Harvesting the garden

My garden has been sadly neglected this year – the dreary, rainy weather pretty much sapped my will to garden. Not much was growing and who wants to tend the garden in the rain?

Yesterday was actually a beautiful day. Earlier in the day I had gone out to deal with recycling and to pick up groceries. But by late afternoon I had decided I couldn’t waste the good weather and it was time to go out and start tidying up the garden for the season.

First things first, I picked tomatoes.

Some of my plants are bravely trying to come back to life, but it’s too late in the season to expect much now.

The Lemon Mint is still going strong; I will definitely plant this again because it is so pretty!

The one thing that did grow well this summer is carrots. This is the first time I’ve planted carrots (not my favorite vegetable by a long stretch – I will only eat them raw or chopped up tiny and cooked in something else like a soup or a pasta sauce).

Since I only have a small vegetable patch, I chose a variety of carrot that does not grow very large, and planted seeds in around other plants where I had space.

Just look at all these carrot tops!

So, I set about the task of pulling carrots, with my feline companions to keep me company.

 

Some of the carrots are in pretty funny shapes. I thought this one looked like someone crossing their legs.

Eventually I ended up with quite a pile of carrots.

 

Along with some tiny onions and some garlic – I left some garlic in for next year, but I did dig up a few decent sized bulbs.

While I was out there, I had to take a look around and see what was still blooming in the flower gardens.

And some fall colour as well…

And a view of the vegetable patch…

So I pulled all of these carrots, and then realized that I hadn’t brought  a container big enough to hold them all. The cats sometimes try to make a break for it when I open the gate, so I like to have everything all neatly bundled up and ready to go so I can get out the gate in one go.

The netting that I’d strung up for the peas and beans to climb was still there, so I detached it and folded it up. Then I removed all of the carrot tops and tossed them onto the netting. It actually worked pretty well.

And then I went inside and stood at the sink scrubbing carrots. This is what I ended up with:

This is minus a few that Husband snagged to munch on, but we’ve definitely got enough carrots to keep us going for a while.

I may still get a few more grape & cherry tomatoes, and there are a few green ones out there I will pick to ripen inside (hopefully). But, I would say this is pretty much the end of gardening season for the year.