Still, this was a timely reminder to us that it's about time to start getting our nest ready for winter. So today, we've been taking care of various little errands like replacing the windshield wipers on the car (including the rear one, which was long overdue), stocking it with an ice scraper and mini shovel, checking the condition of our roof gutters, and draining the rain barrel. Brian also went through the garlic we'd harvested this summer (and already eaten some of) to see how much we had left to plant. Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be less than he thought, as some of the heads had rotted, despite being cured with their stalks on in the approved manner. So even though he planted everything we had left, it looks like our garlic crop next year will be no bigger than this year's. Next year, perhaps we'll try picking them a little earlier and making sure we get all the dirt off before curing them.
He then decided, since frost is apparently a potential threat at this point, to go ahead and pick all the remaining peppers and squash. (There are only three squash here, but he'd already brought in about nine others.) He also harvested what was left of the basil, which he will grind up and freeze (the best method we've found for preserving home-grown basil). However, he didn't touch the green tomatoes left on the plants, since none of them were beginning to blush yet. We figure we have a better chance of gleaning a few more ripe tomatoes by leaving them on the vines a bit longer, taking our chances with future frosts, than we do by picking them now and trying to ripen them in a box, which hasn't worked altogether successfully for us in the past.
One other crop he harvested is most of our remaining Climbing French beans. He made a point of letting some of these beans go dry on the vine so that he would have a supply of seed for next year, since we can't buy these at Fedco. As a result, we didn't get as many of these beans for eating this year as I'd hoped for, but we have a whole bunch for planting. So he picked and shelled most of those, and we'll set them aside for next year's garden. Now the only question is, what shall we do with all this lovely produce? Since this is the last harvest of our 2019 garden (unless we manage to get a few more tomatoes), it deserves a little something special to commemorate it. I would have liked to make the stuffed acorn squash that my new favorite vegan blog (the one where I found the vegan mozzarella recipe we've been using for the past couple of months) served up a recipe for today, but I didn't know how well it would work with butternut squash. And we'd need to acquire some dried cranberries for it, anyway. So we'll have to try that one some other time, possibly as our Recipe of the Month for November.
For tonight, the plan is to make a simple fried rice using some of our freshly harvested Carmen peppers and Thai basil. It'll be a last taste of summer to bid farewell to the warmer days and welcome the cold winter in. And we'll most likely follow that up with a batch of chocolate pudding and a bit of the vegan coconut whipped cream that we were delighted to discover is back in stock at Trader Joe's. We're hoping this will work for us better than the coconut-based Reddi Wip we tried, which got stuck in the bottle and wouldn't dispense. If it's good, it might be the final piece of the puzzle—or at least the biggest remaining piece—in our attempts to go dairy-free.
Then it's off to snuggle up on the couch with a blanket, some Critical Role, and the cats (if they cooperate), before turning back the clocks and tucking ourselves in for a long winter's nap.
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