Growing Season In The Garden

By Thomas Fryd

Have you been enjoying the late fall vegetables from the second planting? One year when the bean row was all dried up, I went down it with the mower. This left just stubs of the bean stalks sticking up. To my pleasant surprise these sent out new green shoots, and we had a second crop of beans from the one seeding.

All of you have undoubtedly heard of the battered hulk of a defeated prize fighter shouting, "I've been robbed." That's the way I feel about the summer season.

First it was spring. That would require a whole bucket of adjectives just to try to describe. Lots of rain, then early summer, mid-summer and now it is early fall.

For the life of me I can't figure what happens to the time or where it goes. We get our first killing frost in our area about October 20th the average. That's the phrase that throws you - it means frost can come in early October, and I've seen it hold off until well into November.

The first frost, of course, gets the tender things like - tomatoes. But roses, song of india plant and chrysanthemums don't mind, it seems. Although we have had roses all summer, they really come into their own again when the cooler weather, and usually more rains, come in the fall.

You are cautioned about not fertilizing your roses and song of india plant after about the middle of August for our area, or July 15 to August 1 if you live much farther north. If they go into the fall season too lush and with too much succulent growth, the freezes are going to injure them - if not completely kill them.

A couple of years ago we decided to clean the lily pool late in the fall. Our rose bed is only a few feet away, and what was more logical than to dump this pool muck into the rose bed? Yep: you guessed it. It was just like a shot of fertilizer, only maybe more so. Although we actually lost only a couple of roses, all of them were severely injured with winter freezing. Oh well, we wanted some new varieties, anyway. - 29857

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