It is hard to believe our garden has only been growing for four months. After our fool's spring, the garden got a foothold, survived a short drought, and exploded into produce.
The big story for September has been tomatoes. Although our trellis system failed, we have been able to harvest a seemingly endless stream of tomatoes. The yellow plum tomato finally started to turn color, along with a Beam Yellow Pear tomato that was a volunteer from last year. Every weekend found us canning tomato sauce, pizza sauce, and salsa, along with dried tomatoes.
Our bush bean cover crop was also a big producer in September. For three weekends we picked pots of beans, which we processed in our pressure cooker. Last weekend, we gave up and simply blanched beans and froze them, as we were tired of all-day sessions in the kitchen.
As the days got shorter and the nights cooler, the winter squash vines began to fade. Maggie spent an entire day harvesting squash, picking mountains of acorn and butternut squash and a couple of dozen pie pumpkins.
Our pepper crop has been a bit of a disappointment, although we picked enough for salsa and three batches of pepper jelly. The highlight was finding a large Black and Yellow Garden Spider among the plants. The peppers continue to produce, so the plants and spider will stay for a while.
Because we are not doing much with succession cropping and are not employing row covers this year, September will be our last big month of vegetables. We are starting to put the garden to bed. The leaves are starting to change, and snow cannot be far behind. For now, the nasturtiums have overtaken a couple of the beds and are putting on a show for us to enjoy.
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