garden wind-down
Every gardening season is a disappointing one, because it's frankly impossible for every plant to grow as well as you want it to. Especially when you don't know what you're doing. This year was further complicated by Harvey's arrival right at the beginning of the weeding period, and the distraction he provided from proper garden care and appreciation. Also it was either cold and rainy or way too hot, if memory serves, so we didn't spend much time outside. Excuses, excuses.
That being said, I planted so much more this year that I was pretty much guaranteed to come up with a passable harvest, and indeed, we did alright with tomatoes, greens of all kinds, and carrots, and we got a reasonable number of zucchinis and peppers as well. Wonderful peas early in the summer. Still, so many weeds... and so many wasted crops that dried or rotten on the vine because I didn't manage to harvest them in time!
So it's nice, in a way, to start closing everything down for the winter. The garden is never neat in the summer, at least not with the way I do my tomatoes! With them gone, and the cucumber trellis packed up, things start to look calm and tidy, and I start to be able to envision what I'm going to do next year. The anticipation is even better than the actual thing... at least at the end of the summer.
All that was in mind as I started taking things down on the first of October; imagine my surprise, then, when I couldn't get going on the cleanup until I picked a reasonable bunch more veggies! The day's intake is pictured above, and that isn't even the end of it. I got two nice tomatoes yesterday from some plants in the side yard, and there are a handful of carrots still in the ground and peppers ripening on the plants. So I can't get things down to bare dirt yet!