Time is flying. Amazingly it is faster this year than ever before. Didn’t Winter just end, the sun just start being out more each day, when now it’s out less each day, and the temperatures aren’t AS tough, it’s backwards Spring. But it was just Spring.

My garden is a mass of dead plants and weeds, with one lone Cauliflower ever strangling taller and taller, looking ugly, not producing a thing. Actually, my garden was rather like that since Summer began. Spring it was working, and then, blahdom set into it. If I had the time to be in it noon and night it still would have gone sour. It’s just that ugly spot of land, that ugly Summer we had too. But it was a blink of an eye. A dream I had one night.

So now it is October. Good beer month.

I have one tomato plant that popped up not to long ago in the middle of the yard. Right now there are 10 tomatoes on it in various stages of development, as well as more blooms ever opening to be fertilized or not. It has been a gift. It would be somewhat connected with the hens, in that I gave them some tomatoes a few times this past summer, and they were penned in that area then too. One way or another, one nice plant sprouted up. I saw the leaves popping out from amongst the too long weedy yard, so I smooshed the weeds down to investigate it. I knew it was a tomato plant just from the couple of leaves visible. Oh what a nice plant it was! So I ran and found a tomato cage and propped it up nice and tidy. Pulled some weeds out that were near it and just have been nice to it ever since, pulling off extra leaves, moving a branch in the cage for better support.

We have another month and a half before first normal frost. I think I just might get tomatoes from this plant. That’ll be nice, since my real plants all were horrible this year. I have do a raised bed for them next year, no doubts about that. I think that the method I found this year, one plant in the middle of the yard, is a clue as to what’d be good to do.

I think it best for me to plant tomato plants later in the year, not in Spring. And plant them in various non-garden spots throughout the yard. Take a plug of grass and earth out, and put in the tomato plant. Grass will overtake it by Spring, and the spot will be ready to be used for a tomato again another year or so, but that the very next year it’ll just be grass and the tomatoes of that year will be in other little spots here and there.

Well, that’s a maybe solution to having nicer tomatoes. In the South there really are two planting seasons, and I’d really like to take advantage of them by growing some things earlier, and other things later. That’d help me not be so overwhelmed as to failure garden-wise.

So I’m happy to see October arrive, and hope to find some fresh North Georgia Apples soon, and hope to have some lovely tomatoes from the middle of my backyard soon! I’ll see about a tent to protect it soon enough, in case of early frost. That’s not so hard, to figure out a tent for one lonely plant

A brief note about the hens: They have been molting for too long, and we’ve had no eggs from them since about September 10th, and most of them quit laying before that. It’s quite frustrating, and I hope to get a better set-up for them with lighting, so that maybe they’ll start to lay and keep laying all Winter. Any way, the Leghorns are the problem, I figured they’d lay all summer and fall and then do them in. They are in there eating and not laying though for a couple of months, so …. I want some eggs out of them! If we did them in, we’d only have 8 hens. 8 hens that are never every day layers. I need some new stock, and want to get the pens figured out and really just DO IT! This month would be the month to get babies. Hmmm.

So Happy October to y’all!