The 2024 gardens at the Kisner homestead are winding down. It always feels a little sad to see the plants turning brown. However, we are still harvesting a few things so it’s not over yet!
My patio planters did a great job with lettuce and radishes this summer. By mid-August I had had enough radishes for a while and the lettuce was attracting hungry aphids. I pulled everything and Bert put fresh soil in the bins. I planted spinach in all of the bins thinking I could harvest it all at once, dehydrate the leaves and spin them to powder in the blender. Then I could add a spoonful of powder to soups and smoothies. Great idea…not! August was really too hot for spinach and then we had tons of rain that just overwhelmed the tiny seeds. This week I cut off most of the spinach that had tried to grow and gave it to a friend who had bunnies…it would not go to waste! I have two bins of spinach that seemed to do well, so I’ll let them go until the first frost and see if it works!
These sections might actually produce some spinach!
These sections had a few green shoots that I cut for the bunnies. We’ll compost the leftover roots.
The fenced sections off the patio had mixed success.
The front section had sugar snap peas in the spring. When we cleaned them up, we found a few volunteer potatoes that came up from last year. We haven’t dug down to see what actually grew yet. The section behind that has zinnias and giant marigolds. They are beautiful right now. They have been a delightful treat as everything else is dying down.
To the left of the empty potato patch, we planted just 2 yellow pear tomato plants. They went nuts! They have leaned into each other and the fence is holding them up. The tomatoes are delicious and make a great snack!
Behind the tomato section we had 2 hills of zucchini. I think we harvested about 10 small zucchini and that’s it! Who knows if it was the weather, the soil or the seed! We’ll consider it next year.
The fenced garden up on the hill still has some green plants!
I’ve begun trimming the lavender so it will be good over the winter. Bert discovered one lone poison ivy plant right in the middle of the lavender. Luckily he put some gloves on and removed it before I started trimming!
We tried a late planting of green beans in early August. I think the birds pecked up some of the seeds but the ones that grew are making blossoms so we may actually get a few more beans!
Our carrots have done very well this year. We’ve pulled a few and will continue to dig them up as needed.
And then we still have tomatoes ripening! Many of the plants got chomped and stripped by giant horn worms…UGLY…but the tomatoes just kept on growing.
I’m most disappointed with the echinacea. They look great around the 4th of July, but very quickly they started dropping their seeds and now look pretty sad.
So, that’s the status of our garden today. All I have to do is look in the refrigerator and on the kitchen table to see that we’re not done with the garden yet!
Keep checking the Farmer’s Markets near you. They should have fresh produce through October and November around here. Enjoy!
I had a similar experience here with my echinacea, tomatoes, spinach, and zucchini. Way too dry for me to keep up with the watering, and maybe there were other factors, like I tried a new method of staking tomatoes that didn’t work well. I’ll try to do things differently next year!
I’m glad it wasn’t just us with garden issues! You can bet we’ll try again next year anyway!