhought about potatoes, but nothing I am reading suggests they should be grown in Autumn, so I'm going to wait til February. I'm already thinking about next year, using the knowledge I've gained this year. What worked, what didn't work, what techniques were sound, how I can add more knowledge to my gardening know-how.

Not sure I will bother with corn next year. It takes space and I can, I think, make more use of that space. I'm going to enlarge the vegetable patch considerably next year and need to give more thought to what I want to grow and how much space to allocate to each thing. I'll also give thought to what complements other crops and crop rotation. One thing that will help a lot next year is that I will have lots of luvverly compost to use. Another bonus is I won't have to break my back digging out lawn - the extyension to the plot will be achieved by simply covering grass with tarpaulin for a few months, killing the grass/weeds which then rot into the soil, fertilising it. The rest of the plot I'll keep weed free during winter, less work that way come spring.

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Hi. Pictured to the left are things I picked this morning; various squashes and one cucumber. The cucumbers finally seem to be declining after an amazingly productive period. My green beans barely survived the hot, dry period but have now burst into full life once more and I'm getting a daily crop again. My chest freezer is rapidly filling up with frozen produce!

I've been preserving my crops by blanching and freezing. With green beans this involves top and tailing the bean pods (I pick them young before the beans have grown too much), snapping them in half and then boiling for three minutes. Immediately after taking them out of the boiling water I immerse them in iced water to stop the cooking process. Then I put them into ziplock bags and freeze. The process is the same with squash, you cut them into one inch pieces and put them through the same blanching procedure as the beans. Works pretty well I've found.

I am having a problem with squash bugs. They bore into your squashes and eat the flesh. I've read that looking out for egg clusters on leaves can help; if you knock them to the ground the local beetles think 'oh look! Brunch!' (I'm pretty sure beatles eat brunch). There's other solutions so I'll try a few. The bugs only really seem to like the spaghetti squash . . one of two crookneck squashes have been affected but that's all. The butternuts have, so far, been left alone. I want to find the most effective methods before my pumpkins begin to flower and fruit. Speaking of which, here's a photo of one of my vines growing at an almost frightening rate. Honestly, it's like something out of Little Shop of Horrors. All the wet weather has given the young plants all the impetus they need and the vines are barrelling along. I'm going to enjoy waiting for the Great Pumpkin to show up at Hallowe'en!

Left, a monarch butterfly in the garden.

Hi.

The heavy rain has continued. We've had at least 5 inches this week on top of all we had the week before. This presents problems of course. The fact I planted a lot of stuff in raised beds has helped a bit as the plants themselves haven't been drowned. The pumpkin seedlings in their hills seem to have actually done very well. My various squash plants have gone berserk and the vegetable patch now resmbles something out of a plant-based 50s B movie. 'The Sensational Sinister Squash Plant' maybe? Some of the young fruits have, unfortunately, rotted and the growth of the fruits has become a little stunted as we have had day after day of rain and little sun.

We've now got a few days (at least) break in the weather and I expect the garden to go BOOM. The cucumbers continue to produce, my bean bushes are still yielding green beans (but in dwindling numbers and size) so we're not doing too badly. My tomatoes have been a challenge, though. The constant heavy rain has made the ground so sodden that, even with stakes, the plants all keep flopping over. I've therefore given them bigger stakes driven in deeper to the ground and this has helped a lot. There's a lot of fruit coming along nicely and I'm looking forward to it, I love fresh tomatoes. I also love the smell of the plants.

That's it for now, take care!

Hello! Well, the longed-for rain has arrived. In true North Carolina fashion, it arrived in bucketloads. We had some rain a few days ago, which was nice, then a pattern set in that will give us a lot of rain concentrated in one week. (I've rapidly discovered that having a vegetable patch makes you even more addicted to weather forecasts and looking at the sky muttering 'no bloomin' rain again' ). We had rain on saturday night but on sunday it really chucked it down. Strong winds, lots of lightning, torrential rain. My pumpkin hlls were literally islands for a while there. I heard a neighbour's tree (or maybe a very large limb) go down, it was a vicious brute of a storm.

