We’re having a cold October. It got down into the low twenties the past two nights.  The garden is done.  I’m not even sure the chard made it through. When all is said and done the tomato harvest was 241 pounds. I could’ve gotten more if I had picked all of the green tomatoes but I let them go into the compost.

It was a good year in the garden. I canned tomato juice, tomato sauce, marinara, ketchup, hot sauce, salsa, and three kinds of pickles, froze tomato paste, pesto, zucchini, chard, and green beans, sun dried (well, oven dried) a batch of tomatoes, dried oregano, coriander seeds and dill seeds.  I’ve got a string of garlic, the small pile of butternut squash, beets still in the ground, piles of cantaloupe and watermelon (although mostly they didn’t ripen). I still have tomatoes on the counter, the giant bag of hot peppers to deal with, more chard waiting to be frozen and basil to be made into pesto.  Is still have to dig the last of the potatoes. Collin has a mountain of gourds (plus I donated all but one pie pumpkin because they just didn’t get big enough to bother with).

The failures this year were lima beans (again), the potatoes (darn grasshoppers), cabbage, and peas (I got a good harvest of snow peas, but only one serving’s worth of shell peas before the frost hit). The onions did poorly too. The sets I planted had their leaves snapped off by wind and hail so they didn’t bulb out very well, and the onions I planted from seed didn’t grow fast enough to produce full-sized bulbs.

But all in all it was a great year.  I can’t believe the season is over already. Next year will be even bigger and better. And next year I’ve GOT to get hens and rabbits.  That’s a must.