October has had some nice weather, but we are definitely heading into winter. The leaves are changing color and even falling off the trees, it’s more windy, and we have had some heavy frost too. Sure signs summer is over!
Let me show you around the garden throughout this month.
October 5
The pumpkins are ripening nicely.
There are so many raspberries which are ripening. They’re huge and so flavorful!
The sunflower is not doing well. There was a light frost — just enough to wipe out the petals. Looks like it’s too late in the season for it to develop any seeds in the sunflower head.
The parsley and chives are surprisingly doing quite well still. We will be harvesting the chives and cutting them back to about 1” high for the winter. Parsley has never come back before, but we will be trimming it back the same. The one parsley went to seed, so we will leave it and see what happens!
October 7
Here’s the large garden bed. It’s all cleaned out for winter. The black currant is here and we’ll be planting the garlic today here too. It looks so different when it’s cleaned out — it feels so empty!
Garlic has never worked for us before, so hopefully it’ll work this time! Every fall we plant it, by spring it’s rotten or eaten by critters. I’m hoping we have done everything right this year!
The garlic grew amazing at my folks’ but my dad decided he didn’t want to plant the garlic there because he wants to work up the garden plots this fall and next year too, like summer fallow.
From left to right we have: garlic from my mom, unknown garlic (my aunt wasn’t sure where she got it from), Sister garlic, 100 -Year garlic (garlic that came from Romania a hundred years ago), German garlic and PE garlic. These are all hardneck varieties which do better in our climate.
First, I set the garlic out so we’d know how to plant it. I wanted to be sure there’s enough room for a head of garlic to grow.
Then we pushed them into the ground and covered with dirt.
Then we covered the garlic with leaves to create a barrier and help insulate it a bit from the cold winter yet to come.
The blueberry is such a beautiful red now.
October 10
The pumpkins and spaghetti squash are curing nicely. The apples we picked at my folks’ are still really nice – they’re crisp and simply delicious! I’m turning the last of the apples into apple pie filling to can and enjoy in the winter months.
October 26
Unfortunately the raspberries have lots of berries, that simply will not ripen in time thanks to all the frost we have had.
Here are the strawberries — they’re still trying to flower. The days have been quite warm but the nights are getting quite chilly, so I’m surprised they’re still doing so well!
Here are the honeyberries. Yesterday they had beautiful yellow leaves and today, they’ve nearly lost them all!
Here’s the burning bush. Nearly all the leaves are gone.
Here’s the onion – it’s gone to seed. We planted this in the summer when we tossed a bunch of seeds in the dirt, that were in the bottom of my seed bin. We literally just tossed them! So these onions grew, along with chives, lettuce and tomatoes — and they grew really well this way!
Here’s the chokecherry.
And here’s the blueberries. The wild rabbit has eaten nearly half of the one bush. So I have been covering these bushes at night.
The apple tree’s leaves are now turning yellow.
The plum tree no longer has leaves and lost its leaves much earlier this month.
One parsley plant has gone to seed and the chives have re-grown a lot.
The pumpkins are curing and ripening nicely!
And that’s all for this year’s gardening season! We have a lot of canning to do still with the pumpkins and all the garden goodies.
We will be planning the garden soon and deciding what we will be planting next gardening season.
How was your garden this year?