After the deluge I went out to survey the damage and happily there wasn't any to the vegetable plot. Thankfully we didn't get any hail - I've seen hail here getting on for golf ball size. That'll put a dent in your cucumber. We are due, as I say, for more rain throughout the week and it'll help immeasureably. The butternut squashes (photo at top of this entry) are growing lots of fruit as are the yellow crooked neck squash. The cucumbers are proving to be prolific and the rain will help all of them.

I do have a couple of large containers for collecting rain water but I'm always wary of keeping standing water around too long - eventually mosquitos will be drawn to it and will breed like mad. Still, it's good to have some water for a few days after a deluge. Whether we see more wet weathewr or return to drought-like conditions remains to be seen. August here, in my limited experience, can be full of the classic afternoon pop ups storms we get in NC so we shall have to see. For now I am very grateful for the rain we've had. Thanks for reading and I'll leave you with a couple more photos - a crooked neck squash growing and a large pot of sweet basil I keep by my porch. Delicious.

Hello! The garden is challenging and rewarding at the moment. The challenge lies in the continued arid conditions we have. Hot remperatures are not exactly rare in a North Carolinian summer, nor are stretches of dryness but it has been particularly hot and dry this year. I suspect this is why my various squash crops have been struggling. I strongly suspect I should have planted them all earlier so they were pollinated and growing fruits before the hot stretch started. Another lesson learned.

In my defence, it took me a lot longer than I anticipated to prepare the vegetable plot and this led to me planting stuff later than I wanted to. I thought I could get away with it - ha! Another lesson learned: don't butt heads with Mother Nature. It's not all bad though, far from it. I have tons of pickling cucumbers growing. They can be eaten like standard cumcmbers and taste very similar, or pickled. They're smaller than other cucumbers, growing to 5-6 inches in length and being a bit on the dumpy side. I look forward to some nice salads, partly flavourred with sweet basil leaves. My sweet basil is growing like mad and it is delicious. Delicious.

I also have my corn producing cobs, some very nearly ready to pick. I've been researching how to assess the ripeness of the cobs and I should have some in the next few days. I'll cook them immediately after picking, as the sugar in the kernels begins to convert into starch immediately after picking (apparently) and affects the flavour. I cannot wait to tuck into them. I've learned that next year I should plant them in a block for better pollination, but I haven't done too badly this year.

My tomatoes are finally producing fruit. My initial planting was washed away by torrential rain and this set me back a bit. But now the plants are growing well and fruit is apearing. I still have enough time for a decent crop - the cummer in North Carolina is long and the Autumn - of Fall as they call it here - is very mild too. More like an English summer, only hotter. Heh. Which brings me . .

I've been thinking about my Autumn garden for a while now. I will be planting stuff in about a month to six weeks, crops that will grow in our temperate Autumn and some that can resist a frost or two. Indeed, some vegetables, apparently, taste better after a couple of frosts - eg, parsnips (which I love.) Crops I intend to plant include beetroot, carrot, parsnip, collards, turnips and broccoli. Maybe cauliflower too, we'll see. As other crops finish I'll creare new deep, wide beds and get sowing.

Well that's it for now. More next time when I talk about my adventures in pumpkin cultivation. Well, not so much adventures as me bumbling about the garden poking seeds into the ground, but adventures in pumpkin cultivation sounds slightly snappier.

Tata!

Hello there. June is pounding by and here in the piedmont of North Carolina we are having a stretch of hot, humid and rain-sparse weather. This presents challenges in the garden and I am having to water with my temperamental hose. Like me, it's old and cranky and needs a kick to get to work. Still, the plants continue to grow; the photo to the left is of a cucumber flower. Pretty little things, I think. The bees are busy in the vegetable plot - I can work in there and they're supremely disinterested in me. But then again, I don't have brightly coloured petals and a tantalising fragrance. (My own bodily aroma, though, freely attracts mosquitos and other biting insects. Typical, innit?) I will shortly be planting pumpkin seeds, hopefully to have them ready for Hallowe'en. No idea if I'll manage to grow any, let alone of a decent size, but we'll seee.

