Happy Labor Day, everyone! We’re celebrating the holiday with, you guessed it, a whole lot of labor! We’ve been busy this weekend.
Today also marks our average first frost date. So, from this point forward, we’re basically on borrowed time. Though it’s possible we could have days or even weeks until the frosts settle in, there’s simply no way to know what the future will hold. And once those frosts start settling in, it’s a practical nose dive into winter for us.
While previously we were certainly focusing on harvesting frost sensitive things, now everything is fair game. Our general focus now shifts to completely harvesting things out. We might let a few things here and there keep going, if we think it’ll be beneficial. But, our focus must shift towards wrapping up the season at this point!
Our weekend work has been rather diverse. We’ve been harvesting and freezing peppers, doing a couple blanch & freeze projects, getting some things dehydrated and of course some further canning efforts. We’re really trying to get those tomatoes preserved up as much as possible as eventually, we need to reclaim our greenhouse for winter garden storage.
We will allow our greenhouse to continue to function for now, further ripening those few remaining tomatoes and cucumbers. For the next couple weeks, it’ll still be able to produce rather warm temperatures. Realistically, though, this is only good for about a couple weeks of season extension before it’s time to shut it down. While we’ve done greenhouse heating experiments in the past, we’ve found that the juice was barely worth the squeeze.
We’ve also begun shutting down some of our container gardens. This is always a ton of work as we need to store the soil for the winter, plus perform a general cleaning of our equipment. We’ve definitely found it best to clean our gear at the end of the season, otherwise it makes for a rather miserable spring season.
We’ve had some really successful harvests this year. We’ve got several things to share with you in coming days and weeks, plus a few experiments that have gone rather well. Things are happening much faster than we can cover in our daily posts, though, so we’ll do our best to curate what we think is interesting!
Hope you all are having a great holiday and are also knocking down those harvest lists!
