autumn

Under the harvest moon,

When the soft silver

Drips shimering

Over the garden nights,

Death, the gray mocker,

Comes and whispers to you

As a beautiful friend

Who remembers.

--Carl Sandburg

Yesterday I harvested almost all of our remaining garden.  We had harvested a bunch a few weeks ago in advance of a few days of freezing temperatures, but decided to leave and cover a lot of crops: beets, turnips, kohlrabi, and a few swiss chard plants.  It turned out to be a good decision; we had a few weeks of nice weather and things grew some more.

Now, with more freezing weather and snow predicted (and it has snowed!), we decided to get most everything out of there.  I covered a few kohlrabi that I felt were just too small to pick and some more recently planted radishes and spinach.  We’re supposed to get another week or two of warm weather after this cold front moves through, so we’ll see how the remaining plants do.

In addition to what we’ve already harvested and eaten or freezed, we got about 2 ½ gallons of carrots, a good pile of chard, a 5 gallon bucket of beets, turnips, and their greens, and a 3 gallon bucket of kohlrabi.  We’d already gathered about that much kohlrabi, and I’ve been eating them almost every day.  They’re delicious and remind me of being a little kid, when my grandparents grew rows and rows of them.  I’d bring them to grade school for lunch, and kids would wonder at the smell of them.

All in all, I think this has been one of our best gardening years.  Except for tomatoes.  We had several very vigorous seedlings that we got started very early.  It really seemed we were in for a record tomato crop—the plants took off and grew quickly and strongly, but then, one by one, they succumbed to some sort of mosaic virus.  In the end, we got very few tomatoes.  Other than that, though, I’m really pleased with how well the garden did.  We harvested about three gallons of hot peppers…after processing a bunch of those for freezing, my fingers burned all evening.  The next morning I stuck a finger near my eye and was quickly burning there, too.  Thanks to our friends who gave us a couple of plants, we grew and ate several eggplants this year.  They grew surprisingly well and offered a lot of fruit.  Our first planting of green beans didn’t yield all that much; the varieties we planted just didn’t do that well.  We did a second, late planting that did very well.  I’d like to grow enough green beans to pickle and can some next time.  Spinach and lettuce did very well, too.

And there you have it—a garden update and year-end summary, of sorts.

Here is a picture of the main part of our garden back in June.  We also have two smaller areas that we garden in (where the peppers, eggplant, more spinach and lettuce, strawberries, and herbs are).  We've also made a little fence and gate to go around the garden; you can see some of the fence posts in this photograph.