Harvest Day

You'd never know it was the end of September... the high today was about 83. I love all this sunshine. But rain is in the forecast and most of the garden is done for the year, so I brought stuff in and pulled up plants.

First I picked the last of beans and zucchini, only to discover that the plants aren't quite done yet. So I let them stay to see what happens...

The beans, however, were done. So they got yanked...

I wasn't sure about the winter squashes but they hadn't gotten any bigger in weeks, so I just picked them, too.

My pumpkins came on quite late. I have 4 good sized ones but only one just started turning.  I guess we'll see what happens???

The tomatoes just don't seem to be getting ripe on the vine much anymore, so I picked them all, brought them in the house, and put them in a box with a few apples to force them. It's worked well in the past. I'm hopeful to get enough for a freezer pasta sauce that I tried last year and loved...

 But my favorite part of my harvest this year is that big laundry basket full of green apples. Those are our apples. We didn't even know we had an apple tree for the first 6 or 7 years we lived here. Then one day we saw an apple in our driveway. We couldn't figure out where it came from. We looked up and there were a couple of tiny green apples in the tree right above our garage.

This is the very first year we've had enough to even bother picking. And it was such a good year for apples, we got a bunch! Thankfully our youngest son was willing to climb up on the roof of the garage to pick them for me...

When I went to take a picture of my now mostly-empty yard, I saw I have new chives growing in my pot. Just in time for potato soup season... :)