Fall Produce

Usually at this time of year, I have no crops left to harvest from my garden.  However, Mike has started to hang around with gardeners and they tell him that you can have crops well into the fall.
As a result, he keeps trying to save those straggly dying plants that are in my garden.  So I let him keep a few.

I have to concede that it is nice to get some fresh fall produce.  My brand new raspberry bush has been even more productive in the fall than it was in the summer.  I actually had to get a bowl the other day to hold all the ripe berries.  In the past all I ever had was a small handful.

And Mike's giant jalapeño plant has continued to produce jalapeño's that supposedly get hotter the older the plant?  That is according to Mike.  The plant did continue to look nice and healthy so we kept it.  

The other reason we have fall produce is I started planting early season crops.  The only early season crop that usually does well for me is broccoli (did not do well this year though) which then results in open garden space late spring when I pull the plants.  To fill the space I threw in some sweet potato plants this year. The sweet potato vines were so successful that Mike was unable to mow around my garden.  

Since I had never grown sweet potatoes before I had no idea how to tell if they were ready to harvest.  We ended up waiting until the first frost of the season.  The potatoes are all different sizes but it looks like we were successful.  

Both Emily and Suzanne love Brussel sprouts so I looked into planting them.  I missed the early season option so I went ahead and tried for fall.  I had to order the plants online from Burpee because I could not find any around here.  That probably should have been a clue.  Burpee condescended to sell them to me in my planting zone but only after a certain date.  So I waited for them to arrive and quickly threw them in the ground.  This is what they looked like just before the first frost.  I decided to leave them in the ground in case they will continue to grow.  At least the plants still look healthy.  Maybe we will have home grown Brussel sprouts for Thanksgiving?

I do not know about Mike but I am finally ready to be done with gardening for the year.  Now I have to find recipes to use up all our fall produce.