Last of the tomatoes
We are shutting down our vegetable garden for the season. We have a few more vegetables left to harvest but it is mainly done for the season. This has been a good year especially for the tomatoes. We have also learned a lot.

We started another crop of snap peas at the end of July which have done terrible. They got to about 1 foot and then died. When we pulled them out we noticed that there were no root hairs so we were able to diagnosis that they have Pea Fusarium Wilt. This explains why we had such a poor crop earlier. It is soil born so we will rotate where we plant the peas to another bed next year. There are no varieties of sugar snap that are resistant so we may change to either snow peas or regular English shelling peas next year. It is so disappointing because I love sugar snaps.

We started another crop of lettuce which is still growing. We have harvested several heads in September and October from an early August sowing. We are just waiting for the first strong frost which may be any day now. We also grew another set of radishes but had to pull them out because they got too large. We were not eating them. But we did learn that the problem we had with our earlier crop being too pithy was because of lack of water.

The carrots are still in the ground. We can leave them for a while more since they will tolerate the freeze.

The cucumbers ended around the end of July. They produce a lot at once and then they are finished. One or two of our plants wilted and I’m not certain what caused that. The squash lasted until mid-September although the production had slowed down especially since we were not harvesting. I did not like the varieties we choose this year although one was pretty good. We may try another variety next year and go back to at least one patty pan which did well for us last year.

We took down our green beans earlier this week. There were a lot of beans still on the trellises. They were no longer any good for using as green beans since they had gotten tough from the cooler weather. I was leaving them on for fresh shelling beans and dried beans. Part of the beans pods had dried and were yellow. These produced about 1 cup of dried white beans. Most were small like navy beans but a few were bigger white kidney beans. I am saving these for a soup in the upcoming days.

The rest of the green beans I snapped to look for larger green shelling beans. This was a tough job. Most of them were still too young to have plump beans. These I just tossed into the compost but I was able to get a good bunch that I could split open like a pea pod and extract the younger shelling beans. I got about 2 cups that I boiled up with garlic and sage. It only takes about 20 minutes boiling to soften these beans and then I pour in a good flavored olive oil. They make a great side dish. I had them with lightly breaded rock fish.

I would love to grow more romano style. Helga variety which have grown the past two years seem to go to seed pretty fast. The seeds are great because they are large white kidneys but it shortens out usage of the romano green pod. I may look around for another type such as Musica next year. I would love to find Gold Marie again which is a yellow romano. We will definitely grow a bed of the bush haricot verts again. Maxibel is great.

The tomatoes plants lasted until after the beginning of October. The ones in the drive way went first – around mid-September – especially the determinates. I canned 2 dozen pint jars and then I was able to freeze about 4 quarts. I still have two large trays in the cool downstairs that I am using to cook with and serve with mozzarella. I suspect we’ll eat our last fresh tomato next week.

End of September in the Garden

Mid October – just lettuce and carrots left

End of the Green Beans

Some produced wonderful white kidney beans

All the greens beans – yellow had dried beans and about a third produced fresh beans similar to those seen above.