OK, so it’s probably time for us to talk about the garden’s end game. With 10 days to our average first frost date, we need to be thinking about our strategy to harvest and preserve as much as we possibly can.
It’s important to stay ahead of the harvest, especially if you have a considerable sized garden. In the north, winter often comes on suddenly and at that point, the season is just done. Our goal is to stay ahead of that curve, as much as we can.
As you’ve probably noticed thus far, our earliest focus are those frost sensitive or early maturing crops. Be it peppers, tomatoes or other things that are ready to harvest or will perish in a frost. We generally want to get those out as soon as is reasonable. That’s why we’ve been knocking off preservations, here and there, ultimately to lessen our future efforts.
Next up, we tackle all the frost tolerant things. Which is a lot in the northern garden! We generally try to order this in terms of “early” and “late” based on the plant’s frost tolerance. For example, our root veggies and Brussels sprouts are incredibly cold hardy. It doesn’t make sense to harvest those robust and cold hardy plants before, say, cabbage, cauliflower or especially anything frost sensitive.
This isn’t a precise science and we don’t follow any kind of “exact order” each season. The point is that our focus is on harvesting out everything over the next several weeks. Often, we’ll harvest things even if we could get more maturity, just to get it off our plate. We know it can be hard when you think you can get “just a little bit more”…but it’s also quite a relief to be done with a given crop!
There’s also some general sensibility that goes into it, too. For example, we’d prefer not to harvest out our potatoes during or right after rainfall. But, if we get a streak of nice weather that dries up those soils fairly well, that’s a very good time to tackle a task like that.
It can take a remarkable amount of time to preserve the garden. When you put things off a bit too much, hoping for a bit more season or more maturity, Old Man Winter is likely to teach you important life lessons. We find it quite miserable continuing our harvests into the snowfall. We’ll do it if we have to, but would much rather avoid it.
We’ve also got a ton of garden shutdown tasks ahead of us as well. This of course relates to the garden, such as cleaning up and putting up our container gardens or shutting down our watering systems. But it’s also all the other “general” winter preparations we also have to accomplish. There’s a ton of things that will divide your attention as we scramble to get prepared for the long winter months!
I don’t know about you, but this summer has gone by in a blink of an eye. It seemed shorter than usual and we’re all ready regretting the many topics we weren’t able to cover this season! But, we’re not throwing in the towel yet! We’ve got an absolute ton of harvesting and preservation ahead of us!
