Late Season Garden

Per usual, our gardens suffered the effects of semi-abandonment during the later weeks of the growing season. Our late summer was HOT and DISGUSTING. I hardly remember a summer when I have spent more time indoors. The weeds loved it, at any rate. Some of our plants did great, others suffered a bit....it was hit or miss. Then we got our first (and only) frost in mid-September, which killed some things much earlier than we'd hoped. We covered most of our tomatoes and some other things. Then it got ungodly hot again and we are now running our air conditioner on OCTOBER 8 - unheard of! It was a weird a gross weather season. Now we are hoping for a long fall and a nice, snowy winter (fingers crossed!!!!).


salsa ingredients from the back alley - so pretty!


lots of peppers

A mourning dove ended up nesting in my potted sage and parsley plants. I don't know how it found the time to build the nest back there, but it definitely did. I actually liked having the birds back there and grew rather attached to them. The pair raised two baby birds. And then one day they were gone.


the birds were skittish so it was hard to get a photo.

The most interesting plant we grew this year was our back alley cherry tomato. We grew it by accident. By that I mean that we didn't plant it. We found it growing back there halfway through the summer when we were weeding and didn't pull it because it looked like a tomato plant. Boy was it! As best as we can figure, one of our neighbors had once grown cherry tomatoes (we never have) and an animal took one over to our area (or pooped the seeds?) and that's how it grew in our garden area. Anyway, this plant has some incredible genes. It grew to be over 12 feet long, 4 feet wide, and produced hundreds (if not thousands) of cherry tomatoes. It ended up overgrowing all of the other plants in the back alley and cherry tomatoes were literally everywhere back there. I've never seen anything like it - a truly amazing plant.


You can see the cherry tomato plant has overtaken everything else.


Cherry tomatoes everywhere!

Also interesting were our carrots. We only got one harvest of carrots because our first planting was upended and ruined by a neighborhood hooligan. We knew who it was, but we just replanted and decided not to raise the issue unless anything else happened, and nothing ever did. This particular boy has a younger brother who also runs wild around the neighborhood and shows particular interest in our garden and in growing food. I think some of his interest may be because he's hungry, or perhaps afraid of being hungry in the future, and who can really get too upset about some bare-footed 4-year-old taking a few tomatoes and raspberries? At any rate, we got only one harvest of carrots, but they were absolutely GORGEOUS! Don't you agree? We plant 3 different varieties. One of the varieties is variably colored - yellow, purple, orange, and red. Most of these carrots ended up in a huge pot of chicken noodle soup, most of which is residing in our freezer, waiting to be made into a quick weekday dinner.








It was another fun, semi-successful year for our gardens. Stay tuned for next year!



Obviously, we don't spray or anything, so we had a very large heinasirrka enjoying our tomatoes one day.