So, I think we’ve decided. We’re going to shut down our gardens this weekend and possibly into early next week! The end is near!
Even though we are experiencing a rather mild fall thus far and temperatures look like they could sustain things for at least another week or two, it seems prudent to try and get ahead here. We usually use impending snowfall as our guide, but it’s looking like even that may be delayed this season. We are starting to see frost survive our days in certain areas of our property, telling us that the “warming units” to support growth are nearing completion. Also, at a certain point, we just want to move on with our gardens and get things buttoned up for the winter.
We only have a small number of things left to harvest for the season. Our root veggies are sustaining quite well, with our carrots receiving enough frosts to sweeten them up quite nicely. We roasted some up last night and they were delicious! The moose we reported a few days ago know what we have now and they’ve been back to revisit our gardens once again. So, we figure it’d be best just to be done with these to remove the temptation.
Our late season greenhouse experiment seems to be going better than expected. We’ll have some nice data and analysis on that for you all next week. We honestly weren’t sure if running our greenhouse for another 2-3 weeks longer than we usually do would be worth it. Our plan is to pull tomato weights and basically compare the cost of heating to our harvest, which will give us a true “value” that we can work with. But, just by the looks of things, it’s been worth running a little longer than usual as we have many more ripe tomatoes. Our tomato plants are also looking a little rough, even with heating those 23 degree nights take their toll.
We are going to keep some things going as long as possible, with no plan to pull a “major” harvest for preservation. We run several late season things such as radish, lettuce and other fast growing things that we sowed back in August. We generally see much slower growth going into winter than we do from spring going into summer. If we get a harvest…great! If not, that’s OK too.
So, that means we’ll have a few more days of preservation related and final season discussions for you all! The late season is tough for us as our minds are still very much engaged with gardening, it’s hard for us to put it down for the winter. But, we are quite certain that our hand will be forced eventually and the timing seems about right.
We know that a lot of you far northerners are probably all ready shut down by this point. We usually are too! (So much for an early snowfall like we thought we’d get!) Some of you more southern growers still have weeks or even more to go! But, as always, we appreciate you all following our gardens and being interested in what we have to say!
