Autumn

"There is no need to bewail the declining year.
Autumn is a glorious season in its own right,
and as pleasant as summer to spend in the garden."

- Christopher Lloyd

Today was indeed glorious. Despite the thickening clouds, the air was pleasantly warm. So I let the younger boys off for the afternoon, and headed out to the garden with baskets in hand to gather herbs and vegetables.

The string beans in the upper garden have all but finished producing and have become forage for the deer. In the kitchen garden, however, the bean plants are just beginning to fruit. The beans themselves are long and "sticky" with tiny little hairs, and sport an attractive purplish mosaic pattern on its skin.

I'm still gathering very small tomatoes from the blighted plants. These are more sun than vine ripened since most of the fruit has already fallen from the plants. The tomatoes I had found near the compost pile, however, have appeared to escaped the blight perhaps due to the fact that they were covered by weeds during the early growing season. Large green tomatoes still cling to the vines, and I can only hope that with a careful covering of floating row cover we may soon enjoy them.

I next cut parsley, basil, and applemint for drying. These herbs, I've discovered, dry very quickly if placed in a wire mesh colander and set in the oven for a day or two. Frequent stirring keeps the herbs crisp and helps maintain their color better.

One of my favorite activities of September is making wild grape jelly. This year I found several places on the homestead where the wild grapes formed thick canopies over small weed trees. I was able to fill my garden basket about 2/3 full, but will need to find more if I want to make jelly. Our St. Pepin grapes produced several nice bunches of sweet-tart grapes, and I added these to the basket "for complexity" of flavor. Yes, that is a picture of one "goodly bunche" at the top of this post.

The red onions faired poorly. Too little sun I think. Most of the bulbs I pulled were almost as small as when I first planted them. I will dry them and replant them next spring.

I also began seed gathering for next season. We had a very successful trial with saving a French lettuce seed from last year. It was my most vigorously growing lettuce, and just about every seed germinated. I gathered these seed heads again, and some of the buttercrunch. Both the Italian and curly parsley have finally entered the seed setting stage and I gathered several dry heads already. There are literally thousands of these seeds so I think I will be set for parsley for many years to come. I will continue to gather some dill seed for next year's pickling spice, but the remainder I will allow to self sow over the garden again this year. I found that those "wild" dill seeds that had overwintered resulted in stronger healthier plants. (These were wild only because I had dropped the bowl holding hundreds of seeds last Fall among the raspberries.)

The beets continue to be abundant, and I pulled a large basket full of the round and cylindrical veggies to can. But first, fresh beet greens for dinner. Yum.