Well it is crazy to say family but the last of the garden harvest is coming up on us soon. We have some temps coming up soon that will be close to our first frost and I am not sure I want to keep anything in the garden to possibly not make it through. So with that we are going to share about what we have left in the garden.
Some how we had a second sprouting of our green beans and that was probably the nicest surprise. Then we also have some tomato plants pop up that were definitely not looking good but somehow they stuck with us. Our biggest harvest needed would be to the peppers. I think we need to spend some time this week or next and get all that we can possibly grab off the plants. Lots of hot sauce most likely but I think with jalapeños we want to make some poppers. Skylar was asking for them at dinner one night and now it is stuck in my head. Also we don’t have a ton but we do have some luffa still on the vine. I need to go see if we have any that are brown or do I need to try to harvest them and dry them out myself. This one I am still learning how to do so when they are still fully ripe. Part of me is thinking of just harvesting them and then letting the chickens have them over the next few days as food. I will just cut them and open them up for the chickens to eat. I may have a lot of luffa growing in the coop next year but that is to be expected!
That is sadly it on the front of the garden. It was a bit of a slower year with the garden and we didn’t can as much as I would have hoped. I could have done a lot more on the tomato front but we did what we could. I think this years garden we kinda got burnt out after a year of my health declining and then going crazy in the spring. This year we are planning out how to make next garden season easier on ourselves and I think that will really ensure that we have a better year. One thing we don’t have to worry about is expanding or topping our garden this year. Can plant and then put some wood chips down. To which will be 10x easier on ourselves. I think if we plan it out we could probably get the entire garden planted within 3 days. So really going into the season with a plan, cutting out the time to work, and truly sticking true to what we need. I think all of that combined will change the outcome next year.
Also the mindset needs to change too. I, personally, started to feel dread to things this year. The garden was sadly one of those things. Instead of my typical excitement I was thinking “crap, I gotta harvest the garden.” So I went from the excitement to plant everything to dread once everything started to sprout. That will be the big change. Next year I need to get back to the excitement of being outside. I have some plans in place to work on my heat tolerance so I think that will boost the desire to be outside. We all go through those phases and I think this year we hit ours and a burn out phase. So looking to next year, I think we only have positives to be planted.
Oh! I also forgot. Two storms ago, the Hurricane or Tropical storm before Helene, we had damaged done to our greenhouse. So we will need to fix that and repair the greenhouse soon so we can start seeds early in the year again. I have plans to start luffa in December. I’m calling it an experiment! So that will be our big winter project along with starting up the chicken processing time again!