Garden Oct. 6, 2018

Garden 

Oct. 6, 2018

Another great week of gardening, things are really doing well.  If only we could have a few more sunny warm weeks I'd have so much more to can.  Michigan quickly turns to snow and winter so I should be thankful for the extra days we had this year of fairly good and warm days in October.

This turnip in the green bean bed was a volunteer!  It turned out to be one of the biggest ones this year!

The Swiss Chard is in it's prime.  I'm planning on covering this whole section with one of our hoop houses to hopefully keep eating on all these greens.  I have it planted in a few different locations, but can't cover all of them.  

More turnips

The carrots will stay in the ground until a few touches of frost; that way they may be a little sweeter when we eat them.

The Tomatillos went really well for our first year of growing them.  They sure do take over the whole space though.

The green beans are hanging everywhere!  So happy to have plenty.

Our new middle bed---Parsley, Purple Basil, Green Beans and Tomatoes.  I've been copying Heather by putting chopped up Parsley in and around the whole chickens I bake and the flavor has been amazing.  I find the herbs really do bounce back when I pick from them often.

Kale; our kale really took a lot of hits from bugs this year and now look at how full most of the leaves are!!!  

Another walkway that was taken over by the tomato vines.  All these long vines were cut and delivered into the chicken coop for the chickens to clean.  All the dozens of green tomatoes, mostly cherry here, were taken inside my sun room, on newspaper, to ripen for canning.

I planted green beans in three different locations this year, in a staggered pace--around a week or two later I did the next section.  I *should* have just planted them all as soon as I could.  These plants are still adding new growth each day and would have been able to give more beans if they had matured faster.

The tomato plants took over all my normal walk-ways!  Not only did they fill up the beds they just kept spreading out farther and farther with no end in sight!

In this picture you can see two of the three green bean sections, the third is outside our garden fence in the 'corn bed' we made for Dd.

Marigolds--our first year gardening here I planted the marigolds inside the beds and they really took over the space that was meant for veg.  This year I either put the marigolds in pots in front of the bed or in very thought-out locations so they wouldn't hurt the growth of the veg.

The Herb Bed is doing well.  I'm working on making herb butters from various herbs.  So far I've make lots of Basil Butter, but I want to also (and did do) make Thyme Butter and Sage Butter.

I've been digging up all the potatoes and canning them.  We did so much better this year on how the canned potatoes turned out.  I'm so glad I was able to do it better this time around!!!

You can see the third bed for green beans in the background.

All the kales, chards, turnips and green beans are doing really well with the colder weather.  You can definitely tell the bugs are gone and the plants are thriving.

This picture shows the outside of our fenced in garden, where some blackberries, grapes, and other things are that aren't usually eaten by woodsy critters.  We had our best grape season this year, making 2 1/2 pints of the most delicious jam I've ever tasted.  I'm sure it tastes all the better since we did it ourselves.  The trick was the pruning in the spring of the grape vines.

Dd's corn bed looks like it is only a green bean bed now as all the corn stalks were pulled down by the bean vines.

Digging the Burbank Russets potatoes last.  I especially found the Golden Yukon variety to be really tasty.  I've managed a good amount of canned potato this year.  I've also done a good job this year getting green beans canned.  I did not excel with tomato canning, specifically my prized tomato paste that is so wonderful when added to dishes.

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