I didn’t get anything posted in August (a lot was going on!), and since the garden is dying down, I figured I’m running out of time to talk about it. There are only a few things left to focus on, at this point, but overall, we think it was a solid year!
It hasn’t rained much in the past few weeks. It has also been unseasonably mild, temperature-wise, so I think the plants just know it’s time to wither away. There are still some green tomatoes on a few vines, but they’re pretty small and don’t show any sign of developing further.
A few weeks ago, though, we were getting some good hauls! We had a lot of good slicers this year, so we had our obligatory BLTs for a few weeks in mid-August. Brooke thinks we got at least 3 bags of tomatoes processed and frozen, so while more would have been nice, we still did pretty well.
The sweet potatoes are just about all that remains of the big plot. The zucchini died off about a month ago, and the squash never amounted to anything. I think we ended up with two squash, but beetles got to them both pretty quickly, and they didn’t get much larger than an apple, so not as successful as we’ve had in the past.
The eggplant, though, did alright! We probably ended up with 8 or 9 eggplants about this size?? They all looked pretty good! Brooke made baba ganoush once, but otherwise, she dehydrated them and mixed them in with various ground meat meals in the past few weeks. We’ll probably plant them again in the future, since they didn’t take up much space, and we actually got some fruit out of them.
Brooke processed the sorghum two weekends ago, just like she did the last time she grew them. She ended up getting about a quart and a half of sorghum extract. Not really all that much, but it’s still in keeping with our quest to make sweet things off the land.
Peppers are also one of the few remaining things we’ve got growing. The “banana peppers” ended up being hotter than we’d anticipated, so Brooke is letting them all turn red and then dehydrating them. We’re going to smoke some of them so we can make smoked paprika, which sounds pretty good to me!
The soup beans are the other thing that took over the bean plot. Again, we didn’t get much from our green beans this year (we got enough, but it wasn’t exactly a bumper crop here in 2025…). The soup beans, on the other hand, are doing just fine as always!
In that same plot, we had some cantaloupe growing. Of the 9 or 10 that ultimately grew, only one of them was viable (the others rotted or never really got big enough to ripen). The one we got was pretty good, though I’m not convinced the space those plants took up was worth the one cantaloupe.
And last, but not least, Brooke dug up (dumped out??) her laundry basket of potatoes and….this is what she got! We ate these last week and, honestly, they were pretty good! Again, was it worth it to use a laundry basket for what amounts to a dollar or two of new potatoes? Meh. Still, the process worked! Maybe I didn’t water them enough, or maybe they were so deep down in the soil that the water didn’t percolate down far enough?? We’ll try potatoes again next year, but probably without as deep a path for the water to take.
There’s a chance I’ll post one more thing for the end of the season sometime in the next few weeks, but there isn’t much more to develop for Summer 2025’s garden season. Here’s to looking toward Summer 2026!