What gardeners are up to in October

Harvesting, canning, cleaning, planting ... did I mention canning? This time last year our garden was pretty much bare earth in the existing raised beds with lots of apples and figs and a single pear. This year, I've got a whole different animal on my hands. It looks so bucolic in this picture.

Stupendously huge black jack figs.

When the figs started ripening last month I ran out into the garden with excitement every time we arrived on Saturday mornings. Six weeks later, I groan when I see them hanging low with cracked skins. It means more work in the kitchen. I've lost count how many jars of fig jam I've made. We visited a music store over the weekend and the elderly owner ran out and begged us to take some figs from her two trees which were over fifteen feet tall. Poor lady!

Fig jam, fig tortes, fig whatever ...

I'm at least thankful that the crush didn't hit me early on or I probably would have fled and never looked back. Not really, but at least I was able to slowly build up my expertise over the past year before September and October hit fast and furious.

Two more batches of applesauce and then I'm done for the year with that! And now we enter squash and pumpkin territory ...

Two different mystery squash, pumpkins, and the lone melon this year.

Well, I thought I planted watermelon transplants from the nursery but instead I got squash. Plus, we have a volunteer squash (in front) who popped up last year. I personally love squash, especially a wonderful squash soup. My husband detests the stuff. Too bad. He can eat out that night!

Cabbages (well, there were cabbages there), beets and onion seedlings.

It's also time for cleaning up the beds and prepping for the winter planting. First project was to replace a dying bed right in front of our fig tree.

The old beet, onion, potato, pumpkin bed.

It's made it hard to access the blackberries and there was a perfectly good trellis a few feet away that wasn't being used. I think the previous owners used it to keep the blackberry thorns away from their toddler.

Peas, turnips, onions and rutabagas.

My amazing husband has been rebuilding all the beds in our yard to keep out the gophers and replace all the rotting wood. Only twelve more to go! This one is now planted with Blue podded Blauwschokkers peas (What. They sounded cool, I couldn't resist). While he was busy building, I was a few feet away clearing out the summer bean bed and nursing my parsnip seedlings (which are very persnickity). The beds look beautiful now all neat and tidy. I planted at least eighty more peas, mostly sugar snap, in the square bed with bamboo poles.

I'm about four weeks late planting the peas (eight weeks before first frost is the rule) but they wouldn't have survived the heat wave that hit last week. We'll see if they turn out as this is the first time I've grown peas from seed planted in the fall, I'm usually of the February variety. Here was the aftermath of the bean bed, shelling. Lots and lots and lots of shelling to be done.

But the end result is lovely. I'm planning on doing a trade with a friend here for some of her tiny haricot verts that taste perfect right on the vine.

Next weekend will include a little tarragon oil making and freezing, thanks to my friend, Shelly, who turned me onto the 101 Cookbooks blog. This sweet little plant will be ripped out to make way for cool season lettuces.

You have to be brutal in gardening sometimes. On the softer side, check out my quickly growing Pinterest board on enjoying and preserving the harvest.

First weekend in July

There are plenty of flowers in the garden finally. I still wish I had planted more among the vegetables. Next year, I'll add more, including more flowers for cutting. The sunflower seeds I planted were gobbled up quickly so I had to resort this year to seedlings from the nursery.

I planted them next to the beans and they've become friends. Those are purple podded bean flowers below.

The calendulas I planted from seed are doing well at least. I need to harvest them more quickly but so far the plants seem to be going strong.

The red flowers below are coreopsis tinctoria. Any plant with tinctoria in its latin name means it will be excellent for natural dyeing.

And you can't go wrong with marigolds growing next to tomatoes. These have all but been engulfed by the monster tomato plants surrounding it.

A lot of those early spring flowers have rapidly turned into ripe, luscious fruit. We have about two dozen santa rosa plums that are ripe. They taste beyond divine! We can only eat them outside leaning over because the juice content is so high.

We also have strawberries and blackberries ripening daily. I'd forgotten what those fruits tasted like right out of the garden.

And last but not least, the vegetable harvest is starting to pick up again. We still have way too many beets (not complaining there) and chard. We also had kale, carrots, padrone peppers (which were waaaayyy too hot) and the last of the broccoli.

And anyone want some herbs? I can finally say I have enough parsley to harvest nightly now that I've gopher proofed one of the beds. I am in the process of gopher proofing the carrot and parsnip bed. What carrots I have harvested (they left me a handful) have been huge and flavorful.

A mid-June weekend

Here's a peek at what's going on in the garden in mid June. We had a heat wave last week and all seems to have survived except the remaining english peas turned starchy. I learned that fall planted peas are much more worth it. Those did really well and produced for a much longer time period than the early spring planted batch. Note the hose lying off to the side, well used this weekend.

We bought an umbrella for the center of the garden so I can escape the sun every few minutes. I'm still not sure what seating to put underneath it. A table might be nice but it sure would be great to have a lounge chair out there.

These are the left beds that include my daughter's bed with broccoli, my gopher safe tomato and parsley bed and a bed that held the most productive pea plants. So productive the bamboo trellis wouldn't hold.

The bed above is the most authentic square foot garden we have with a huge variety of plants. The chard here hasn't bolted, yet. And we have tons of calendula flowers popping open every day. There are some bare bits that need succession planting but haven't been able to do anything with this heat.

This is a view of the opposite side of the garden with a weeping Santa Rosa plum on the left. Lots of plums growing. There are brussel sprouts in the center and several bush variety english peas adjacent that I will never plant again, they hardly produced.

I did manage to weed some this weekend. Oxalis is taking over this bed. I'm hoping if I just keep at it and remove all the soil along with the weed, I'll eventually knock those back. I hate oxalis. The kale didn't seem to mind but the lettuces couldn't survive.

And finally, the most important planting of the year, according to my daughter, corn! Not something I would have chosen due to the huge amount of space they take up for so little reward but I hope I'm proven wrong! They certainly look good in the bed. Next weekend I plan to mulch more of the beds. Planting in 95 degree heat wasn't fun but I did manage to finish the irrigation with some help. The beans are behind the corn and are doing well. No gopher action ... yet. And also this weekend, more cherry plum jam making. It looks like a few more weeks before the other fruits are ripe, whew.

Cherries, garlic and gopher snacks

It started off as a sublime weekend, the net on the cherry tree held up and we had tons of ripe sweet cherries ready for picking. We gave some to friends and still managed 20 cups of pitted cherries.

We froze most but made some divine balsamic cherry preserves with four cups of them from this site. So many more recipes to try out!

The garlic was also ready for harvesting, some of the cloves were beyond big.

And even three onions that had started as seeds snuck in the bed were ready for plucking.

But the gophers also realized it was prime harvesting time. Last week I had noticed that one tomato plant had just up and gone. This week, three more! After doing a little internet research, I realized they're the culprit. Who would want to eat an entire tomato plant, bleh.

A gardener told me to pour fish emulsion around the plants, they'll hate it. It was like a vinagrette for the tomatoes. They went after those first the next morning. One of the highlights of the garden was going to be harvesting loads of heirloom tomatoes. Not to be had likely. I'm on the hunt to get rid of them but have resigned myself that it's probably too late for the tomatoes, sigh.