A slow transition to fall crops

We are weeks into the fall season if you are tracking it by the calender, but here in Gidget's Garden, we are still enjoying a wonderful warm season. With temperatures climbing into the 90's last week many of our warm season crops are still thriving. With that said, we want to be sure to have enough food for us to eat, as well as fill our little table for the market all year long so we are doing our best to balance both maintaining warm season crops to their full potential while starting cool season crops at the same time.  

We still have some wonderful looking tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, and more

One of the crops that we thought it was sensible to replace right now is our watermelon. It is still producing and may have even provided a winter watermelon but it was spreading through the fence onto the sidewalk and we felt it was time to replace it with something more traditional for this time of year.

The sugar baby watermelons taking over the front east end of the garden

We went ahead and pulled the plants out and harvested the last of the fruits for us this year.

I was thrilled to see that we have happy earthworms inhabiting our soil

Gidget was disappointed to see the watermelon leave because that was one of her favorite places to play in the garden.

"At least I can still hide under the eggplant."

The eggplant is another traditionally warm season crop that could be replaced right now but this plant is blooming like crazy so I am going to give it another week or two to see if it produces some more incredible eggplants.

Now with the watermelon gone we have more space to walk around in the garden

I put some cauliflower seeds in where the watermelon was so we now have that as well as peas, carrots, chard, and broccoli started for our "fall" season. The "season" in San Diego is negotiable, basically if you have enough sun, anything goes. That makes it so much easier to have a consistent supply of fresh food which is one reason why I don't write much about preserving food, we don't have to in order to put our garden on our dinner plate on a daily basis.

In the next couple weeks we expect to continue eating peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, and chard. In the weeks after that we are looking forward to avocados, peas, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, lettuces, arugula, cabbage, radishes and onions. Beyond that we plan to have some artichokes, strawberries, nasturtiums and we are going to try to have tomatoes all year long.

I think coconuts are the only thing I would just love to have that you can't grow in San Diego. Or can you?