Harvest Monday

Each Monday Daphne's Dandelions hosts Harvest Monday where gardeners link posts about their latest harvests. It's a great way to be inspired wherever you grow and in whatever season you are!
This is a true autumn week around here. The trees are really beautiful and the days are cool and crisp but quite dry. This morning we had a temperature of 35F, so no frost, but the closest brush with it yet.

 Above are the very last of the tomatoes, save a few Matt's Wild Cherry that always linger on till frost. The brown dirty looking pods are dried Scarlet Runner Beans that have a very pretty purple bean inside. The last of the trombocino were picked, as well as a few Brussels Sprouts and a bowl of Gold Marie Vining beans.

 In the middle picture are some roots: carrots (very tiny, I haven't mastered growing good carrots yet) some parsnips, a good sized handful of French Breakfast radish and the last large beet from my very first planting in the spring. It is a golden variety as you can see. The later plantings of beets never did produce bulbs. I don't know why, but this is always the case for me even when the planting is just a few weeks after the first one.

I'm still harvesting small amounts of green beans and those Chinese Red Noodles are the very last ones from the vines. There is one Jimmy Nardello pepper and one bell pepper of unknown variety. What a difference a year makes! Last year I had loads and loads of peppers, but this year a mere handful. The trombocino squashes you can see by comparing them to the green beans are very tiny, the immature ones that I picked because the vine was dying, so they weren't going to get any bigger.
What is left in the garden? A surprising amount, though it's coming in slowly. There are plenty of Brussels sprouts, parsnips, leeks and kale. There is some lettuce, arugula and tatsoi, bok choy, kohlrabi, carrots and a tiny bit of chard and spinach. There is cabbage, but unfortunately most of it is unusable due to bug damage. My fall peas were a disaster. They sprouted and started growing well but stopped at about half a foot tall, blossomed a bit and shriveled up and died. The same with the fall spinach. I usually do well with it, but this year most of the large bed I planted sprouted and disappeared.
Despite the setbacks I have almost harvested as much produce as I did in all of October last year, so I will certainly surpass that total with ten more days to go in the month. I still have a lot to learn about Fall gardening, but every year I've seen some improvement so optimism reigns around here!