Gardeners' Holidays 2022: Late Harvest

Autumn is now at its peak. The weather is pleasantly cool, the trees are ablaze with fall colors, and out in the garden, production is starting to wind down. We're still getting some tomatoes (mostly Sun Golds) and the odd handful of raspberries, but nearly everything else is finished. Brian is leaving the few Climbing French beans still growing on the trellis to dry so he can harvest them for seed to plant next year. And a frost warning a week or so ago prompted him to harvest and process most of the basil, zucchini, and peppers, along with all the tomatoes — blushing or not — that were reasonably large enough to harvest. So most of what remains is the stragglers: the cold-hardy parsley, the few tomatoes and peppers that survived that first frost, a few leeks, and a couple of tiny zucchini that may or may not get big enough to pick before the next frost hits.

Most years, our biggest crop in October is butternut squash. But this year, our squash crop is in an odd half-harvested state. The vines out in the garden itself have all died, but the volunteer plant out in the side yard is bigger and more rambunctious than ever. So, as a compromise, Brian decided to pick all the squash off the garden vines and the two fully ripe ones off the volunteer plant, while leaving the others on the vine in the hope that some of them will ripen before the frost gets heavy. Thus, we presently have a pitiful harvest of six squash — just one small squash off each of the four Little Dipper vines we planted and two larger ones off the volunteer plant, whatever variety it may be. And that's in spite of the fact that the volunteer got a much later start than the ones we grew from seed, only growing large enough to attract our attention around August. This is a truly pathetic performance for Little Dipper, which gave us eight squash from four vines last year and 21 the year before. At this point, I'm starting to feel like I won't particularly regret having to drop this variety next year when we replace Fedco as our seed supplier.

At the same time we harvested one crop, we planted another: the garlic. As I mentioned back in June, our yield of this has not been at all good this year either. We ended up getting just a couple of scapes and seven tiny heads, not even enough to sow for next year's crop. So we had to buy two new heads of hardneck garlic from the farmers' market at an exorbitant $2 each. Brian got a total of 15 cloves from those two heads and about 25 from the home-grown ones, and he planted the lot in the long bed in front of the fenced garden area, next to the rhubarb. This plot currently has asparagus in it, but we didn't get so much as a single spear off it this year, so Brian has decided to write it off and turn that spot into our new garlic patch. We'll hope the plants prosper a little better in their new home, away from the trampling feet of groundhogs and whatever else has been hanging out in our yard.

That's about all that's going on in the garden right now, which means we didn't have much in the way of home-grown produce to celebrate this Gardeners' Holiday with. We used a few of our home-grown tomatoes in the sauce for an Indian shrimp dish on Friday, and last night Brian tossed a couple of our peppers on the grill for some grilled vegetable sandwiches — kind of a last hurrah before the weather gets too cold for outdoor cooking. But today, the only thing I got to celebrate the transition to colder weather was a flu shot. Not as enjoyable as a butternut squash lasagna, perhaps, but probably better for me.