Harvest Time

The garden is in the fall 'hurry-up' stage where everything is coming in at once or getting ready to. It is also a weedy mess, and full of bugs and disease, but no complaints because we are getting our fair share of produce. My garden is roughly 55' X 70' and all of it gets planted. I rake up a lot of raised beds and we mulch with old hay or grass clipping whenever I can get them. It is about 300' downhill from my house and I run heavy duty hoses across the yard to get to it. We have 6.62 acres but this is the only flat spot, hence the location. Most of our land is rocky wooded hillside. I start the majority of my plants from seed or in the garden, but do buy a few too. I do almost all of the planting but I do get help with tilling, mulching, weeding, and harvesting. We really depend on the veggies we get, and there is no finer quality than home grown. I stay as organic as possible, but will use a chemical if the need arises. It is rare that I do spray though.

Some of these pictures may be clickable.


Beans have been especially good this year. I generally plant pole beans because they produce over a long season. Our poles were cut in our own woods from crowded saplings and they get recycled into the woodstove kindling at the end of each year. They are 11-1/2' tall and sunk 1-1/2' on the larger end in the ground of raised beds for stability. Some are still leaning, we've had a lot of wind this year. I pick as high as I can reach and then hold the 8' stepladder while someone else does the top. Don't have a picture of that yet. The scarlet runner beans weren't supposed to be in with them, but we had wet seed to plant before it went bad and so in they went. They do produce edible beans. I think I got 18 lbs of beans from my last picking, and we gave some away. I generally put them up for the freezer.





All of my tomatoes wound up with the blight that is going around this year. It was a very cold and wet summer. Still we are getting plenty to pick, and have been grabbing them a little more than half ripe and letting them finish up indoors. We have made regular salsa and purée so far and I just made a batch of mango salsa last night. We also froze some whole to process or use later on. I grow all kinds of tomatoes, from cherry size on up to the big slicers, and quite a selection of canning and paste tomatoes too. I like the variety and with a blended sauce the flavors really pop. No huge tomatoes this year but we've had some decent sized ones. We use the metal fence posts and cheap cages to support the short vined tomatoes, on the taller ones, I have the taller posts and tie them as they grow, topping off at about 6-1/2 feet or so, which is about as high as I can reach. These posts are very stable and will support a large plant with multiple stems. They are reusable too, and last for years, so that kind of offsets the initial cost.



A lot of my vines jumped the fence and are headed into the treeline between my garden and the neighbor's house. This baby butternut squash is sitting right on the top of the fence, and there are several inside. Our fencing is plastic mesh on the inside and chicken wire on the outside to keep the critters from chewing through it. We have landscaping ties around the edge to keep it in contact with the ground. It sags a little and is far from square but does the job.





The biggest offender amongst the vine excapees are the birdhouse gourds. This one is hanging off the fence on the outside, and it is pretty good sized. I find their flowers interesting because unlike the rest of the cucurbit family they are white and not some kind of yellow-orange. It's easier to track their progress through the garden. I will try and get this one before the frosts kill the plants this year so that I can do something with it.



My family loves butternut squash so I planted a good sized clump this year. This is one good sized one inside the garden, but I have seen several. The weeds have gotten ahead of me but the vine area is not too bad, their lush growth tends to mat everything down.



A kabocha squash, my personal favorite amongst the winter sqaushes. They are like a larger, button-less buttercup, and the flesh is deep orange, sweet and moist with very little fiber. So good baked or nuked and scooped out of the shell to be mashed and whipped with butter and a touch of cinnamon and nutmeg.



Pumpkins! I always try and plant a few. This one is the largest and has colored up before the others, but I have seen several. It is already promised to my grandson Ben. The dead leaves are a combination of squash beetle and foliar disease damage, but the plants are still very much alive. The pumpkins went over the fence too, but this one is in the garden.




You can see how the vines jumped the fence and are headed into the trees. That line of spruces and firs marks the edge of our property. You can see the sunflowers and beanpoles in the background, sandwiched between the two are two rows of corn. We did so-so on the corn, not the best year, we got a lot of half ears, but they were tasty. Way in the background is the swallow house where for the second year a tree swallow pair raised their brood and kept me entertained all summer. I got some good pictures of that too, but they are long gone now.

Yeah, I know, the lawn needs mowing, not my job!



Lushness of the inner garden, with a better shot of those sunflowers. The trellis to the right is for cucumbers, but they have had a mind of their own and not all are growing up it. You can see there is some disease die back. And of course the vines of the squash and pumpkins are all coming this way too. In front of those vines is a long raised bed of summer sqaush, and behind the sunflowers are the corn rows and then the pole beans, which stretch pretty much across the back of the garden. You can see some of my dying tomato plants on the other side of the cuke trellis, we have four rows of them there, three of the canning/paste tomatoes and one of the tall vine fresh eating stuff.




This is one of my milking buckets, I have two of them. We got the first one back when I was first married and briefly got a cow from a co-worker of the other half. Found out quickly that Frank and cows don't get along. Oh well... The other bucket I got a flea market, and only paid $8 for it - they are good stainless steel. Did I mention that I love thrifting? LOL Anyway, this bucket is half filled with summer squash (which you can't see) and the cukes are on top. This is one day's picking from the trellis, we have been giving a bunch of them away. Good eating! I raised a couple of the clumps myself, the others came from a local nursery, hence the picklers, which were mis-marked.





The day's harvest. Lee was helping me in the garden, he picked all those tomatoes himself. He followed me around with the smaller buckets and I picked the squash and cukes and handed them to him. I picked the beans while he got the tomatoes. We took frequent rests, I have lawn furniture down there, and we bring a small cooler with drinks. This is Lee's car and I had him move it down there because neither he nor I can haul those heavy pails uphill to the house (he has the heart condition, I have the bad back and arthritic joints). We did OK for a couple of gimps. This is not all the stuff we could have picked, there were more tomatoes and beans, some broccoli, a cauliflower, a small cabbage, and a whole bunch of sweet bell, sweet frying, and jalapeno peppers I got the next day with #1 son Jason, but I didn't get a picture of them - sorry! Not a bad haul though huh?