October Gardening

This month we've achieved our first failures in the garden! We lost several cucumber plants, but harvested our first lettuce. Each failed crop is a lesson learned.

Meanwhile, over at Grandma's we began a fresh set of lettuce:

Later, these lettuces all got chewed down to the nub by hungry pests. Valuable lesson, don't keep leafy plants out in the open during the evening.

We decided to move the cucumbers into the sun where we could lay them out to creep along the ground.

One of the issues we've been seeing is the green algae in the bottom of the bottles. It seems kind of random which bottles get it and which don't, but it costs us some of the nutrients in the water. For our next iteration I was thinking we should a) keep the water in an opaque container and b) have all the plants take from one tub, so that cleaning can be done once all together.

Meanwhile, back at our garden, our lettuce got huge!

Then our cucumber plants started to die off:

Notice how big just that one lettuce plant got. I decided to harvest it to give growing room for the second lettuce attached to it. It made for a tasty salad!

Back at Grandma's:

Grandma's lettuces got eaten by squirrels or rats, so she started locking the plants up at night in the shed. Here's all the little plants she had:

After another week, here's how things progressed:

Another week later, and:

Of course, the cucumbers surprised us by being thorny. The bristles came right off with a little brushing, but I never knew cucumbers were so sharp!