The garden just won't quit

[John K Jordan]

I thought every thing was about gone but I checked today.

peppers_Oct_2021.jpg

Still a few tomatoes, lots of basil and other herbs.
And almost stepped on a guinea sitting on a nest of eggs near the strawberries. I thought they had quit for the year.

JKJ

[Jim Becker]

I still have late summer flowers blooming out front...welcome to the new reality.

[Mark Bolton]

Peppers are still booming here in WV. I pulled in the last of the pumpkins and gourds yesterday and arranged them for an end of year photo with some peppers and a few morning glories I picked along the way.
pumpkins.jpg

[Tyler Bancroft]

We're still getting new squash flowers. (In Canada, nonetheless.)

[Ken Fitzgerald]

The abnormal heat receded here a couple weeks ago and the temperatures dropped. The tomatoes though continuing to produce fruit aren't ripening but the pepper plants have been going to town. We pulled 2 tomato plants last week and will pull the remaining ones next week.

[John K Jordan]

I still have late summer flowers blooming out front...welcome to the new reality.

Our garden is a riot of color from flowers I planted this year. Roses are doing well too. Still picking figs and raspberries every day and lots of new blooms on the berries. Grass in the pastures is still growing well. Temps have been mostly 50's and 60's lately.

JKJ

[Mel Fulks]

I don’t think it’s new. It’s just not the way we want it. Latest FIRST FROST I’ve seen in Richmond was Nov. 2 and I think almanac says something
like “by Nov. 1” . There are some really old records of unusual weather.
John, I think you need a Stewartia tree, what beautiful things they are are !

[Jack Frederick]

Gardens, ours and friends, were generally a disappointment this year. We have been paying attention to the soil, cover crops and organic material. We had pretty good expectations, but with the excessive heat this mid-summer it didn’t matter how much you watered. The plants couldn’t take it up fast enough to overcome the heat. Tomatoes which generally produce really well came on, not in July, but in Sept. they too are about done, but it was nice having something come through strongly. The Shishitos did well too.

[Jim Becker]

Yes, you had a terrible time with hot and dry, Jack...I can only imagine the challenge to the plants! Here in the east, we fortunately had a reasonable amount of rain.

[Andrew Seemann]

First hard freeze of the season last night, saw 28 on the thermometer when I let the dogs out at 7:30, frost was still there at 9:30 where the sun hasn't hit it. We have had frosts for the last week or so, but today the dogs' water dish had 1/4" of ice on these surface.

Garden was pulled a few weeks ago, too cold for things to ripen.

Pictures from a few minutes ago. The geraniums are done, slight chance the petunias could survive. They are all getting pulled tomorrow either way,

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[Steve Demuth]

We harvested fresh eggplant, pepper, tomatoes, cucumbers and zuchini earlier this week at the same time we were bringing in fall crops of cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli and butterhead lettuce for fresh consumption, along with potatoes, radishes, carrots, and beets for winter storage.. That's a full 3 weeks after our median first frost date. It finally froze hard last night, but we'd already cleared most of the plants from the garden after that last picking. There just isn't enough sunlight and overall heat to ripen really tasty fruit by mid-October, and I hate having to rush to harvest stuff the evening before a major frost. Time to call summer done.

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Notwithstanding an overall seriously droughty year, we got just enough rain at critical moments to make this a spectacularly productive garden year. Along with that, the biggest and cleanest grape harvest, and more pears than five families could use (we dried about 12 lbs of raisins and an equal amount of pear slices). Plums were good as well. Really, only the apples disappointed - poor return bloom after an unfortunate underthinning in 2020, and cold overcast (with no rain, oddly) through the majority of the bloom period got us a lousy fruit set, and a sparse crop makes control of pests like curculio, coddling moth and apple maggot using the organic "discouragement" method we use hit and miss for effectiveness. In the end the apples yielded only a modest juice run of maybe 50 quarts.

[John K Jordan]

...l. Really, only the apples disappointed - ...

We had poor apple crop too, pears so-so, but an astounding year for black walnuts - probably could fill the bed of the pickup truck.

[Jim Koepke]

We had poor apple crop too, pears so-so

My small tree was heavy with pears this year. The pears were awesome:

Red Bartlet Pears 2021.jpg

A tall orchard ladder is on my shopping list.

One neighbor didn't prop his branches and a strong wind broke a lot of the branches on his tree. He isn't much of the gardening type. He purchased the property from the person who planted all the fruit trees.

jtk