This season is definitely one for the record books! I don’t think we have ever been doing our final harvests just shy of October. Even in the occasional long, Indian summers that we’ll occasionally get.
We’re expecting low 20’s by next week, so the sense of “the garden is done” urgency is now decidedly upon us. Very soon, hard frosts will be descending on our gardens and even the most hardy of plants cannot survive that! Fortunately, we’ve prepared for this point and only have our most cold hardy crops left for processing. We’re looking at one final push to close out this season!
We’ve now closed out our community garden this year with the full harvesting of our Brussels sprouts! This is always one of the last crops we harvest since it needs every minute it can grow in our short growing season. We’ll follow this up by pulling the remainder of all crops still growing from our home gardens this weekend as well.
We ended up waiting so long for our first frost this year that now we’re suddenly at this point of having less than a week to clear every bit of garden we have left. We told you all this was what it was going to look like several weeks ago! The later the first frost, the more suddenly you get into “typical” low temperatures for that moment in the season. Climate is incredibly predictable when it comes right down to it. This is why we 100% follow the weather (and not climate) as our primary input into our decision making in both early and late season.
We’re looking forward to some big harvests and preservation this weekend. We’re both taking Monday off from work to make sure we have enough time to get it all done. This is always a monumental weekend for us, that time where we “officially” call it and make a hard push to get ‘er all done!
