It is September and the weather is getting a little chilly. We have only a few weeks left to collect our bounty from the community garden and have our gardening plots cleaned out! We have cleaned a few things out already since we discovered a mole stealing our carrots!
Today, we will be cleaning it out completely, pulling all the plants from the ground, picking anything we missed from the plants, harvesting our dill seed and picking all of our herbs to preserve for the winter! We will pluck the weeds and have it looking ready for the winter! We will can more pickles and eat the rest of our goodies over the next few weeks!
We have already cleaned out our gardening pots in our yard, including the flowers, collected some peas, beans, potatoes and a few onions and peppers.
Let’s get started!
Here you can see the cucumbers are quite yellow, as we have had a little frost and I have decided that it is late enough in the growing season that we have probably picked all we are going to get!! The squash are flowering a bit still but they too will not produce much more given our current weather. And that is perfectly fine! We have picked a lot all summer long! We have a few beets, carrots, beans and potatoes to clear out as well as our zucchini. Lots to do, but it will go quite quickly!
Cucumber plants are picked out. We only had a few cucumbers that we had missed! We picked the parsley out, which we had to dig because the roots are quite tough, as were the chives. Chives have long roots! Carrots and beans are also picked. The carrots, we remove the green tops as most of these will be made into pickles. The zucchini plants have also been removed and we picked a few more zucchini that we had left to grow a bit bigger. The garden is looking so bare now! And were are fortunate that there is a large wagon to take all the vegetable plants to a local farm!
Harvest time is my favorite time! I love all the fall colors, cooler weather and love collecting our wonderful bounty from the garden! I am thankful that we have all of these delicious vegetables!
The patty pan squash are the perfect size for pan frying or even pickling! We have a few yellow cucumbers which we normally throw to the chickens we have at my mom’s but, these ones we peeled and they tasted pretty good!
Time to pick potatoes. Picking potatoes are pretty easy when you can pull the entire plant. Just remove the plant, and dig around the dirt a bit. Once we completed that, we used the shovel to dig deeper, as we had a few that were lower down. We did spear a few potatoes because sometimes they are hard to see hiding in the dirt.
Most of the time, once you pull the plant, the potatoes are quite easy to see!
Dill seed. When the seeds in the dill head (which all summer are a pretty yellow) have turned brown (or nearly black with a beige outer), and look as they do in the picture, they are ready. We held it over the bowl and shook the plant – the seeds just simply fell right off! Then if there were any seeds left, we just lightly rubbed them in our fingers and they fell right off.
Chives. They have long roots and we had to dig them out with the shovel. We will chop the chives once washed and use what we want fresh and then dry the rest.
Carrots. The ground was so dry, a shovel was needed, however care must be taken to not cut the carrot in half, which makes it even harder to get out of the ground! Sometimes, when carrots are pulled, the tops come off and the carrots stay in the ground! In this case, loosening the dirt around the carrot can be helpful or digging a shovel further away and then lifting up will loosen the soil so it is easy to pick, without spearing any carrots!
Beets. Beets are much like picking carrots, but usually come out of the ground rather easy.
Nearly done! We saved harvesting the dill and the parsley for the last. The parsley is quite tough to remove, so we had to dig it out with a shovel. The dill, once we collected the seed and any green fronds that remained, we plucked them out of the ground with ease!
Update: A few weeks have since passed and the weather has been rather chilly and a bit gloomy. A lot of us have removed our gardens now and the gardens are looking bare, and ready for winter.
We picked any weeds that decided to keep growing, and made sure our plots looked good and all ready for winter.
Now that we have finished harvesting the garden, I can judge what we exactly have remaining and I know we in fact do not have enough for the whole winter. We have canned many jars of pickles, relishes, jams and fruit, most of what we have purchased from the local farmers market as well as from our garden and backyard. These preserves will carry us through the winter which we will absolutely enjoy!
Unfortunately, the bulk of our vegetables I am guessing will not last past December, which is totally fine because we were giving the garden plots a try since we have not had much success in the past growing in raised beds. But since it worked wonderfully, I will be planning raised gardening beds for our backyard! I am looking forward to the upcoming growing season.
How was your garden? Did you harvest a lot, or are you going to give it a try for the upcoming season?
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours