Today I pulled the last of our 2022 crop from our backyard garden. Overnight temperatures have been dipping into the low 30’s recently, and there was still frost on the grass when I went out at 9:30 this morning, so in all honesty it was probably past time.
We didn’t get any tomatoes this year, because June was very wet and chilly here and the plants caught a bacterial wilt that didn’t entirely kill them, but left them stunted and unhealthy all season long. Garden tomatoes are the biggest reason I even have a garden, so it breaks my heart. Last year we harvested more tomatoes than we knew what to do with. I think the best we got this year was eight very small tomatoes.
But the October harvest was solid. Lots of potatoes (this is the first year I grew them, and they did pretty well) along with a ton of carrots, some fat turnips, and the last of a very healthy butternut squash harvest. I did leave one plant still growing in the garden: Three very healthy celery plants, which do not seem to mind the frost one bit.
Celery takes forever to grow, which is funny for such a second-rate vegetable, but at this point the plants are so big I have no idea what we could even do with so much celery. Maybe I need to buy ten gallons of hummus.