Harvest Monday: Garden Fatigue Edition

I'm feeling kind of blah about the garden this week. We are a week into September and experiencing what I call garden fatigue. The harvest is steady but limited in variety and things look a little sad down there. Many of the older plants are diseased and dying and my fall crops never do that great. Those plantings that survived are still smallish and only have about a month before our earliest frost either does them in completely or at least slows them down considerably. For some reason this is the time of year that the wild creatures become more active too and I find a number of plants that are chewed on. The one thing that keeps things looking at least somewhat perky down there are the marigolds. This year I actually got them planted out and they are blooming merrily. Sorry, I don't have a picture of them today but hopefully will in a coming post.
But back to garden fatigue. When the garden gets to this state I lose a bit of my enthusiasm and tend to pull back on some of the basic jobs I should be doing, like watering and weeding and even taking photos. I'm doing far better this year than usually, so things are improving on that score, but I need to give myself a stern talking to to get things done and that doesn't always work.
The harvest now is primarily tomatoes. My vines are still loaded with them but the vines themselves are all but dead. Thankfully enough of them are big and with a pink blush that tells me they will still ripen, which is a good thing!

 Kale continues producing well and in fact, there is a new planting for the fall that is getting pretty large, so barring any creatures going for them they should provide a good harvest over the next few months. I just have to find some new and exciting ways to eat kale because it does get dull for all it is a nutritional powerhouse. We do kale-bean soup and I have a great sautéed kale recipe. But that's about it.

We were inundated with beans last week, but this week they've slowed down quite a bit. The Chinese Red Noodle beans are really coming into their own now. They have proved to be a hit with my husband and son, so I'll continue to plant them in future gardens. I have a late planting of green beans that will be ready to pick later in the week. You can see that I picked my first two winter squashes. They are Buttercup, which we love around here, one large and one small. I have two more still growing out there along with eight Butternuts, one Kabocha, one Long Island Cheese pumpkin and one mystery squash (likely a misshapen Long Island Cheese.) Not a ton, but it is my best success with winter squashes to date. Last year I grew the same number of squash, but they were all much smaller. My Delicata plants gave me exactly one stunted little squash and a ninth Butternut, the smallest, broke off its stem and immediately started to get soft around the neck.
You can also see leeks in the photo above, which were harvested for last night's supper of potato leek soup. Yum! That's it for this week's Harvest Monday, which is hosted by Daphne's Dandelions every week. I hope you're not experiencing garden fatigue and I hope mine has passed by the next time I post!