Hauling in the Harvest

I brought in another 30 pounds of tomatoes yesterday after getting a little deeper into the patch and looking inside the tomato cages. I also set aside one large tomato for seed saving. I’ve got a zucchini to cut open for seeds, and I’ll probably even save some cucumber seed just to be thorough.

I pulled up the beans and put them into trays in the greenhouse to dry:

It’s not nearly the crop I was hoping for, but I’ll get at least as many as I got last year and that’s something. And that area of the garden is ready to be covered with compost for the winter.

The lavender is pretty well spent. I am going to cut it back soon. Pruning it in the fall seems to work better than waiting to prune in the spring. The pollinators have moved over to the spearmint, which has such pretty pale purple flowers:

I still don’t see many honeybees, but this was buzzing with other kinds of insects.

I checked on the grapes. My goodness.

This has been a good year.

I took a peek at the weather forecast for Monday—a high temp of 55 with rain. (!!!) It may go down to the low 30s Monday night, too, so we’ll have to cover the tomatoes. Temps are supposed to bounce back into the 70s later in the week. As long as we keep the tomatoes covered at night, we should be able to keep them going until the end of the month.

I may start digging potatoes soon, too. My goal is to have all of the garden cleanup done before the wedding. I’ve got about three to-do lists running in parallel right now. They have everything on them that has to be done in the next six weeks. I bought carrots at Costco yesterday, so those will get done this weekend. I also need to keep moving forward on some sewing projects before I have to put things away to make room for houseguests.

The husband plans to work on the new shop siding this weekend. We are on the schedule to have the heating system installed, but not until after the wedding because the HVAC company is just as booked up as all the other contractors. (He has portable heaters to use in there until then.) The replacement lights for the backhoe also arrived this week.

We are going to have to deal with the chicken situation at some point. We’re really past the carrying capacity of that coop. The junior rooster posse hangs out together on top of the nesting boxes, where they watch the proceedings and practice their crowing. All of them, all at the same time. Getting in there to collect eggs takes some doing. No one is being aggressive—they know better than that and their father seems to be doing a good job of keeping everyone in line—but there are a lot of chickens.