October Garden

The season is wrapping up, as the garden always does in October. It’s been a really great year, as good as our first year, which is very encouraging (bad years aren’t exactly motivational for next year’s garden plan!). The garden is currently about half pulled up, all the heat-loving plants like tomatoes and vines are gone. I also chopped down the sunflowers. I gathered all the green tomatoes to ripen - we’ve had so many tomatoes, it’s been such a great year! We’re still trying to eat up all the cucumbers I couldn’t give away and we even got to enjoy a few small watermelons that actually ripened. It was really great!

What’s left? The carrots (that I stuck in the vine bed last spring). The rainbow chard and green beans will will keep producing until we get a good frost. In that same bed I’ll once again over-winter the oregano and thyme in hopes they’ll come back next year. In the flower bed I’ll dig up the dahlia bulbs after the first frost, and the zinnias should produce flowers until then as well. So there’s still a few things left to enjoy which is always nice.

Once the frost hits and everything is pulled up, all the towers and poles removed, I’ll prep the beds for winter. This includes removing all the drip hoses and putting down a fresh sheet of black plastic.

Over in my patio pots I have a few peppers left, there are two last bell peppers in a race against time. Will they ripen before frost and turn orange or will they have to be picked green? The lemon and lime trees are in that transitional period where we bring them in on cold nights but leave them out during the day so they can soak up the last of the warm weather and sunshine before a long winter.

I’m borrowing some extra hay to throw our strawberry patch this winter. The fig tree has some ripening figs finally - I can’t believe how much both trees have grown this year (since one was super tiny and the other died back to the ground). When the frost nips them and the leaves fall off, I’ll wrap them up. I need to trim back the blackberries and raspberries, but I want to wait until it’s a little colder - plus I have to pull up all those ridiculous sweet pea vines to even reach them.