Final Harvest

A week ago our thermometer read 100 degrees in the afternoon. It's somewhat high because the outdoor sensor gets some reflected heat in the afternoon. The actual temp was probably in the low 90's. The next day we had rain and highs in the 50's. I don't think it's been out of the 60's since then. Steven said today that winter is kind of slowly sneaking up on us. I told him I thought it jumped out of nowhere and grabbed us by the throat!

The cooler day time highs make for lower lows. Most of what was left in the garden doesn't do well below freezing so last week we picked just about everything. The zucchini had pretty much produced its last already. The tomatoes had come up so late that the plants were loaded with tons of green tomatoes. I was promised that the green ones would ripen, so we picked the bigger ones and have had them sitting on the floor in the dining room where they are slowly turning red.

Tonight were are supposed to be down in the high 20's, so we decided to gather what remained. As I'd picked the last round of tomatoes in the dark I missed a few, so Steven and I picked another 1/2 bag or so tonight . We figured we ended up with 135 pounds, give or take, from 35 or so plants. Not bad for not giving the plants a whole growing season. The picture above shows most of them. There's a bag in the fridge that has already turned red and a bag of green that wouldn't fit on the table. Can't wait to try my hand at canning them if I can convince Erica to leave us a few. The two zucchini are the two we decided to leave and let grow as long as we could. The boys thought it would be cool to see if they would explode, but it was not to be. They've been growing a month or so. Next time we'll have to leave them out all season and see what happens. I have no idea how many zucchini we ended up with, but the freezer is full, the kids are tired of eating it , and the neighbors don't like to see me coming anymore! The 2-liter bottle is there just for size reference. We've not figured how to grow soda, though I'm sure the kids would love it. 5 pumpkins grew, but I accidentally sliced into the skin of one when I tried taking off the vine a couple of weeks ago, so it's already been cooked and eaten or frozen.

That's about it. There are onions still outside, but they're pretty small still. I've been told that they winter-over pretty well so I thought we'd leave them and see what happens. The strawberries are still producing on occasion, too, but I think that's about done as well. All in all, it's been a good experiment and the backard was put to much better use this summer than the weed factory we had last year!