I have enough lettuce, grown indoors, to use it for dinner. 🙂
Chance of frost tonight - much later than average. I am going out to pick everything now.
@cocopeaches Oh wow. You’re quite north, aren’t you? I hope you got everything.
Are you able to do anything over the winter? I have a very small cold frame and I might try putting something in there this year. I have put potted herbs in and they go dormant (look dead haha) over winter but I pull them out in spring and they start up. I does depend on the winter, of course.
@allie120 Yeah, I live near the middle knuckle of the mitten state. It was 29 degrees F at my house last night. My basil and tomato plants got zapped but they're not completely dead yet. I picked 1.5 bushels of beans yesterday! A lot of other stuff didn't do great in my garden this year, but my pole beans were absolutely bonkers. We've been eating them for dinner several days a week for the past couple months, picked young and tender - steamed and sauteed with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. The bulk of what I picked yesterday are more mature pods and I'm going to try preserving them "leather britches" style, which I've never done before. I've never had this many! Or I'll shell them and use them as I would use dry black beans. The variety is called Cherokee Trail of Tears and they are beautiful black beans. I already shared some dried pods with my neighbor for seed. She gave me lots of rosemary.
I have a greenhouse. In there I am growing chili peppers, ginger root, lots of basil, and some other herbs. That stuff was not affected by the frost last night. I need to sow more spinach, arugula, and lettuce to grow during the colder months, but I've been too busy. It gets much too cold here to grow greens in there all year long, but I do move many things in there to give them a better chance of overwintering. If I can start the spinach now and resist harvesting too much, it will die back in the cold and then start growing again very early in the spring. I might try digging up some kale plants and moving them to pots to put in the greenhouse to see how they do in there. It's too late to start kale from seed. My kale did terrible in my raised beds, which seem to be lacking something in the soil this year, and I have a critter problem.
It did not frost at my community garden in town yet. It's in a different micro-climate. I was there today harvesting potatoes from the food donation plots. We got over 40 lbs to donate to the food pantry, including a 1.5 pounder! I have a personal plot that's still loaded with good stuff. I brought home 2 baskets full of tomatoes, peppers, beets, Swiss chard, tatsoi (Asian spinach), and a little bit of cilantro (for Venison shoulder Barbacoa tacos tonight)
@cocopeaches Wow! That’s an incredible garden and a wealth of knowledge! What is preserving in “leather britches”? I just grew regular green beans, pole beans but a lot of them and I got a great amount! We had use of another property and I grew tomatoes but because no one was living there the deer felt free to eat it all. Oh well! We got tons of pumpkins and squash.
And that venison recipe looks amazing! We never keep the legs but I don’t know why I can’t ask for them to be prepared to cook.
@allie120 Leather britches is a way of preserving beans, and then also a recipe for cooking them. It's an Appalachian tradition, but I have only read about it online. I realized my beans are not exactly the right variety (they're supposed to be waxy and mine are not) so I may not do it that way after all.
The venison shoulder roast is delicious. It just needs to be cooked low and slow to break down all of the connective tissue. I cooked mine in a dutch oven for 4 hours. We pay someone to process our deer because it's a really great deal here, and we always ask for back straps, tenderloins, rump roast, shoulder roasts, steaks, and burger. I might be forgetting some parts, but that's what I know we use for sure. We also save the heart, and sometimes the caul fat, when we gut the animal ourselves. We prefer to hang it in our garage for a few days if the weather is cool enough, before bringing it to the processor
Sorry to hear about about your tomatoes, but those squash looked beautiful! I'm surprised the deer didn't eat those too! Most of my gardens are well-fenced to keep deer out. My husband cannot wait to finish up his work season and get out hunting. This is our favorite time of year, when the garden harvest is bountiful and the deer are going to rut.
@cocopeaches That’s the life! Archery opened last month. My husband has been out once and wants to go on Saturday.
He guts his too and we have a processor who does it for us, too. We get all of the above that you do, too. We also got sausages last year. We still have meat in the freezer and I took out a heart today. I’ll makenit with one of the squashes.
Thanks for the info on the beans! I don’t have wax beans either but it’s interesting to check it out.
Garden is clear and ready to be turned so I can plant garlic. There is a significant chance I will not have a garden next year. I'm not happy about this, meaning if this happens, it won't be because I'm ready to quit. On the contrary!
@elsa I hope it can work out as you want!
The garlic sounds great! I planted a few last week.
I have a few serrano peppers that turned red on the plant and then some jalapeños too. I have a little in the freezer but these I strung up and hung downstairs. At any point I can decide to pop them in the dehydrator but I’ll leave them up for now.
We finally got a new dehumidifier a couple weeks ago.
I also ended up baking two pumpkins last night and today, then puréed them for the freezer and a container for the fridge. About 6# total.
This is part of my "office garden". The yellow pepper is a "lemon pepper". I've been growing them for about eight years.