End of September harvest

It's been very cold and rainy lately and definitely feel like fall time - trees flared up in colors and leafs are dropping down like a colorful rain shower. This weekend I cleaned out my tomato beds - which left me with quite a bit of green tomatoes on hands. Not quite sure what I'll be doing with them. Some of the large ones will probably turn color but others might do green tomato salsa.  I also picked a container of basil to dry for winter.

Some of the tomatoes were ripe or close to it so i separated them and put in the kitchen with some peppers, beans, first fall radishes, few carrots for snacking, one lonely eggplant, last two tiny cantaloupe and one small head of cabbage that I will use in soup.

I also finished cleaning up community garden - these sweet potatoes came from there. I'll get them cured and in couple of weeks they'll go back to the food kitchen.

Ordering more seeds

Garden can be cheap and/or it can be expensive at the same time. Depends on what you do with your space and what you plant. You can choose to invest once in only a handful of varieties of your favorite staples and just save seeds year to year to keep the cost down. Or if you're like me, who wants to try as many varieties as there are available - it gets very costly. Oh well. I always prefer variety so pay I will. So far for the next planting season I've ordered:

From Johnny's seed - Diva and Northern Pickling cucumbers,Butterbeans, Rocdor yellow bush beans, Red Noodle beans, Fordhook lima beans, Velour purple bush beans, Gita Yard long beans.

From Renee's garden - Sunflower Snack Seed; Beans - Bush Tricolor, French Gold, Pole Tricolor; Cucumber - Endeavor and Baby Persian; Spinach - Oriental Giant;  Snow Peas - Oregon Giant; Poppy - Hungarian Breadseed and Heirloom Pepperbox (great for baking sweets).

From Jung Seeds - Candy Mountain Foxglove, New Millennium Stars Mix Delphinium, Honeoye Strawberry,  German Porcelain Garlic

From Burpee - Blueberry - Chandler; Currant - Red Lake, Carrots - Big Top, Sugarsnax & Purple Dragon; Radish - White Beauty, Daikon Long.

Oh yeah, I also ordered row covers for both hoop house and for spring floating covers to avoid the bug problem I had this year.

I really need to keep out of the garden centers for a while to avoid buying anything else for the garden :)

Another failure in the garden - Leeks

This year I tried to plant leeks for the first time. They are usually very long to grow but for some reason they really did not grew well at all. Maybe it's the hot dry summer that stunted them. I'll try to plant another batch for winter garden and see if they'll do better in the hoop house.

At any rate, all these will be used - all 3 lbs of them. They'll get chopped and frozen for winter soups and stews. I'll keep green parts for making stock as well.

September 23 harvest

Another small weekend harvest - tomatoes, peppers, beans, corn, eggplants, melons, kale, parsley, red cabbage and a handful of first brussels sprouts.

First corn

I took few minutes after work to pick couple of things from the garden, and one of them was first few ears of corn. Wasn't sure if it would form at all since it was planted very late - in mid July, but looks like they formed. Not good pollination and ears are tiny but it's fresh and it's home grown. And since I'm not a big eater it's actually perfect size for me.  Also picked couple of small cantaloupes, handful of beans for dinner, one tiny sunflower that birds have been attacking non-stop, pitiful first fall radish and a handful of tomatoes.

there were some herbs that I needed for cooking so I sniped few lemon thyme twigs, rosemary, parsley, regular sage and pineapple sage.

Harvest Sep 15

Another week another small harvest - tomatoes, sweet & hot peppers, kale, beans and last butternut squash.

Maitake season starts now!

Happy Hunting to those who like picking mushrooms! Old oaks - preferably decaying black oaks are your target areas.