The end of the season

We had a hard frost Sunday night, so, in anticipation, we started putting the garden to bed on Sunday afternoon. We collected the last of the harvest, pulled out and composted the plants, and stared preparing the bed to receive the first of the season nutrients.

I'll be putting down manure, alfalfa, bone meal, blood meal, and rock dust then I'll cover it over with newsprint so that the decomposition will be well underway by planting time -- and there will be few or no weeds to deal with. I should only need to turn the soil when it's time to plant.

That's good because we have plenty to do in the spring -- like building tomato towers. The cages this year were completely useless and we lost the majority of the fruit to Mr. Groundhog, who as I have mentioned, is not terribly good at sharing. (He leaves us half of each ripe tomato. Ick.) With towers, we're hoping to keep enough of the harvest to do some canning next year.

We lost all the cabbages this year -- we didn't pick them in time and between bug damage and splitting, none of them were edible. Oh well, next year we'll know to pick them sooner.

We were delighted to find that we had some sweet potatoes. Rod roasted them up for dinner on Monday and they were tender and tasty. I think that's something we'll do again.

And we have a gazillion green tomatoes. Luckily, they mostly ripen OK in steel bowls in the sun. They don't look pretty for the table and they aren't as sweet as if they'd ripened on the vine,. but they're no worse than store tomatoes, so we use them in cooking.

We got a few more carrots, and that was about it for the final harvest. Not bad. I think we'll do a lot more carrot next year now that I know they work well for us.