The Last Day for The Vegetable Patch

Beans drying on the vine.

Tuesday Matt and I spent the morning tearing down the vegetable bed.  The temperatures were dropping, we'd had to cover several times, and it seemed we couldn't fight the inevitable any longer.  We made it to October 25th though so I feel we made the most of the season. Fall is here and doesn't seem to be kidding around any longer. 

Harvesting peppers.

Ripping up the pepper plants and pulling down the sprawling tentacles of tomato plants is somewhat surreal.  The vegetable bed is radically transformed in a rather short amount of time.  Plants we've so lovingly cared for since they were just little seeds way back in March we were now ruthlessly tearing up. 

An impressive tomato root.

Matt insisted on taking down the little rabbit fence as we still hope to have moved to a little house of our own by the time we need to be transplanting seedlings outside next year.  We also will be stacking all the bricks, but didn't get to that yesterday.  With only the carrot tops and fallen leaves the bed looks so flat and naked.  The front of the house feels enormous.

We got quite a number of green tomatoes.  We will try to ripen what we can, but also want to make some green tomato salsa.   We also ended up with quite a crop of spicy peppers--cayenne, Serrano, jalapeno, kung pao--as well as some bells and other sweet peppers.

Spiral pepper.

Tomatoes spread out in a dresser drawer to ripen.

We grew beans for the first time this year.  Yellow Indian Beans.  We haven't gotten to eat them yet, but watching them grow and dry has sure been fun.  Beans are definitely going to be a part of our vegetable patch from here on out.  We eat a ton of beans, so why not?!

You can see a couple beans that hadn't dried in the shell.  They are very white and tender.