Kitchen Garden Clean Up

I enjoyed being out in the garden today. Even though the weather was pleasant, I knew that my time was growing short. If I wanted to harvest anything in early fall, or overwinter for the spring, I needed to get going and clean things up. One of the signs of fall coming is the abundance of spiders! I really have to watch my head when walking through the garden beds!

There sure were a lot of carrots! This is the first year that I yielded such a harvest! I remember just sprinkling a lot of seeds, sure I would “thin them out” later. Well, the thinning never occurred and I spent a lot of time pulling carrots. You can see how close they grew together here.

After a while of gently loosening the soil and removing a carrot at a time, I finally just started hoisting them from the dirt by the handfuls.

The end result was 26 pounds of carrots, plus a clean garden bed ready for a new crop. It’s not that big of an area; perhaps it is 3×5 feet? I think I’m going to put my hardneck garlic in this spot this time. My husband, bless him, put in drip irrigation that’s on a timer, sensitive to rain. Talk about easy gardening!

Another favorite *crop* of mine are sweet peas. I so love this delicate flowers with their intense floral scent. Every year I think I’m not planting enough, and every year…..they take over! Alas, it was time to let them go. Most of the flowers had gone to seed, and I wanted to harvest the seeds for next year before the wet weather began to mold them in their pods.

The pods are ready to harvest when they are plump. I like to wait until at least half of them are getting crinkly and dry, but at that point it becomes a rush job because if I don’t get to them, *pop*, they open on their own and reseed themselves! I’d love that if they’d actually survive the winter! The picture on the right above shows one that opened up; isn’t it beautiful how it twists open?

As you can see, some of the pods were on the green side. That’s all right, they will just dry out nicely in the shade. Then, it is easy to open the shells up and save the seeds. My toddlers do this easily as well. I’m going to really enjoy my last bouquet for the year.

Apples, beets and more squash were harvested as well. And the black eyed susans also said goodbye in passing while the morning glories are in full force. It’s a sweet time, fall in the air and summer waning.