This will be relatively short, but as I’ve been posting about this all summer (and now Fall), I figured I should present the aftermath of a relatively successful first year with the garden.
Clearly, the main garden is mostly dead. There’s some broccoli struggling to survive, but that’s about it. As you can see, though, the corn stalks have been pulled down (and re-ordered into decorations for our upcoming Oktoberfest party), and the pumpkins have all died off. We ended up with something around 12 pumpkins, but only 4 of them survived to be useful. The rest were chewed on by beetles, so we may need to do a bit more proactive spraying next year.
The tomatoes and peppers, on the other hand, are shockingly still producing! They’re looking a bit saggy, but that’s more because they’re still growing and I’m not trimming them or tying them up. There are absolutely some areas of death and destruction, however, as leaves continue to die off due to a lack of water.
The picture just above this one shows a little bit of the dying leaves in the middle of that dense forest, but still, there’s plenty of green still in there. As of today, we haven’t had a frost yet, so the tomatoes are still coming on and there are still flowers on some of the plants. Even some of the peppers we planted, that hadn’t made anything yet, have finally put on some full-size veggies for us to pluck.
I think Brooke’s generally tired of canning tomatoes already, so I haven’t bothered to pick the really tiny ones anymore. I’m still grabbing the larger ones as they slowly develop, and as you can see above, there are some pretty big ones in there that are finally turning red. I pick them when they’re starting to turn so we can keep them protected inside.
As of right now, Brooke’s canned about 24 pints of tomatoes, and there’s still quite a few bags left in the freezer to be canned (she thinks another 15 pints or so) after we’ve got more batches like these accumulated.
So ultimately, not too bad for our first year’s harvest! We still haven’t dug up the sweet potatoes, so I’ll likely do a post on that yet. Surely they’re done, but with the party coming up, we didn’t want to disturb that area of the yard with a ton of digging. Soon, though!
I’m very curious about your sweet potatoes. Aunt Marie’s are being eaten up by voles (so she thinks anyway). She gave me a couple so I can use them soon since with the areas they’ve eaten away, the potatoes won’t store well.