The whole “Winter Gardening” idea didn’t really fly this year. Oh well. Anyway, these are some carrots that we pulled out of the garden the other week. They’re perfectly fine, though it was a bit of a chore because the ground is mostly frozen.

Now it’s time to start thinking about what to plant this summer…

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The season is over, and now we need to do some gardening clean-up. After scooping the composting manure out of the back of my truck, we’re going to have to do some serioius truck clean-up as well.

Just like last year, the onions just don’t want to die. The funny thing is, their green tops died more than a month ago, and now they’re pushing to come back again. The onions from last summer didn’t amount to anything this summer, so I think pulling them up and starting fresh next year is probably the best idea.

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(Just for the sake of posting something).

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We haven’t been very good about updating this weblog recently. Something to do with the end-of-the-season-nearing lack of motivation, I guess. Anyway, here are a bunch of carrots that Chris picked from the garden today!

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I spent the better half of the evening grilling eggplants. Mostly ours, but we got a couple from Easy Bean this week, and then there were a few food shares left at the food co-op that didn’t get picked up by Thursday evening (they deliver Tuesdays), so after doling out vegetables to volunteers before they went bad, it seemed I had enough eggplants to preserve! (I guess people just don’t like eggplants. Actually, two volunteers told me that they had never even eaten them before and didn’t know what to do with them!!).

My new vacuum sealer is finally coming in handy. Just days after we pulled three-quarters of our green beans, we had over 2” of rain, and the beans still in the ground started producing like it was July again! So, we are freezing a bunch of beans as well (finally!).

Also, Chris is making tomato sauce tonight. He started cooking down most of our tomatoes (yes, we have a lot – but no where near as many as I had thought we would) the other day, and we ended up with a lot of extra tomatoes from the food shares that never got picked up. Our giant pot (five gallon?) is quite full with sauce (granted, there’s a bottle of zinfandel in there as well), and though it will cook down a lot tonight, it will definitely can six or eight quarts of sauce! Yay!

… There are still a lot of carrots in the ground, and beets that we need to take care of. As per my mother’s recommendation, I am going to make all of my Christmas presents for my great-aunt (the one who kept giving me the carrot seeds) this year out of carrots: frozen carrot bread, carrot soap, frozen and/or canned carrots… I’m sure she will enjoy the themed gift!

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The carrots in the front yard are looking good – they’re about 3/4” in diameter at the top. We piled some lake muck over them to protect them from the sun.

I brought back some lake muck from my parents’ cabin last weekend. If I make it up there again, I’m going to bring back quite a bit more. It’s really rich and I’m sure the garden just loves it.

Chris planted peas a couple days ago, for a fall crop. Also, the new windows for my house will be arriving soon, so we can start thinking about using the old ones to build cold frames for winter gardening.

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Out of the garden today:

- Two romas displaying Blossom End Rot
- One carrot (just checking on the size) – looks like they’re about half-grown
- Two onions, just barely larger than the sets we put in
- A handful of pickling cukes

The cucumbers filled a quart jar and a pint jar. There are quite a few large pickling cucumbers that we missed over the past week – I left them on the vine to make pickle chips with later. The difficult thing about only having an 8-foot row of pickling cucumbers is that only three or four of them reach “baby dill” size at a time, and I’m not entirely excited about making one jar of pickles at a time. Maybe production will pick up over the next two or three weeks – there are still a lot of cucumbers on the vine!

Apparently, onions are supposed to be the “test crop” for how good your soil is. Looks like we don’t have very good soil. We’re definitely going to get our soil tested – onions are a staple in our house, and it would sure be nice if we could grow enough of them to store until mid-winter.

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I pulled five beets from the garden (in the front yard) this morning. They are fairly large, and the rest still have some growing to do. It took about 64 days for beets. We grilled these along with some other vegetables (pretty good, actually), and I’m planning to use the leaves in a curry tomorrow.

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Tomatoes, Chard, Sunflowers, Peppers, Beets, Eggplant, and carrots

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