The garden is certainly on the decline, but we’re still picking a substantial amount of stuff. When all was said and done, we ended up with over 20 pints of green beans canned this year, along with all the rest of them we ate fresh. There are still some beans on the plants, but most of the pods are empty, so we’ve largely given up on them.
The tomatoes and the soup beans, on the other hand, are ridiculous. The tomatoes have certainly slowed, but Brooke has been keeping up with canning sauce, freezing batches until enough are ready. Brooke has canned 32 pints of tomato sauce so far. This time, she hasn’t canned any whole tomatoes like she’s done before.
We also have 5 quarts of soup beans. As in, a full ice cream bucket full of them. And there are plenty more on the vine. This may be our largest haul of those beans yet!
We’ve had some banana peppers here and there. Our pepper haul this year was lower than before, mostly because the volunteer tomatoes encroached and limited their growth. We haven’t eaten many of them yet, but Brooke’s frozen slices of them for later use.
Here’s that really good pumpkin, completely with a grasshopper to add some scale to the picture. We were hopeful this one would make it, but some bugs drilled a hole in the side. It isn’t rotten yet, but we can’t say we’ve got much hope for its survival. There are a few other little baby pumpkins growing that are still yellow, but they surely won’t make it.
We actually had more luck with watermelons this year. This is the biggest one, yet it’s strangely misshapen. There’s another, rounder one, but this late in the season, we aren’t hopeful much will come of them. Still, it’s the most success we’ve had with watermelons! They just took a lot longer to get moving than we expected.
The popcorn also took awhile to get going. There are fewer stalks this year, but what we’ve gotten so far is promising. Obviously, the weeds are taking over…
The corn ears are pretty skinny still, but I seem to remember them looking like that last year. We aren’t expecting to get a lot of popcorn, but last year’s crop worked out better than we expected, so perhaps we’ll be surprised again!
The raspberries came back with a vengeance! I figured they were done a long time ago, but the last two weeks, we’ve been getting handfuls of them. We haven’t really done anything particularly interesting with them, but Meg and Calvin each had 10-15 last Saturday afternoon while they were playing outside and, frankly, that’s a good enough reason to grow them.
The sweet potatoes are still growing and we haven’t done anything with them yet. We assume there are potatoes down there. I guess we’ll find out eventually, when we get around to digging them up!
The fruit trees are still there, with the peach tree leading the growth chart. The rest of the trees got hit hard by Japanese Beetles and, while they’re still growing alright, they’ve got a long road to full recovery. Their trunks have fattened up substantially, so I hope the root system has followed suit, even though the leaves haven’t. We’ll add some fertilizer and mulch to them in the next few weeks and hope that helps them out over the winter months.
That’s about it! Probably the last post on this for the year, but who knows…maybe those tomatoes will keep going through November…