Saturday, September 1, 2012

The harvest continues, and fall cleanup

Many gardeners (and I know because I used to be one) let the late summer garden get ragged. They harvest the fruit, but don't clean up the remains of the plants for weeks, and sometimes not until spring. This looks awful and can harbor disease.
This year I'm working hard to be different. In the morning I mostly harvest, and in the afternoon I remove dying or dead plants and compost them on the other side of the house, in an isolated pile just for suspect foliage. I also plant late summer flowers, including moonflowers, morning glories and Jerusalem artichokes to keep my fall garden cheerful.
Here are crops from the Thursday morning picking-- I had the day off and could take my time, what a joy!

The Mortgage Lifters were dying back, probably because of several different fungus infections. I pulled them up -- check out those roots!-- and harvested all the tomatoes, then brought them into the garage to ripen. These are the fruits of just one plant, and I had four more in this bed. I could have tried to spray fungicide, but I was ready to let go of these plants, who had done their jobs well.


I dug the last patch of potatoes-- Yukon Gold.

And I picked lots of other fuit to keep the plants producing, including trumpet squash, which is still growing when all other squash has succumbed to fungus!


Carrots:



And  peppers, beans and raspberries.


Here's a shot of the cleaned up garden this morning: