Unfortunately, we didn’t move the old bean and cucumber trellises with us, and I didn’t have the scrap wood (or the ambition) this year to build something new.

Menard’s sells 10′ PVC Pipes for 97¢. Five of those, plus a bit of hemp twine, makes a really nice bean teepee. I dug each pole 1 foot into the ground to make sure the winds wouldn’t take them down this summer.

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.

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!

I am not the photog Jessi is, but here are the fall pea sprouts. I planted them a couple days ago. Some slugs sprouted up too what with the rain, but the peas seem to have managed okay. I hope all the junk like straw doesn’t hurt anything – I didn’t want to spend an hour cleaning the bed up. Today I planted beets and black salsify. For the rest of the week I plan to work on removing the grass from the side of garage facing the house where next year we’ll have corn, squash and peas. Once the grass is up and the soil tilled I’ll plant the fall manure mix I got which will grow the rest of the year die down in winter and some will come up again early next year before anything could be planted.

I tried to take a picture of this sign that told you where to dump pesticides today and then I was going to write something about how our country’s “War On Terroism” and conventional agriculture’s “War On Pests” is analogous, but maybe its better I don’t try to get political on our gardening website!

Beans, Broccoli, Tomatoes, Buttercup Squash, and Cucumbers.

A lot of growing can be done in a month! Our beans are happily climbing up the trellis (some are vining 4 feet up already), the squash and pumkins are giant and have tiny buds, the tomatoes have flowers, and the beets and chard are actually looking like beets and chard. We planted some yellow summer squash where the spinach was, and it’s coming up nicely but I hope there’s enough summer left for it to produce – it’s about three weeks behind the rest of the squash.

I realize now that pictures don’t really do the garden justice – things look healthier and fuller when you’re actually standing next to the plants.

The Royal Purple beans have red stems; Tendergreen have the green stems. Both are bush varieties.

Well, mostly. Everything except about 20 eggplant seedlings, which are either going in containers or replacing the broccoli raab that we’re about to harvest. Containers would be best, because then we could position them to get enough sun… but the problem then becomes finding containers for that many eggplants, and then buying dirt, soil amendments, etc. My guess is that we’ll need to replace a couple of eggplants in the front yard though, so we’re still holding off for a few days.

On Tuesday, we planted 11 tomatoes, 22 chile peppers, 2 okras, and 11 eggplants in the new front garden. The eggplants are quite small, and I’m hoping now that they’re in the ground, they will take off a bit more. We planted basil with the tomatoes, and I still have a packet of dill to plant, which will hopefully be ready around the time that our cucumbers are. Still not sure where to put the dill…

On Wednesday, we had 24 tomato plants left to plant – we managed to fit all but the one I snapped in half when transplanting (oops…) into the garden in the back. That makes 34 tomato plants in all – I’m excited to see how well they produce. I have definited freezing and canning plans for this summer, and we have at least 8 or 10 roma tomato plants, so hopefully we can make some sauces too. We also grew some specialty heirloom tomatoes: Amana Orange, Prize of the Trails Cherry, Oaxacan Pink, and Early Red Chief. One hybrid: Marvel Striped (a yellow/orange tomato). We put the three broccoli in the back yard as well.

The neat thing is that everything in our garden was grown from seed this year. We didn’t buy anything that someone already started for us. Hopefully things will come along nicely over the next few weeks so I’ll have some more exciting pictures to show off online.

We planted the beans today: Royalty Purple Podded Snap Bush Bean, Tendergreen Bush Bean, Blue Lake 274 Garden Bean, and Blue Lake Stringless Garden Bean (the last two are a couple of organic hybrids I had from last year). We ordered most of our seeds this year from Seeds of Change, but I’ve found that the packs are a bit skimpy.