Maybe This Is It...

Every time I think we have seen the last harvest of our Summer Garden Guy comes in with a big bowl of stuff. We are still getting tomatoes, mostly the little ones, but a few Golden Delicious and Black Krim, and we actually got 3 Painted Serpent cucumbers - they are really tasty and look so pretty with their two tone green. They reminded us of the swan gourds at Ila and Stuarts!

The Cold Weather Crop Is In

Well, no matter that it's October 16th and 80 degrees here, our winter crop is in the ground and looking good.

Capitalizing on our summer garden learnings we have planted quite a lot more of the things we really love in hopes to be able to both eat and can those items.

The winter crop includes; snow peas, sugar peas, onions, carrots, (from seed) broccoli, (from both seeds and seedlings) brussel sprouts (both green and red) I had no idea there were red brussel sprouts! Spinach, kale (both red and yellow), celery, parsley, and assorted lettuces.

We also planted a few fava beans to see how they would do and a little cauliflower, which is not my favorite but Guy loves it.

We also planted a few acorn squash and pumpkin, from seed, so we will see if those come up, we've had good luck with squash so hopefully it will work.

We were hoping to plant some parsnips and rutabegas but have not seen any of those seedlings available in the area, next year we'll have to get ahead of the game and do those from seed.

Lessons Learned and End of Summer Harvest

Well, it's been too long since I blogged about our garden, I first wanted to share this photo of our end of summer harvest, I think it is beautiful and really defines our garden.

Fresh summer veggies, wonderful herbs, and beautiful fragrant flowers.

What you see pictured are our Zucchini, Machinaw Eggplant, Tomatoes, Mini Watermelon, Butternut Squash, Sweet Basil, and two of our wonderfully fragrant roses in delicious deep summer colors.

Lessons Learned

We loved our tomatoes, all of them, and will plant even more next year, but wait about 4 weeks in between plantings so that we can keep up with all the canning that will be needed to reap the benefits of their prolific production. The pruning of the unproductive tomato branches, those without blossoms, really did work to bring on more tomatoes and give the growing tomatoes more light.

We need many more pepper plants, next year we are planning a pepper patch with 4-6 plants each of several different kinds of peppers. We really did not grow enough peppers to meet our needs this year and so that will be a new strategy for us.

We will plant more Machinaw Eggplant, this Japanese Eggplant was the perfect ingredient all of our Thai dishes, and we eat quite a few, due to its tender skin and quick cooking. An added bonus, it looked so pretty growing in the garden - we will also plant this a little earlier in order to extend the productivity, this year we ended with several off color eggplants on the vine that never made it to full fruit due to weather issues, that is so sad!

Forget about the strawberries, until we have enough land to plant rows and rows and rows of strawberries we cannot seem to get enough berries to pay for the land they are using - next year we will use this land for the peppers.

We will not plant pole beans, they did not grow nearly as well or prolifically as the bush beans, next year it will be bush beans all the way, and we will again plant this in two waves to keep the beans coming all summer and give us additional opportunity for canning.