Final harvest?

Aww, poor tomatoes. I didn’t give you the chance to maybe fully ripen before I picked you. Because temperatures are going to get a bit too close to freezing in the next week, so I didn’t want to risk losing all these tomatoes.

The orange and yellow ones might still ripen by themselves, and with the green ones I’ll make lots of little fried green tomatoes! Whee!

This is what my greenhouse looked like before I cut down all the cucumbers. They made a huge fruiting spurt at the very end, but it’s too cold for them now and I can’t be there to water them regularly, so the fruits wouldn’t have matured properly. Some of the plants had started to mould, too, so it was time to compost them.

As I ripped open the earth bags so I could bring the earth to the compost, I discovered lots of slug eggs. I thought about destroying them, but then I felt sympathy for the slug parents who went to all the trouble of laying all these beautiful translucent eggs, inside which I could see the tiny slug embryos. So I put them in the compost with the rest of the soil. :o/
Maybe that’s my biological clock ticking in desperation, since I’ve somehow sworn that I will definitely not have (human) children once I’m past 30 years old … O_o

Back to my cucumber children. Maybe if I can seed them a month or two earlier next year and water them properly from the beginning, and especially if the weather will be a little bit warmer than it was last summer, I’ll get lots and lots more cucumbers?

This was my last cucumber ever 2011.

The other fruits on the vines looked kind of like this. Awww. Cutesy, but not exactly tasty …

Inside the trailer, I’m drying various herbs – oregano, rosemary, two kinds of basil, mint and chives. On top of the rack, on the newspaper, I’m drying nettles. Mmmm …

Part of my final harvest! Pole beans, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and a cucumber. I also picked some more cherry tomatoes from outdoors.

And then I picked about two liters of rosehips, so I can make rosehip soup! Whee … After that, my hands and forearms look like I’ve battled a ferocious cat.

Now I just remembered that this probably isn’t the final harvest, after all. I have some almost finished carrots in a box in the greenhouse, and I have some red beets in the earth that maybe, maybe not, will be edible at some point (unless the frost gets them before they grow big enough to harvest).

This year has been really interesting, and I’ve learned a lot about what grows well in my garden and what doesn’t, and how to successfully deal with various problems, like coexisting peacefully with the slugs by feeding them yummy kitty food.

I can’t wait until next year! V^(oo)^V