A Long Overdue Garden Update

I'm going to blame it on travel and work, but I haven't really been covering the progress of the garden as well as I'd intended.  There is a lot going on in there constantly though so perhaps I never will even if I managed to spend some time at home during the summer!  It was sort of one of those too-busy-living-it-to-blog-it sort of things which will always be okay with me.  But, now that things have slowed down a bit I have the chance to catch up.  (Even if we have already torn down the garden for the season by now!)

9/20/2011 Purple Pepper.  I did just tell you about how Matt loves to grow things irregularly colored, right?

9/20/2011 All Blue, Rose, and Fingerling potatoes.  Can you see the rose potatoes in there?!  They really didn't thrive this year so we ended up with just a few of them, and tiny at that.

9/20/2011  The garden spider.  This little critter hung around for weeks getting larger and larger.  We figured it was probably helping with the bugs!

10/4/2011  Spider web.

10/4/2011 Cherokee Purple, again Matt and the oddball vegetables.

10/4/2011 Yellow Indian Beans drying on the vine.

10/4/2011  We need to mulch more thickly.  We thought we had it pretty thick as it was, but by the end of the season the poor tomato had exposed roots as the mulch was absorbed and dispersed by the rain and watering, etc.  Oh well, something to work on for next year.

10/4/2011 The pepper patch.

10/4/2011

10/4/2011

10/5/2011 This yellow bell had little sprouting miniature peppers growing from its top.  They tasted good, too.

10/5/2011  My rather weak, pathetic homage to Going Off Da Grid, Janice.

10/9/2011 Weighing in the tomatoes.

10/9/2011

10/9/2011

10/14/2011  The squash vines were rather shriveled and sad looking so I took that to mean it was time to harvest the squash.

10/14/2011  There are still slugs about.  The is the first year we've ever had slugs at our place, albeit small ones.   It was a record breaking moist year though so I suppose it all makes sense.  In any case, I can see what my sister out in Washington has been griping about!

10/14/2011

10/14/2011

10/14/2011

10/15/2011 The last harvest of potatoes from our personal plot at the community garden.

10/15/2011

10/15/2011

10/15/2011  Letting the squash cure in the backroom, on a Sesame Street blanket I've had as long as I can remember.  My mom made it.  There used to be two of them. 

10/15/2011  Matt cut off some too-long pants to make work shorts.  My sister, Lisa, turned the cut off portion into potato sacks for him.  They came in quite handy.

10/16/2011  Boiled bite size potatoes.  Yum.

10/17/2011  The first frost was predicted for the evening of the 17th so I was out to the garden to harvest all the ripened peppers, and tomatoes before covering the whole shebang.

10/17/2011

10/17/2011  I added the cayenne peppers to my growing stash, drying in an old onion sack.

10/17/2011  It was a very pretty pre-frost harvest and this photo captures it quite well.  Spicy peppers, sweet peppers in several colors and shapes, tomatoes.

10/17/2011

10/17/2011  We bought these green plant covering bags after they were out of season last year.  They were dirt-cheap.  This was the first time we really got to try them out and they were pretty effective and super easy to throw over a plant.  They cinch up at the bottom which would be the best if we grew in pots, but I didn't really use it because the plants were directly in the earth.  Still, they worked well. 

10/17/2011

10/17/2011

Now one of these days I'll have to get around to calculating how much we actually harvested and put up.  We've been trying to keep track all season long so we shall see!