Garden Journal End of Summer Garden

Hello, hivers and garden lovers!

I haven't written a post in about 10 days, so I thought I should at least attempt to write one. Things have been a bit crazy here for the past couple of weeks, and as a bonus, I had a bout of depression to add to the lack of motivation needed for writing.

The weather here has been pretty nice for this time of year. We've had a couple of rainy days, but the weather has been mostly in the 70s F. September has been a good month for the weather so far.

My community garden plots are done growing now. The potato plants have all died back and I've been digging the red potatoes about a half row at a time. The potatoes I'm getting are a nice mixture of a few really big ones, a lot of medium sized ones, and some smaller ones. I have 1-1/2 rows left to dig of the reds, and then on to the Yukon Gold potatoes.

I also picked up all of the pumpkins that I grew that were orange. There are still 2 green pumpkins that I left on the vines to get ripe. I I gave about half of the pumpkins to my friend who shares my garden plots, and brought the rest home. I made a little decorative harvest display with a couple of the pumpkins and a few other things.

This was the pumpkin patch a week or so ago.

This is the biggest pumpkin from the garden this year. It's the biggest pumpkin that I've grown in the last 10 years.

Here's the pumpkin display. That's a white pumpkin in the middle, and a weird cross-pollinated squash in front with the corn. The hybrid squash is a cross between a sugar pie pumpkin and a Delecata squash. The plant came from seeds from last year's squash. The corn is from 2 years ago, it was the last of what I had hanging in the greenhouse.

And of course, what's a fall harvest display without the cat? 😃

The home garden is almost done now, with just the carrots and tomatoes still growing. I probably won't pick the carrots until it gets cold outside. The tomatoes are what I've been working on for the past several weeks. Between canning pints of stewed tomatoes and making pasta sauce, I've been pretty busy.

I probably won't get many more regular tomatoes to use for stewed tomatoes, most of them have already been picked and processed. Some of the Black Krim tomatoes got cracks and started to rot before I could use them. That usually happen with them, but at least I was able to use most of what those plants produced. The Amana Orange tomatoes were really nice this year, so I'll probably plant a few of them next year. I've canned 64 pints of stewed tomatoes this year, much better than last year.

The paste tomatoes still have a lot of green and half ripe tomatoes on them. I think I'll be able to pick more ripe ones tomorrow to start the next batch of sauce. My last batch of tomatoes yielded 6 quarts of pasta sauce after cooking down the processed paste tomatoes. That was my biggest batch so far this year. At this point, I've canned 20 quarts of pasta sauce.

Now that fall is almost here, my tomato plants were suddenly hit with blight. I'm happy that it didn't happen sooner, but I know it will affect the tomatoes still on those plants. Interestingly, it didn't hit all of the plants, only certain ones. It seems to have mostly affected the Better Boy hybrids and the Big Mamma hybrid paste tomatoes. Another weird thing is that the plants were all fine 3 days ago before the last rain storm.

This is the first row of plants, all Amana Orange plants. These are ready to be removed, there's only 1 or 2 tomatoes left on these plants. As you can see, the marigolds here are doing quite well. I got lucky with the color placement.

The second row is the Black Krim plants, with a Big Momma hybrid on the end. You can see how the blight has affected the plant on the end. It's not too bad yet, but I think it will get worse fairly quickly.

The third row is the worst. It seems to have hit all of these plants at the same time.

My short row of paste tomato plants in the low raised bed seem to be unaffected by blight so far. Lots of tomatoes left on these plants. The marigolds I planted here seem to have just gone nuts with growth!

Tomorrow looks like it will be a nice day, so I'm going to pick all of the ripe and almost ripe tomatoes for my next batch of sauce. The almost ripe tomatoes only take a few days to finish getting ripe, so I can process them in a few days.

One more picture, my marigold bed. The shutter speed was slow on this picture, so it's not as clear as it could be. I did what I could to clean it up, so it's pretty good, but not perfect.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for checking it out!