
The End of Gardening
Well, folks, tonight the forecast is for -2 Celsius, and for us who have gardens, it means the total and nearly complete end to the gardening of food for the season. I just spent an hour in my garden harvesting everything I possibly could so that the frost doesn’t damage the foods.
And I was pretty impressed with the final bounty.
And I also have some questions, like, what do you do with minuscule leeks? I forgot to get around to thinning them and then my mini-dahlia plant became a medium-sized one and I didn’t want to reach past it to thin them…
Lots of tomatoes, mostly green at this point. Beans! Humongous amount of beans from my bush beans! The climbing beans did horribly this year and my peas didn’t produce at all, so those were quite disappointing, but these dingy bush beans (they have, like, 4-6 leaves and typically 10-20 beans per plant every week; so odd and efficient) more than made up for it.
And we had a lovely cherry pepper plant that produced some spicy peppers for us and a few cucumbers that will likely be used mostly for seeds.
Tons of swiss chard (top left)! and some lettuce greens (top right) and a million leaves of sage. I’m not kidding on that. Anyone have some good sage recipes?
And finally, though it’s not producing any fruit right now, we also have this in our back corner, and it scares me…
So that’s what the garden’s like in autumn. Gardening is mostly done done done. Over this next week we will be pulling out the rest of the frosted green things and composting them, then amending the soil in the beds so that they’re ready to go next year. What joy! Spencer saw the bags of manure and asked Andy, ‘Daddy, is that sheep poop?’ Why yes, son, it is sheep poop. Thanks for putting it in a way that makes it much worse.
Anyone else pulling up their garden?

