From the garden - fall round-up

It took them long enough - the FIRST of the red peppers ...


Still haven't harvested any of these yet ... but I think they're finally almost ready:

Still going strong:

We dug out and prepared a second 4' square for next year, which I think I will designate as the "mostly herb" garden. It's in a shadier spot, and I think that will hurt the herbs less than it will the yields on my tomatoes and whatever else I put in. Maybe it will get enough sun in the spring that I can throw in some salad crops before the leaves come out. I wasn't able to find any manure for sale at Home Depot when I was working in the amendments to the soil, so I have to remember to double up on it this spring when I turn it over again.

New things I'm thinking about planting for next spring:

• peas
• lettuce or spinach (probably spinach)
• zucchini (with a barbed-wire fence around it to keep out the deer and groundhogs and raccoons)
• rhubarb (although I'm not sure I want to devote that much room to a pie filling)
• cherry tomatos
• more onions, staggered in planting time (maybe try for some green onions?)
• maybe some radishes? Not a lot, just a few to see how they do.
• maybe some carrots? I know that garden-grown ones are really ugly, but I remember them tasting pretty good.
• maybe a Japanese eggplant

Things I'll skip next year:

• corn - I don't have the room to plant enough to get it fully pollenated
• broccoli - it takes too much room for one head of so-so stuff, and it attracts caterpillars
• cucumbers - they're fun to watch, but I don't like them enough to use them up fast enough
• zucchini, if I don't come up with some way to protect it. Pest magnet, those things are.

So, we've probably got another few weeks I can baby along what's left in the garden, and then it will be time for the mass purge and returning to the soil. I'll pitch the tomato stalks and whatever the deer have left me of the zucchini plants, since they seem to have some sort of white powdery mildew on them, and I don't want to put that back into the soil. But the rest I think I'll have Jason run over with the lawn mower, then I'll turn it back into the garden as my own cheapo compost. Worst case, when I turn over the garden in the spring I can pull out any big chunks that are left.

So that's it! Thanks for sticking with me for a whole summer of posts. It's been fun for me to have an excuse to have to wander back there regularly. Hopefully the wealth of veggie photos haven't scared away too many potential readers!