Winding Down Our Garden

 

Although we had a pretty good year in our garden, it is already winding down as you can see in the picture above. All the root crops, potatoes, onions, garlic and carrots have been harvested. The early season stuff, peas, lettuce, green onions, etc. have been long gone. The two rows of flowers last bloomed weeks ago. So I removed the stalks from our sweetcorn, hauled them down to the compost pile and then mowed everything to neaten it up. Mowing helps to control those late weeds that crept up among the plants we desired and also chops up the straw a bit so if I get a late season tilling in, it will more easily allow the organic matter to be incorporated into the soil to break down over winter and provide nutrients. 

On the far left is one volunteer tomato plant that I left to grow though due to lack of staking, it probably won't produce much. But due to our failure in growing tomatoes from our own seeds, it is the only Amish Paste tomato which are my favorite. The four in a line with the fence posts in the right center of our garden were all purchased Roma tomato plant. They produced enough but aren't as resistant to late season blight which is what I think happened to them. The leaves are all withered and though there is a fair amount of fruit on them, they are producing no more new fruit.

Between the two groups of tomato plants in the left center of the photo is a row of three small pepper plants and our last two fennel plants. The fennel has been stellar this year, our first year of growing it, and the peppers are only okay. Like most years, we can almost always grow peppers but they always remain fairly small compared to what you buy in the grocery store. 

The tall plants on the right side of the photo is a row of okra plants. We have always had good crops of okra and from past experience, they will be producing up until the first killing frost. Not really very visible but between the okra and the raised bed ever bearing strawberries is a row of eggplant which have been doing fairly well this year.

The ever bearing strawberries, protected all summer from rabbits by the electric netting, have finally been allowed to do their thing and are looking good. The fence is no longer electrified but I kept it up around the strawberries just to keep the deer out of them. The rabbits are free to nibble away until next spring when I turn on the juice again.

I removed most of the fence and put it away for the year. This allows easier access to the garden to mow, till and harvest what is left. It also allows the deer to check out things which they have according to the amounts of deer scat I see strewn about. It is hard to turn down this free fertilizer. 

We did learn some this year as we tend to do every year. We left the carrots in the ground too long and didn't dig them up until we returned from our second vacation in early August. That was probably a month too long as about two thirds of the crop rotted. However, the salvaged third that I saved, was enough to freeze a good quantity of grated carrots to allow us to have carrot cakes and lumpia all winter long. Only the people I had promised to give our excess carrots too were disappointed.

One final note. Our asparagus patch to the far right of the photo and to the right of the netted off raised strawberry beds, seems to have some life. Once the summer greened up, the rabbits and the deer left them along and there are a number of sprouts that stayed up and weren't eaten down to the ground. Next spring will be the first year we are allowed to pick the sprigs of asparagus for consumption so I'm looking forward to that as long as I can pick them before they get eaten off by hungry critters. I might have to do some experimenting to keep them away for the month or month and a half that asparagus season lasts.