Two Feet in the Dirt

With a steady succession of frosts every few nights, the garden is quickly becoming much more two dimensional. At this point, the three tallest crops, the eggplant, tomatoes, and beans, have been removed after getting significant frost damage. I was okay with sacrificing them to the frost before it happened, being pretty sick of harvesting tomatoes and beans by this point. But once it came to actually pulling the plants, I couldn’t help but be sad as that really does mark the beginning of the end of the season. 

At the start of the season, I was envisioning the garden as a source of home food, but was also planning to sell a good portion of what we grew. I quickly changed my game plan, though, realizing that a homesteading approach just makes more sense. Why grow all of this food to sell to someone else when we could make use of it at home? Ripping out the bean plants this past week was a perfect opportunity to really embrace the homesteading spirit of getting the most possible out of every crop. While the beans were originally planted to be harvested as string beans, and did provide us with a huge bounty in that regard, I was also able to get two extra types of harvests out of the plants. By letting some of the beans grow past a normal string bean size and begin to dry out once we reached September, we now have our bean seed source for next year. In addition, I harvested off the beans that had gotten extra large but not big enough to be viable seed and plan to use these for soup beans over the next few weeks. 

Our other big garden event of the past week was planting the garlic for next year. This is the first example of all the extra growth we will get out of the garden in the coming season that we missed out on this past year since the garden was not set up until late spring. The adage I always heard with regards to garlic was “plant at Halloween, harvest at Fourth of July” and we got our’s in on October 30, just ahead of the fall target. Next we will need to get some straw to provide a layer of winter protection and then it’s just waiting for the garlic to push up its green shoots in spring!