Thursday, September 26, 2013

Harvest Update


The days are getting cooler and there has already been one frost.

Its time to bring porch plants in and start to harvest everything that is ready.

 Soon the tress surrounding my coop will be orange.


 The house is over 200 years old and I always marvel at the intricate details on the outside of it.



The hens dug a dust bath pit under the fire bush. I didn't realize how deep it really was until Marilyn almost dissapeared into it.



Many neigbors walk this 3 mile stretch of rural road.


My colorful carrots are delicious.


The turkeys have been grazing on crickets across the road in the big field.


Only a few sunflowers left to bloom.


My friend Mev and I discovered a tall pear tree that was bearing lots of beautiful pears.


 What a treasure we found of ripe, perfect pears.
They were falling off the tree onto a grassy area, so hardly any of them were bruised.



We filled our bags.

and have gone back several more times.



Mev made pear salsa and we made applesauce with pears. Yummy!

I picked buckets of fresh produce from the Community Garden and brought it to the local library for people who need food.
 We have 15 varieties of tomatoes in the garden.
The purple ones are the most unusual and taste the best.


I picked delicota and sweet dumpling squash last night and have many more that will be ready by the weekend.

Pole beans are getting ripe.


Every morning has been very foggy and the deer have been coming out to the fields to eat.


I am in the process of digging up my potatoes.  I have a long way to go.
I planted 4 kinds.

Green Mountain, Kennebec, Yukon Gold and .....  cant remember the fourth....


Every day I will be harvesting out of my garden and 3 times a week harvesting from the Community Garden.  Not much time left to get the food out and close the gardens up for the winter.
Weeds and all the vegetable vines need to be pulled up and out, plastic mulch covers need to be dried out and rolled up and all the fencing taken down, cleaned off and stored away.  It will be a long process.

How is your garden doing ?
Got a plan to put it to bed ?

5 comments:

  1. What bounty . Marilyn seems pretty pleased with her dirt bath, the deeper the better it seems. I have a lot of pears needing preserving and am planning on spending the better part of tomorrow making apple-pear sauce to can. God is so good in His providing for us and His creation...if I don't get all the downed apples, the wild rabbits , deer, and birds will feast !

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  2. Potatoes: red ones Dark Red Norlands? We grew those this year.

    We have access to a pear tree and made pear sauce last year, many quarts of it. It had cinnamon and allspice for spices. I don't use sweeteners, and it was delicious.

    Just finishing up dehydrating and freezing the 3 bushels of Walla Walla Sweet onions. The high sugar content means they don't keep. I grew Cortland onions to store.

    Have cleaned out the last of the tomatoes and brought them in to ripen. They will be turned into ketchup in the next few days.

    Of the squash types, I got 2 bushels (80 gourds @) of Daisy gourds from 2 plants. They seemed to be impervious to the squash bugs. I got a dozen or so butternuts and 4 acorn squashes. But most succumbed to squash bugs.

    My next big push is to get the celery harvested and dehydrated for celery salt. We use a lot of that.

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  3. The carrots are so beautiful! Our gardening is pretty much done for the year in MA. We just picked a few pumpkins, tomatoes and squash and now we wait for the next year!

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  4. Lovely series of fall harvest time shots... love the lone hen in the grass most!

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