The garden has been pretty unusual this year. I am getting green beans out of it now, enough that Dave is already tired of them. I’ve frozen some. I was flipping through a recipe book and saw a recipe for canning pickled 3-bean salad, and that sounded like a good way to use up some beans.

Dave thought it tasted ‘interesting’, which is pretty good for him, since he hates beans.

I’m getting tomatoes off the ‘4H’ tomato plant, they are kind of like big cherry tomatoes. Very nice. Martha said they were always the earliest tomatoes, and they are this year too, it’s just that ‘early’ has come really late! Next year I will limit my tomatoes a bit more. I planted 8 plants this year, filling two rows, and that was overdoing it. We trimmed the plants back to try and encourage them to finish the tomatoes they’ve already set.

Likewise a whole row of green and yellow beans was overkill. I have to remember we only need enough for two people! Of course one zucchini is overkill, but you can’t really plant less than one!

My 12 foot row of potatoes produced about a colander full of potatoes. I should have just bought some at the auction last week. They weren’t even worth the trouble! Potatoes are going on my list of things it’s better to let someone who knows what they’re doing grow.

Today I planted a 4×4 area with lettuce and winter greens (chard, broccoli rabe, stuff like that). I’m going to clear one more area for my cold frame and plant that in October. There are still chard and spinach out there, and carrots are coming along now that the cucumber plants are gone. So the garden is slowly moving into it’s winter phase. And that’s ok because today was a gloomy, rainy day, reminding us that winter is not too far away.