Garden Journal, End of Summer Garden Report

Hello, hivers and garden lovers!

Well, summer has come and gone here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I think we're pretty much done with 80 degrees F weather here, it's supposed to be in the low 70s or high 60s for all of next week. I think we're about 2 to 2-1/2 weeks from the first serious frost at night at this point in time.

My garden is pretty much done growing now, so lets take a look at the garden and see what it looks like. First, we'll look at the sunflower plants. The flowers are pretty well developed, and the bumblebees are busy with them.

The carrots are just doing what carrots do.

I have a few green bean plants that I didn't pull out of the raised beds because they have big bean pods that I'm going to let mature for the seeds.

My weird cross-pollinated squash plants are looking pretty bad, mostly because of powder mildew. Since it's the end of the season and the squash are turning color and hardening up, I'm not going to worry about the powder mildew now.

The tomato plants are still healthy, more or less, and the tomatoes are continuing to ripen.
These are paste tomato plants.

These are the regular tomato plants. Most of these are heirloom tomatoes.

The paste tomato plants in the greenhouse are still doing pretty well, although there's not a lot of tomatoes left on the plants. I started picking the tomatoes from these plants while the ones in the garden were still green.

Here's the last of the zucchinis. The plants were dying because of stem borers, so I pulled them out.

The marigolds are still blooming like crazy!

Now on to my community garden plots.

The late season potato plants still have some life left in them, but they're dying back with the change of the season.

The potato plants in the straw bales are just about done also. The borage planted next to the bales seems to still be doing well, and the bumblebees are happy with that.

The early season potato plants died back a couple of weeks ago, now all that's left to do is to finish digging them up. I dug up 2 rows a week ago, but have not been able to get back up there to dig more because of being so busy with canning the tomatoes.

It looks like my little pumpkin patch is just about done growing for the year. A week ago, there was still a lot of life in the vines, and the pumpkins were still green. My, how things can change in a week.

I took home the most ripe pumpkin when I left after taking these pictures. With how obvious the pumpkins are now, I hope they're all still there when I go back up there next time. I've never had any problems up there before, but these big orange pumpkins might be too tempting for someone. I guess I'll find out when I go up there next.

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