Our October Garden

October in our vegetable garden usually means harvesting the remaining vegetables, and getting things ready for winter.  Here are a few things we tackled in the garden on this particular October day.

My friend Lori had already harvested all her tomatoes, so one job was to glean any green ones she left behind, and cut out the tangled mass of tomato vines in the bed.  They had gotten really jungly over the summer!

We had also harvested our plum tomatoes, and all that remained were the bottoms of the tomato plants to pull up.

I did a quick check of my strawberry plants.  There were four surviving plants this past spring; as you can see below, they grew like mad this year!

I pulled this entire rosemary plant to chop up the needle-like leaves for the freezer.

My sweet Joseph helped out so much!  Here he is harvesting all the cayenne peppers.  It was pretty easy--I told him to pick everything that was red.  For some reason, all my cayenne peppers turned red this year.  That has never happened before.

Below is the remaining basil and the rosemary plant I pulled.  I picked all the basil leaves, then chopped and froze them for use this winter.

Danny came out to help after doing his college homework; he pulled up tomato cages, stacked them, and put them away.

I also had him dig a nice, big hole in my front flower garden.  :)

He dug up my sage plant from the backyard vegetable garden and transplanted it into the front flower garden.

Below is the sage in its new home.  It flowers purple and has a beautiful scent, and I used cuttings from it to decorate my home throughout the summer.  The critters don't eat it, and I don't use much sage in cooking.  So it will do better out here.  I plan to do the same with my perennial oregano plants.

Joseph continued to cut, break, pull, and throw tomato vines onto our growing pile of garden refuse.

That pile grew quite large after awhile!

Since I always go up to the deck of our pool to capture my wide-angle garden shots, I thought I'd snap a shot of my special place.  The tree looks so pretty this autumn, and has already turned color since this picture was taken.

Here's our garden, with everything pulled.  We want to work in some manure and cover everything with mulch for the winter, in order to replenish the soil for our spring planting.

Back to life,
Christine

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