Buttoned up for Winter

Last weekend we pulled out what was left of the garden.  I put away a bushel of beautiful potatoes, a gallon of beans and some odds and ends of cucumbers.  Then yesterday Tim covered the beds with road fabric.  We plan on letting the raised beds rest next year and this will keep the weeds down and solarize the soil.  I won't be giving up gardening entirely.  I still have my 8x8 bed left for a few necessities like tomatoes and cucumbers.  But this will free up a lot of time to get some other outside projects completed.  Like finally painting the doors to the garden shed.

My 8x8 bed is still active.  I have my second planting zucchini plant and some lettuce.  Last year my lettuce kept going until we had a hard frost of about 20 degrees which was mid November

This is actually the second planting of fall lettuce.  The first one was in the big garden and went with everything else.  Do this is my third crop of lettuce this year. 

The Big Apple

The garden is put away for the year and it's Apple Season.  The spindly Spy apple tree has begun to drop apples so tonight we went ahead and picked them.  We got 9 this year and as you can see they are as big as usual.  

They were all over 10 ounces and the largest is a new record at 13.4 ounces

A little perspective on size.  It's a Handful!

The Harvest Waits for No Man

Once you plant a garden you are committed for the season.  Things will ripen.  They must not go to waste.  The garden does not care that I am hobbling around on one leg.  It has been tended.  It is coming to fruition.

I was out of state for four days for a funeral.

This is what I returned to.

Today's Harvest

I froze a gallon of green beans last weekend along with half my harvest of hot peppers.   Today will be another gallon of beans.  I can't complain, the beans are beautiful and tall and easy to pick.  I also picked the first zucchini from one of the last plants which survived being uprooted by the coons.  The late planting experiment proved to be a success.  One plant succumbed to disease the week I was gone so I pulled it.  The remaining plant is thriving and producing.

Late Summer Wrap Up - Without A Leg To Stand On

I have been laid up with a broken ankle for the past week so the Garden is in Tim's hands.  He has been dedicated to watering and dead-heading and advising what needs to be picked.  He even helped my pick beans tonight since we are up to our ears in beans!

The most beautiful purple beans ever

We also have a bed of cucumbers which is battling downy mildew but producing some nice straight cucumbers.

A new bed of GORGEOUS bush beans.
Remind me not to bother to plant beans before July 15th ever again.

A bed of young lettuce and old carrots

Waiting on the bell peppers to ripen

 That makes three vacant beds but one is still harboring undug potatoes.  I also have my fall garden bed prepared and am saving lettuce seedlings to plant there where I can keep them under a frost cover long after the main garden is closed down for the winter.

The fall garden bed with a young zucchini plant
and the frost frame ready to shelter lettuce

The second half of the lettuce babies ready for transplanting

 My strawberry bed is thriving after being renovated in July.  I'm glad I was up to date on garden projects.  All my major cleaning projects were done and things only need maintenance.

The strawberry bed

My carting home of crysanthemums was interrupted after the first trunk load which was one huge glorious Five Alarm Red mum which BARELY fit in my car and garnered compliments while it sat in the office parking lot behind my car.  "Where did you buy that mum?!"  No sense in spending the money on half a dozen more if it is going to be difficult to get out there and enjoy them.

My Barlow Jap tomato plant produced 26 large tomatoes this year.  I don't know if that is a record because I've never kept track before but I can say that the plant obviously had so many fruit that I began counting them as I picked them.  I also had the opportunity to take some back to their home town of Shelbyville KY and give them to my Kentucky family as a special treat.  They were a BIG hit!

The loaded tomato plant before they began to ripen

My ankle ought to be mended in time for planting this year's batch of fall bulbs.  In the mean time, my mother is canning my extra tomatoes, Elsie our Amish friend has been recruited to handle the wild plum jelly, and the apple orchard is in shape and ready for apple picking time.  

If I was going to fall off of my high horse, this was an OK time to do that.

And here is the cause of my broken ankle.
An unplanned (and poorly orchestrated) dismount from Mr. William Pendleton