We haven’t had a frost yet, and here it is the first of November. I think we have to call it fall, for the colours, but it doesn’t really feel like fall until the garden actually slows down, which will take a frost.
We grew a lot of these:
and I reorganized the cottage kitchen to create a drying and storage rack for them. I think this is the best solution we’ve had yet for winter squash storage.
the tomatoes have been yielding pounds of fruit every week. it was desperate enough for a while that we were hard pressed to keep up, in spite of selling them, giving them away, and multiple canning and dehydrating batches every day. now that the temperatures have come down a little, the yield is mellowing out, but it’s far from over. We have an entire pantry full of canned tomato sauce, tomato pickles, dried tomatoes, you name it. Now we’re drying tomato leather to use as tomato paste in sauce recipes later on.
at least the corn, which actually didn’t do very well this year, is done and down.
not that i’m complaining about the abundance. i’m just ready for it all to fold in and let us rest a bit as the winter comes in. which it sounds like it’s not going to do much of this year: predictions are for drier & warmer than average weather all winter.
and i’d love enough of a hard freeze to kill off all of these guys:
before they can decimate yet another year’s worth of plants. at least it wasn’t as bad this year as last year. they hit us hard in the spring, but we had put down several pounds of NoloBait, and this paid off over the summer. we’ll do it again next spring.