Root Crops

I spent several hours the past two weekends in the garden, getting it ready for the winter. We are planning to over-winter the chickens in the garden as well...they can till in the mulch and cover crops for us (if I ever get them planted).

In the late Spring this year, I cut up about 3 sprouting red potatoes that my Mom found in her pantry, and planted them in a garden bed. I have been most anxious to see what they did, if anything. By this weekend, the foliage from all of the potato plants had all died back, so I got out my shovel. I ended up with 9 pounds of beautiful red potatoes!



I also pulled most of the carrots, all of the turnips, and a couple of the onions. I pulled the red beets last weekend, and just finished taking my jars of lovely magenta pickled beets out of the canner.



The peppers, both hot and sweet, are still going strong. There are now 19 asparagus plants ferning. The tomato plants are limping along, but are fighting their second wave of hornworms. The chickens got most of them that we picked off yesterday, but we left about 5 of them on the plants. These were covered with the pupae of Braconid wasps: beneficial, harmless wasps, which parasitize the hornworm.



(This photo, and more info can be found here.)

I love my garden, and am very proud of it, but I am never sad to see it go to sleep in the Fall. It is a lot of work, and I have many other cold weather projects to turn to in which to spend my copious free time!