I promised a selection of resources I've been using, so here's a few. This is the Old Farmer's Almanac site . I've found it very useful,particularly the planting calendar - you can enter your location (only in the US, but if you're in another country you can probably find a US location not dissimilar in climate to your own home. Amazingly there are places in the US that resemble, for instance, a UK climate. Gasp! Amazement!) There's lots of resources across the site and information.

Three Season Gardening A site talking about a the different growing seasons in North Carolina. I include it here as it could be applied to other places - but mainly to illustrate that there are tons of resources tailored to different locations. Search for gartdening in your own home/country/location etc and the chances are you'll find information about growing conditions and tips pertinent to you.

Gardening Know How is another site like Almanac with a range of resources. This particular page contains good tips for suburban gardening. That's just three sites. There are literally thousands and thousands of sites out there, as well as facebook pages, twitter users, forums, communities, you name it. Loads and loads of stuff written by people getting their hands dirty in their own gardens.

As for books, I'm corrently consulting a couple: 'The Vegetable Gardener's Bible' by Edward Smith which talks a lot about the deep, wide beds I mentioned previously and 'The American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Gardening'. This last one I got lucky with - the local library was selling old books and I grabbed this monster tome for the princely sum of ten cents. It covers every type of garden and plant and is stuffed with useful info.

When I started planting I took a piece of wood and used it to make a furrow of the appropriate depth in the ground, put the seeds in and covered them. That was that. Of course I read about other techniques once I'd already taken the plunge. Yep, the Amateur Idiot Gardner looked before leaping yet again. I began to read, after the event, about deep, wide beds. This is basically a variety of methods for creating beds that are, surprise surprise, deep! And wide!

Why are they a good thing? Well, by piling up the beds you provide plants with more loose soil to push young roots through. You create a better environment for the plants to grow, basically. Not only is the soil looser but I've also found that during torrential downpours - and we get our share in North Carolina - the beds aren't flooded - the walkways in between are. The beds themselves retain moisture very well I've found. We had a recent succession of downpours here and after everty one, the beds I'd created were wet, but not sodden. There were puddles in the 'valleys' between. This siuted the plants much better than the earlier rows which were planted in the plat soil.

There are many gardening publications and sites - which I'll list in an upcoming entry - which go into greater and wider detail about raised, deep, and wide beds. For this entry I'll limit it to my experiences so far. Primarily. so far (apart from my experiences with hard rainfall) creating the beds. I'd seen a few different types. Some are very raised and have planks of wood to contain and structure them. This might be sometihng I attempt in the future, but as I'm srarting out I was looking for an easier (and cheaper) method. I ended up following the 'rake it up' method - simply ise your rake to draw earth across from either side and gradually pile your earth up that way. The rake can also be used to flatten the top off prior to planting.

The photo at the top of this entry shows one of my beds - it's hard to see the actual depth but it's about five inches higher than the walkway either side.

I could have made it higher, probablyh will in future but for now it was an improvement on my earlier methods. I've planted cucumbers and squashes (spaghetti, butternut and crooked yellow) and the growth rates have been fantasitc. Within days tiny plants began sprouting from the earth, tiny plants that are rapidly growing. Therefore, early evidence is that raised beds are indeed the way to go. As I've promised, next time I will list websites and books I've found useful. Comments on all my entries are welcoms as I have a lot to learn.

Thanks!

When I started out gardening all I really had to fall back on was my childhood memories of helping dad out. Therefore I went to the library, took some books out and hit t'internet to do some research. One of the first things I realised was that the climate I am gardening in is very different to that of 1970s/1980s North West England. North Carolina is much hotter and much more humid. This influences choice of crops, planting times and cultivation hugely, more so than I initially realised.

I also realised that, seeing as I'm on a very limited budget and have very few tools, there would be a lot of hard work in simply preparing. I had to create a vegetable patch free of grass. I read up and discovered a few ways of doing this. For example, covering the ground with tarpaulin of similar and waiting a few months for the vegetation underneath to die (and rot into the soil, fertilising it.) I didn't have a few months, nor did I have access to tilling machinery. What I did have was a spade and a pair of hands.

