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:

Tomatoes everywhere -- Celebrity and Mortgage Lifter in abundance!

What a year this has been for tomatoes here in southeastern Massachusetts. Here are pictures of the tomatoes I had on hand yesterday. These were ripening in the dining room on the sideboard:

And in the garage, sharing company with some Red Zeppelin onions:

And in the wheelbarrow,  stripped off four plants I'd just pulled up (they were  yellowing and dying back).

I sorted through all the ripe Celebrity tomatoes and blanched and froze a batch.

Here's how I did it. First I cored then, then I put them in rolling water for about a minute:

The skins slipped off easily after this hot bath, and I laid the whole skinned and cored tomatoes out on a sheet pan to freeze:

The next morning I stacked the frozen tomatoes into a sturdy rubbermaid container. I'm looking forward to a winter of delicious tomato sauce and chili!

Meanwhile, we are eating fresh Mortgage Lifter tomatoes morning, noon and night. We're not sick of them yet, but there are a lot more on the vine. When it gets to that point, I bring them to work and share them with my customers and co-workers. Most people don't want squash, but they are happy to get a vine ripened heirloom tomato.

August video tour of the kitchen garden

I'm planning on picking lots of tomatoes and basil to make sauce, so I shot a video tour of the garden yesterday while the tomatoes were still on the vine and the basil still flowering with the moonflower.

Moonflowers, finally!

Adirondack Blue potato harvest

As readers of this blog may have noticed in previous posts, I really want to grow blue potatoes. They are just so cool, and since they are also expensive, I figured I'd get a good ROI (return on investment-- sorry, I'm currently taking an online business course....).
When I finally got a shipment of Adirondack blue seed potatoes this spring I was saddened that many of them were rotten. I called Pinetree Garden Seeds, and they promptly sent some fingerling seed potatoes as replacements, since there were no healthy blues left in stock.  I planted the few salvaged  tubers without much hope, thinking I'd have to wait yet another year for my blue potatoes.  To my surprise they sprouted in a couple of weeks.
I weeded and watered the potatoes lovingly all spring and into summer.  Last week the foliage died back, and last night I harvested.
First I removed all the withered foliage, and any remaining weeds. The adjacent planting of fingerlings  is still growing, and the vigorous vines were lying across the bed of blues, so I carefully moved them aside. Here's the potato patch before digging:

I gently forked under the potatoes all through the bed, working from the outside in. I didn't poke one potato!

Here's the bed afterwards with my harvest:

Not a vast haul, but enough for a few meals and a good stock of seed potatoes for next year.

There were a couple of giants--here's one:











And here's a closeup of the harvest -including a few fingerlings that strayed.















As I headed into the house for the night I took this shot of the flower garden side of the yard in the evening light. The two tall yellows are Rudbeckia nitida, a tough as nails and spectacular native flower.

Mortgage Lifter Tomato and a bit of stonework

I always wanted a property with a real New England dry stone wall, and I love the old wall that was carefully rebuilt to make a space for my driveway. But it's  always been a tight space, especially on the right. Twice delivery trucks have hit the wall, and I've paid craftsmen to rebuild the same section.
But I was proud of my ability to avoid the wall.
Until last Friday, when I scattered stones for several feet turning my Tacoma too sharply as I backed up the drive from the garage. When I saw that the only damage to the truck was  some scratches on the wheel well and a bent mudflap, I felt very lucky.
I piled the stones into the now crushed bed of stella d'oro daylilies and went to work. By the time I came home that night, I had a plan. I would rebuild the wall myself, but finally move it further back. And I would make a path through the shade garden with the extra rocks.
And so I did!
Here's the wall before:

And here it is after:

 These pictures show each end of the new path:

And today I ate the first ripe full sized tomato from the garden, a funny looking and delicious Mortgage Lifter.  A wonderful sweet rich heirloom, perfect cut up into chunks with a sherry vinaigrette featuring my own finely diced garlic.

Happy Together: flowers and vegetables

It's late July, and the many annual and perennial flowers in bloom bring lots of bees to the garden, which in turn pollinate the vegetables. My only question is how do people harvest squash blossoms? Mine are always full of bees! Sometimes they get trapped inside the flowers when they close at dusk, and I find and release them (now a bit groggy from the cool night air and lack of food) in the morning when I pick the squash.