We woke up yesterday morning to a dusting of snow on the ground, which melted and returned throughout the day. The snowfall is pretty light, but it’s been steady since at least 7:00 last night, and doesn’t look like it’s going to let up any time soon!

Chris got all of the tomatoes out of the ground, along with the cucumbers and beans. The eggplants are slowly dying in the cold. The only thing left is the pumpkins, which are mostly orange now. The carrots are still in the ground, but they’ll stay there for a while longer. I’m not sure how the kale and lettuce Chris planted is doing – the newer bunch of carrots are coming up nicely, and Chris did put some storm windows over them to protect them from the snow. His plan for the weekend is making cold frames.

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I raided the tomato plants in the front yard, filling up my entire stovetop with green and pink tomatoes this afternoon. Tomorrow it’s the back yard. I smell indian dishes and green tomato pie in the forecast…

The weather man says that we may get snow on Tuesday night, and that Wednesday will be in the 30s. Alas, it’s time to start taking apart the garden. I pulled some tomato plants out today, and the eggplants, beans, cukes, etc. are still to come. Tip for next year: Wear gloves when pulling out tomato plants, as your hands turn yellow and stain everything you touch yellow as well!

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The tomatoes are starting to come to the end of their season. The temperature has dropped below 40 a couple of times now, and all gardens must come to an end some time. Strangely, one of the volunteers at the food co-op told me the other day that her garden is still flourishing – she even said that the eggplants and okra are still doing well! Our okra never amounted to much, and the eggplants surely look like they’re done for the season.

Aside from the cooler weather, it has been very windy recently (in Morris, it’s always pretty windy, though). The bean trellis finally decided that it wasn’t going to take it any more, and landed on the cucumbers and tomatoes. It’s going to have to be repaired for next year; I think we’re going to use the taller two trellises for tomatoes, and think of something else for beans. I want to plant beans in front of the house and also in front of the garage, and tie twine from the ground to the eaves for the beans to grow up.

Now, soon, comes the task of pulling everything out of the ground. I’m going to find some good green tomato recipes (I made a green tomato/apple chutney a couple of weeks ago, and it is really, really good!), and eventually we will need to take care of the beets, carrots, and everything else that we haven’t pulled out yet.

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There’s a chance of the red dropping below zero tonight (I mean – 32ºF), so we raided the garden. Lots and lots and lots of cayennes! There were a bunch of eggplants that aren’t very big, but together they amount to something. We picked up a bunch of apples from various Farmers Markets, and I’m in the process of making a green tomato/apple chutney right now. I’m going to can it, and Chris and I will enjoy it all winter. I doubt that any of my family members will be interested in chutney – they’re the “milder” type.

I’m heading out of town this weekend to visit my family, and I hope to bring back a truck full of manure from my uncle’s hobby farm. He said that I’ll have to go and collect it (no compost pile, I guess), but I hope that will help out the garden a lot. Then, next spring we hope to hook up with a sheep farmer in town to get another giant supply. I think our main problem (aside from the lack of sun because we’re in town and have trees) is just that our soil doesn’t have enough nutrients in it – adding some manure should definitely help out.

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These are flowers from squash and/or pumpkin. This morning while watering the garden one fell off and it made me think I should try picking a bunch and frying them. I picked about 6 and put them in a paper towel and jessi thought they were garbage and threw them in with the dog business (can i say crap? i don’t think thats offensive. i apologize if my grandma or someone ever comes across this)! maybe next time.

it is a law that i take pictures of the garden to post about. whats frustrating is how bad i am at taking pictures. this kale sprout is case in point, but we all get the idea – the kale i planted is sprouting.

the idea of this picture was to illustate that lots of my green onions got ruined from the dudes who came and put in a new gas line. it turns out they also broke a shovel. i saved the metal part cause it looked like it was a good shovel. also they like to eat beef jerky and drink squirt. even though i will have less delicious green onions to eat and it is their fault they were nice guys on the whole. they did move all our eggplants in containers out of the way.

today i bought some more seeds. its mostly cover crops for winter/spring and some herbs to plant inside! for this weekend i hope to get started on making my cold frames and/or dig up some grass for a new garden area next year. its been warm the last few days, but i’m sure fall will sneak up on us.

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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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I picked one of the white eggplants that has been around for a month or so now for dinner last night. I was a bit weary because it was still green, and supposed to be a “white” eggplant, but I’ve heard that over-ripe eggplants are no good. The seeds were QUITE dark, which makes me think that we left it on the plant too long! Plus, it wasn’t very good cooked – very bitter. We ended up getting rid of it.

In a frenzy, I ran outside and picked all of our larger eggplants, just to make sure they weren’t over-ripe. We had one more pink bi-colored eggplant (that’s the purple one…?), and a few black and white eggplants. Chris got home and told me that he thought maybe the eggplants were underripe! Arrgh! According to “the experts” (I really like to refer to “the experts” as often as possible), eggplants are ripe when their skins are “shiny.” I don’t know… they sure look “shiny” to me, but then they’ve always looked “shiny.”

In other news, I brought all of my papaya herbs (trees), grapefruit trees, and medjool date trees into the house tonight instead of putting them back in the garage. They take up the entirety of the new shelving system, and I realize now that if they grow at all over the winter I’m going to have to find some more options. Oh yeah, and I need to buy many, many more lights.

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Lots and lots of stuff out of the garden today! Many Roma tomatoes, a few Amana Orange tomatoes, a large Marvel Striped tomato… more tomatoes… cucumbers, beets, and carrots (I didn’t take a picture of them).

We ate two of our black eggplants for dinner last night. The one here is a pink bi-colored eggplant. The random yellow/green squash was weighing down the vine, and when I picked the vine up this morning, it just fell right off. So, I guess it’s time to be eaten! It’s not very big and the vine only made one, which is slightly upsetting.

We ripped a big chunk of the beans out of the garden this afternoon, and Chris has been busy planting vegetables for late fall/winter harvesting. Maybe he will write about what he’s been planting soon!

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The best way to see progress in your garden: go away for the weekend. Chris is going to be pleased when he comes back on Wednesday night. The tomatoes are still quite slow to ripen, but there are two nice orange ones that I may be able to eat for dinner tonight, and a few clusters of ripe romas. We have five or six baby eggplants, and there seem to be quite a few more on the way.

The biggest question I have now is: What is that squash growing in our zucchini? <– is!

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Last night at the food co-op when we went to pick up our food share, we spoke with another home-gardener who said that she also performs surgery on her squash and pumpkins every year to remove the borers. She said that they always turn out just fine – this leaves me a bit more hopeful, and the fact that we still have zucchini and some random summer squash growing eases my mind a bit.

Also, she said that her eggplant were starting to get little fruits… and this morning there is a small black eggplant! The flowers on some of the eggplants are starting to fold up, and within a couple of weeks we should be regularly harvesting eggplants!

Additionally… we mentioned that a lot of our tomatoes have blossom end rot, and the home-gardener said, “that will go away.” She’s gotten four tomatoes out of her garden so far this year – we ate an amana orange tomato and a couple of romas last week, and with the pink ones starting to ripen, I don’t think we’re too far behind at all. We got our first tomatoes this week in our food share from Easy Bean, so it seems like this year they are slow to ripen. If only we could get some rain…

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