I used string and stakes to mark out the area of my vegetable patch and started digging. I used the spade to cut out and dig up roughly square pieces of turf. I say turf; in reality, it's grass mixed with clover, dandelions and God knows what else. In short, it wasn't turf I could carefully knock the soil out of and roll up to be used elsewhere. It was clumps of grass and weed that I banged the soil out of and threw onto my budding compost heap. Back-breaking doesn't begin to describe it. I would start early to avoid the worst of the North Carolinian sun and heat and each day clear a strip a couple of yards wide.

It was satisfying, especially after all that hard graft, to see the bare earth emerge. I. naturally, couldn't wait to get planting so I dived in straight away with a schoolboy mistake. I planted carrots and beetroot which, I was to rapidly discover, should have been planted months earlier, given the local climate. It was a mistake but one I've hopefully learned from - indeed, this whole furst year is really about me teaching myself with the aid of a huge amount of gardening literature and websites. I'm making plenty of mistakes but that's all part of it.

Anyway, back to my choice of crops. I consulted my sources as well as my father in law and settled on a few things. Corn was on my wish list; we'd tried to grow it when I was little and it didn't go too well. The climate we had wasn't that conducive to growing corn and though we got some cobs they weren't that big. That shouldn't be a problem here in North Carolina so into the ground it went. Tomatoes were a must, forming as big a part of our diets as they do. Green beans too; I love green beans so I planted a row of them. I read about planting things next to one another that complemented one another; beans, corn and squash. This is a Native American practice that I decided to try out. I planted a row of beans, then a row of corn and next to that a row of spaghetti squash.

I also planted cucumbers, butternut squash and yellow squash. Yeah, that's a lot of squash but it grows well in summer here and i like the different varieties. Besides. I didn't want too great a variety of things in my first year. I've heard that over-ambition in the garden kills many a new gardener's enthusiasm stone dead. I have all kinds of ideas for other things to gtow. Some of these ideas will put into practice later in the year when the stifling summer heat is behind us and I can plant cooler weather crops.

Next time I'll talk about my initial planting, the rain storms that flooded the patch and my discovery of raised beds. Ta-ta!

My wife, our two cats and I recently upped sticks and moved to a new house. The house sits on about an acre of land all told and this new space got me thinking (a dangerous thing in itself.) When I was little our house backed onto meadows and my dad extended our garden out to create a vegetable plot. He grew all sorts; potatoes, peas, brussels sprouts, tomatoes, lettuce, beetroot and a whole host of other things. We had raspberry canes, rhubarb as well as apple and hazelnut trees. The meadows grew pelntiful quantities of blackberries. One of the things that sticks in my mind were the runner beans we grew, with their brilliant scarlet flowers. That was a beautiful sight in Spring, as the plants trained up the netting and put out hundreds of bright red blooms. They seemed worth growing just for that. It was all part of the experience. Dad was good at what he did, building a greenhouse using timber and thick clear plastic and a compost heap out of old pallets. I helped out as I could, as did my sister and brother. Weeding mainly, I imagine though I also remember sifting soil through a large plastic seive to get rid of stones. You always look at your childhood through rose-tinted glasses – the summers were long and hot and there was thick snow every Christmas. Hardly ever true of course, but looking back, that's how it seemed. I don't remember that sheer hard work Dad put in, the toil and long hours. Just the good stuff - the way the garden looked when everything was growing, the wonderful taste of all that homegrown produce. All this bubbled up into my mind when I looked over our newly acquired garden. I resolved to make a vegetable patch. I went into it aware of the hard work but also of the rewards for that hard work. I began to read widely – books, websites – as well as to consult my father in law, a home gardener of many years experience of growing produce very successfully. I chose my site, grabbed my shovel and began to dig. This is my ongoing account of my efforts as I learn by trial and error, mainly error it sometimes feels like. Hope you enjoy it.