Going Radish Crazy

So some of you know that I have been spreading radishes throughout my garden in the manner described by Dick Raymond's Joy of Gardening book. The idea is that when you are planting, you plant a few radishes along with everything else. The radishes grow quickly, showing you where you planted, as well as helping to shade the soil (which is important in our Texas heat), and also leave lots of loose soil behind when you pull them.

Well, the first time I tried this I planted way too many, and my chard and beets had a hard time coming through all the radishes. I pulled all the radishes, and the chard and beets are thriving (although that could be because of all the cool weather and rain we have had!). This time, I planted what I thought were a lot fewer radishes, but I replanted almost my entire garden, so cumulatively I still planted a lot of radishes. So yesterday I picked 12 pounds of radishes! I have no idea what to do with them all. They are very good, not the pungent nasty radishes from the heat of the summer, but there sure are a lot of them.

Any ideas?

The Fall garden is taking shape

Okay, so I don't have any picture sof my garden, but I did take a picture of a salad I had for dinner today, which got much of its contents from my garden. I will admit, the lettuce is from Costco, but this salad has radishes, beets (if you haven't tried them raw, they are delicious), beet greens, red chard, and bok choy from my garden.

This has been a very good gardening year for me, but a very slow summer. The summer was long and hot, but we are finally seeing some cooler weather. A few weeks ago I planted broccoli, cauliflower, rutabagas, turnips, bok choy, spinach, carrots, onions, radishes, and scallions. Some of these are doing great, while others are more of an experiment for me. An example of this is the onions. I have little tiny onions plants growing all over the place, but I have no idea how they will do--I have never grown them before!

In addition to everything I just planted, I still have winter squash, chard, beets, tomatoes and peppers from earlier in the year. I am hoping that with the cooler weather the tomatoes and peppers will hurry and put on some fruit, but I am not really getting my hopes up.

Squash has been the most difficult thing for me to deal with. I planted about 40 feet of winter squash in the summer, and have harvested from it about a dozen tiny squash. I blame all of this squarely on the vine borer, which I have posted about before. I knew they would take a toll on my plants, but some of the varieties of squash have given me just a single fruit off of about six vines. It could be that the extra hot summer prevented the plants from thriving, but I can guarantee you that the vine borers didn't help things at all.

Well, I will start posting updates as things progress in the fall. I need to plant some garlic and lettuce in the coming week (once the ground dries out!), and we will see just how much variety this garden can pump out all winter.