Preparing for Fall

My garden is looking forlorn. Between the buckets of rain we have received in Eastern Pennsylvania and the fact that my son “borrowed” our lawnmower, it is a little over grown.

I have not planned to grow much this fall. I am more ready to start winding it down and preparing it for winter. I will cover a lot of the winterizing of the garden in a future post. This is more about the sorry state of it now.

I would put much of the fault for the mess on the rain – and lack of available time for proper weeding. We have not see more than about 4 days pass in the last 2 months without rain. Is it wrong that I do not want to be elbows-deep in mud and muck? And while this is a bad reflection on my commitment to my garden, it speaks of truth. When I go out, it’s going to be a mess.

Like the tomatoes. The plants look horrible now. They are pretty much done, so I am not doing anything with it until I am ready to pull it all down. But we harvested a ton or so (meaning about 200 or so). Unfortunately due to getting them in the ground late and all the rain, we did not see any until very late in August.

Lettuce Patch – The rabbits ate most of the different varieties I planted. We were able to harvest Arugula and Green Romaine. They were great for salads.

Zucchinis and Cucumbers – Both the Zucchini and Cucumbers were a great success. We had experienced difficulties in the past with the rabbits chewing off the zucchini flowers. After finding fencing, we had success. Cucumbers were lots of fun. We had both regular cucumbers and pickling cucumbers.

Herbs – saw limited success, mostly due to the location. These were on the side of the house. Every storm they would get washed out by runoff from the gutters. We had lots of basil, parsley and cilantro. As of yet, I still have not been able to get my white sage seeds to sprout. I will complain more about that in a future post.

And the Pumpkins – Still Growing. In keeping with my plan to use all organic seeds, I planted what they sent. So far I am not so impressed. I suspect I will be buying large orange pumpkins in a few weeks to carve for Halloween.  I took this picture yesterday. It is about double this size today.