Garden Success

September Writing Challenge - Prompt #16:

Success

As we move into fall, I have to start cleaning my garden up a bit. There are a lot of articles circulating right now that encourage you to not clean up your garden for winter but to leave the plants until spring to provide a habitat for pollinators. To me, this sounds like a really good excuse to ignore my garden for the next six months. But in all honesty, I can’t leave it alone. If I wait to clean it up in the spring, it will be my undoing. That’s just too overwhelming for me. 

My yearly routine, come fall, is to pull out a few plants at a time over the span of several weeks to budget my garbage can space. I’m sorry, pollinators. You’re welcome to make my yard your winter home, but I’m not leaving any plant carcasses for you. Actually, that's not entirely true. The strawberry plants will still be there, and I usually have to leave the sunflower and cornstalk stumps through the winter because they are too hard to get out while they still have life in them. So there you go, pollinators; you can live in my sunflower stumps. 

As we near the end of gardening season, here are some of the successes we celebrate:

This was our first little harvest of the season. Strawberries and peas were sparse this go round, but we had a lot of cucumbers. 

We had plenty of zucchini and summer squash!

Here is the first cherry tomato of the year. We successfully grew cherry, roma, and celebrity tomatoes, and just yesterday I found some yellow pear tomatoes I planted from seed and didn't know they actually grew!

I was able to can some home-grown green beans. I think I got a few more pints in addition to this photo. 

We had a decent year for green peppers. This is the biggest one I've ever picked from our garden. We were quite proud of it. Sign us up for the State Fair!

We babied this crenshaw melon for months and finally picked it and cut it up for game night. It was a little too ripe, but it was still edible. We're just excited something actually came off the vine!

Some years we grow carrots, and some years we don't. This year we planted some and have just started eating them in the past week. 

Scotty planted a little potato garden (our first time growing potatoes), and that became his passion this summer - raising his little spuds. They've been great, and we will definitely do potatoes from hence forth. 

Last week I started picking our pumpkins. We had a good year for pumpkins! I harvested these porch goodies, and we have about five more still working on turning orange. 

It was a great year, and as always, we had our share or garden failures, too, but today is all about success! I can’t wait to try again next year!