It's hard to believe that summer is winding down into fall. Part of the reason for my seasonal discombobulation is that many of the summer plants are just now hitting their stride. Although we still have many more green tomatoes on the plants than ripe tomatoes harvested to date, we did get 35 pounds of tomatoes last week and 41 pounds (and counting!) this week, so that's a nice change. Our peppers have also come on strong this week.
The summer squashes are starting to wind down, falling victim to the often-inevitable powderly mildew on the leaves. I've learned that a baking soda/soap spray can be helpful, but I think it would be better as a preventative (as we did with our garlic/pepper/soap spray on the kale this year), so we'll try to get ahead of the mildew next year. Also, much of our corn fell victim to some crafty raccoons, which is very disappointing.
In the past few weeks we've done our fall planting, with new crops of kale, beets, turnips, arugula, peas, and lettuce going into the ground. It will be exciting to return to these cool-weather veggies before winter hits. Once we've finished harvesting the gardens we'll still have work ahead of us. We plan on moving the beds to take advantage of our clover cover cropping, and wintering-over some veggies for next spring. It feels a little crazy that it's already time to plan for next year, but nature is relentless!
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