Month: October 2019

End of the 2019 gardening season

Jen Powell2 Comments

It is now mid-October and our weather is taking a turn for the worse. We’ve had a month or so of way too much rain, with a few days of nice temperatures and sun thrown in, until this past weekend – I had ice on my car window yesterday morning. I knew this was coming so we pretty much pulled everything in that remained outside.  I experimented a bit this year, I grew some sunchokes and some crosnes – those grew but never flowered. The deer ate most of the sunchoke plants the other day. I am leaving them where they are to see if they will come up again in the spring.  I grew peanuts and ginger. Our ginger did really well in the early part of the season, with our hot weather, but then we got lots of rain in the later part of the summer and the temperatures really weren’t warm enough – I have two plants and I have pulled them both in the house to keep growing, under grow lights.  My peanuts, however, did really well, despite the rainy later summer/fall.  Below you will see some highlights of this year’s garden:

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Carrots – I didn’t get a lot but most of them were very large.
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My two pumpkin / hubbard squashes – seeds for these were from the same “Heirloom” pumpkin I bought last year at Walmart. These were on separate plants, as best I can tell,  but the seeds were from the one pumpkin. I’d be interested to see what other variations come from these seeds. I suspect they weren’t actually heirloom or were cross pollinated somehow when they grew them.
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A nicer photo of my carrots, all cleaned up so you can see the colors.
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Fort Portal Jade beans. I have not tasted these yet because I am waiting for the rest of the pods to dry. I brought all the bean pods in to dry inside because of the wet weather.
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My beets. I got a lot of plants but not very big (I failed to thin them at all so they didn’t have a lot of room to get big). These were mostly about 1-2 inch diameter beets.
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Here are the peanuts! We got one pound of peanuts out of a small packet of seeds (5 shells total that I planted). I was worried these were going to rot in the ground because of the rain this fall, so I pulled them; when I did I found that they were already ready to harvest.
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Peanuts cleaned up and ready for roasting. They were pretty good tasting. We plan on growing these again.
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Some of my other bean pods (a cranberry type bean) and the last of my scallions from the garden.
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A teeny tiny cauliflower. I did get one decent sized head, but most were this size. This is the first year I got them to actually create heads, so I feel that this was a successful year for these, for me.

I still have a few things in the ground that may be ok till the ground freezes – kale, brocolli, and some brussel sprouts. I planted my garlic and some shallots last week and covered them with some straw.  All in all, I feel 2019 was a pretty good gardening year. I do wish the rain would spread itself out over the whole season instead of walloping us either early or late – this year we got nothing in the spring and way too much in the later part of the season. I am already thinking of what to plan for next year’s garden.