Brussels Sprouts Leaves are Edible

The winter beets are getting kinda thick skinned so I pretty much have to peel the whole thing before i cut it up for the cook. Summer beets are thin skinned and tender so they only get the tan part at the top peeled. The leaves need not go in the compost pile, they are delicious sauted..

I found out that the Brussels sprouts leaves are edible too, so I won't be pulling them up to kill the slugs under them after all. I wonder how many other things that I'm composting are edible like cauliflower leaves and broccoli leaves?..

I didn't have to cut back the horseradish plant this year, the slugs ate it to the ground. I have an army of slugs working in the garden and I'm glad I discovered it early. Warm fall, lots of rain. Ounce of prevention and all that. There are live slugs under the boards that I put down with Deadline under them and the Deadline is gone..

That means there were more slugs than poison. Banner slug year, I'll need to get a recipe. Escargot sans shell..

I cut the asters in the garden back today, they were done blooming and looking a bit forlorn. All the pollinators are gone now so it's beginning to feel like winter. No more bumblebees in the hollyhocks, but the garden is still pretty full of plants and dried seed stalks. I don't pull everything up when it's finished anymore because many times an empty space is worse than a spent planting. Sometimes, you get free seeds..

I let some lettuce plants go to seed this year and then I realized that the packet of seeds that I just finished was four years old. I sprinkle 3-4 seeds in each cell of a six pack instead of planting in rows so no seeds go to waste or are thinned. There are beau coup seeds in a pack of lettuce and it's the best value for $1.69 that I know of..

The ground squirrels have started digging out their burrows now. Their leaf filled potholes are turning into dark tunnels to the underland. The almond tree is full of white flowers, and I don't need my rubber boots to keep my feet dry. One of the artichoke plants had the scraggly remains of garden waste mulch surrounding it, and looked a bit unsightly, so I raked it up to find a raised ring of earth around the plant that reminded me of a donut..

It's a great example of how you can introduce plenty of organic material into the soil without digging it in. The material is the exact size the ground wants, not chunks that disrupt it's processes. I have begun to want to fluff up the ground before I plant seeds, but this visual reminds me not to macromanage the delicate structure of the earth, and be patient with improving the dirt..