Our last garden report for the year of the garden...
The first part of October saw us starting to pull some of the more cold-sensitive plants, and harvest our winter squash. Our winter squash crop was fantastic. We ended up with tubs of acorn and butternut squash, and pie pumpkins. Maggie has been busy making squash soup, and I made a pumpkin pie for Henry when he came home from college for a weekend.
The second part of October saw us prepping the garden for its long winter slumber. We pulled most of the remaining plants, except for some kale and Brussel sprouts, chop the plants up with a lawnmower, and place the material back on the beds. The non-raised beds were edged to fight back the intruding grass. We found a yard sweeper at a rummage sale for $20, and used that to gather leaves from our silver maples to place on the beds. We found a horse stable in Baraboo selling aged manure, and took a road trip to get a pickup- and trailer-load of manure for $40 to top off the beds. Lastly, we spread pine shavings across the beds for more organic material. When our neighboring farmer stopped by to drop off a check for leasing the hayfields and an empty canning jar from maple syrup, he found us finishing up in the garden and commented that we have been 'gardening the crap out of the place this year'. Yes, we have. We sent him home with a box of squash, some canned green beans and a jar of grape jelly.
The past three months of gardening has been a blur. Despite the early frost and the drought, our garden was very productive. We ate produce all summer, and managed, at a rough count, to put up the following for the winter:
Four quart cases of tomato sauce
Five half-pint cases of jelly (grape, pear, raspberry, and pepper)
A pint case of salsa
A pint case of pizza sauce
Two pint cases of pickles
Two mixed cases of green beans
Two gallons of dehydrated tomatoes
Two gallons of dehydrated shitake mushrooms
Five pounds of garlic
Over 150 acorn, butternut, and pumpkins
We discovered that Maggie's Nutrabullet blender does a great job of reducing dehydrated vegetables to powder, and produced several jars of tomato powder, mushroom powder, and jalapeño powder. She also dehydrated greens all summer and made powdered greens to add to soups and stews. She created several half-gallon jars of various ferments. I recently started fermenting some hard pear cider, and have some tomato vinegar in process.
As part of cleaning up the garden, we moved our bean trellis and added another to provide some crop rotation. The tomato stakes were pulled with a farm jack and stored for next year. The cucumber trellis is in the barn and will be moved to a new bed in the spring. We bought a hog panel, which will become a new pea trellis. Next weekend we will run the mowers and chainsaw out of gas, and give the hand tools a final cleaning.
We learned a lot this year, and already have an initial sketch of next year's garden. We'll relax for a month or two before revisiting our sketch, make adjustments, and start to decide what varieties to plant, what we will direct sow, what we will purchase as seedlings, and what we will start in flats on the windowsill. For now, we will enjoy our stock of preserved summer, and start to hunker down for the winter.
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