Monday, October 21, 2013

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!

10 comments:

  1. I keep hoping my too late radishes will root up. I don't think it will happen, but yours looks wonderful.

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    1. Thanks Daphne! Yours may yet, because I didn't think mine would earlier on. But what wonderful carrots you have!

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  2. I would say you are doing a great job at gardening! It is so nice that you have all that variety! I am envious of those radishes!! Nancy

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  3. Thank you Nancy! I do love to keep trying new things and I hope I'm getting better at it. Have to push myself sometimes!

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  4. I am giving up on growing Brussels sprouts. Kohlrabi did not do well this year either, well may be next year.

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    1. I do better with kohlrabi in the spring than I do in the fall. My Brussels sprouts do well but they are never very big and those cabbage worms sure do like them!

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  5. What do you think is wrong with your large bed? We get roots from our neighbors trees up in our raised beds (despite weed cloth and utility/wire barriers) and our veggies do the exact same thing...sprout, look good, grow a bit, die completely. We're constantly pulling roots out of the beds.

    I'm glad to see veggies still come in from your garden though! Congrats!

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    1. That is an interesting thought. My garden is surrounded by trees and worse, we have a horrible invasive called Asian bittersweet that spreads its roots everywhere and has to be constantly battled. But I don't know, this has happened with a number of my plantings. I thought maybe birds, and sometimes it's insects. Generally I think I just have to keep working on improving the soil and replanting!

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  6. I have 3 later planting of beets and they behaved similar to yours. The last one was very late and nothing is forming roots. Of the other two, maybe 10% of the seeds that sprouted formed sizable roots. One planting is at home, in part shade with competition from tree roots, but the other is in full sun with no trees nearby (at the community garden). I did remember to thin the plants but I wonder if I remembered to fertilize. I do think beets are much happier with cooler weather, and dislike getting started in the heat of summer.

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    1. I think you must be right! Every year I try to plant a second and third bed of beets and I have yet to get any sizeable roots from them.

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