Serious farm cleanup just in time for the first fall frost

Our first real frost was forecasted for last night, so we decided that it was time to pull out our tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, gourds, and winter squash.  From my drive-bys of the neighborhood, it looks like most people around us took care of this task a few weeks ago, but we've still been enjoying a pretty big harvest from these plants, and also, I'm a kind of lazy farmer.  The tomatoes were quickly devolving into a very sad state, though, becoming so smelly that I was avoiding the garden, and I realized that it would only get worse if we subjected the already overripe fruits and dying plants to a few frosts.  I also wanted to make sure that we didn't waste the ripe eggplants and peppers that were still on the plants, and I really wanted to cut down the catnip that took over the herb bed.  We worked all afternoon, and managed to cross off everything on our farm to-do list.

While I waited for Mike to get home from work, I tackled the herb bed.  The catnip has been totally out of control for most of the summer, and none of my three (or four, but I don't think Ricky Bobby really counts - he's more of a neighborhood cat.  You're welcome, neighborhood?) cats will touch it.  Not Itch, who usually can't get enough nip, and not Pam and Staci, who certainly look like they could use a little loosening up.  Even though I've been pushing it on everyone I know with cats, it grows back even more quickly than the chard, and it quickly became a menace to my other herbs.  The catnip completely smothered the parsley, very nearly wiped out the chamomile, and turned my chives into flattened, pale green weaklings.  To give you an even better understanding of how dominant the catnip was, I found two surprises while I was tearing it out.  The first was a very startled mouse, which Lily unsuccessfully tried to hunt after sneaking into the garden.  The second was a pumpkin.  Yes, my catnip was so enormous that it camoflauged a pretty good sized pumpkin!  So my mystery compost squash plants included both gourds and a pumpkin plant - and I had absolutely no idea until I took out the catnip.

So next year, definitely no catnip. 

Pile of catnip

Poor chives!

Surprise pumpkin

Lily hunting the mouse (she did not catch it)

By the time Mike got home, I had torn out most of the annual herbs and had given the mints a serious trim, and had escorted Lily out of the garden four times.  She can slip under anything, and really loves eating rotten tomatoes.  She's kind of a gross dog.  I had also cut off the growing tips of the brussels sprouts plants so that they focus on growing their sprouts, which according to my garden book I probably should have done a month ago.  Oh well, I'm not even sure that I like brussels sprouts, so I'm not too concerned.

Mike quickly got to work ripping out the tomato plants.  He figured that was the grossest job of the day, so he wanted to get it over with.  Originally, we had planned to try to salvage the ripe fruits and toss everything else, but then we quickly moved over to tossing everything.  Most of the tomatoes were overripe, and once you've spent a good amount of time handling rotten tomatoes, you don't really want to eat tomatoes anyway.  We estimate our wasted tomato to eaten tomato ratio to be at least 4:1, so not great.  But once again, I'm very happy that we have chickens, because they're enjoying the tomatoes that we couldn't get to.  By the time Mike was finished with tomato cleanup we had about three wheelbarrows full of rotten tomatoes for the girls, and they are enjoying the feast quite a bit.

Do you think it was time to rip these guys out?

Mike at work

Wasted tomatoes

Girls enjoying a rotten tomato feast

Next, we picked all of the ripe sweet and poblano peppers and eggplants, and ripped out those plants.  We got an entire giant mixing bowl's worth of peppers, and I think we're going to roast and then freeze them to use this winter in chili.  We also got a lot of eggplants, but I haven't yet decided my plans for them.  Lastly, we picked the onions, mostly because they clearly died a while ago and they aren't going to get any bigger.  My onion crop is extremely pathetic, and none of them are larger than a shallot.  At least they taste good, but I need to do more onion studying before next year.  They were supposed to be easy!  I'm not even including a picture of them - they are very pathetic.

We had a few lingering pumpkins that I was hoping to get more mature out in the squash field, but with a frost coming I didn't want to risk that they would get damaged.  We found a bonus rouge vif d'etampes pumpkin and two surprise white pumpkins that we hadn't noticed before, so it was a better haul than I had expected.  We haven't harvested the giant pumpkins yet, because we don't have a plan for how to move them or where to store them.   So we covered them with fleece blankets last night and are trying to think of a plan this week.

Gourd harvest

Lumina white pumpkin

Hidden rouge vif d'etampes pumpkin

Uncle David's Dakota Plant - it never gave up!  And it also never got bigger.

Wrapped giant pumpkin 1

Wrapped giant pumpkin 2 - note the seasonally appropriate blanket

The dogs were exhausted from all of the farm work; Lily from sneaking into the garden to eat tomatoes and compost, and Bullet from "hunting" all afternoon (in four hours of hunting, he caught a grasshopper, which did not appear to be something that he found very tasty).  They passed out when we got inside, and since Lily frequently sleeps upside down with her mouth open, Mike noticed that she had some very lovely compost residue all over her teeth.  Lucky Lily got a scaling from Mike (although he isn't in the picture, Bullet nervously tried to assist).  She slept through the whole thing.  Then, since Bullet felt left out but had very nice looking teeth, Mike gave him a thorough belly cuddle.  All was very good at the farm last night.

A model patient

Silly Bullet

I was glad that we were able to take care of the cleanup and harvesting, because the temperature dropped to 29.4 last night, and I went outside this morning to see a frosted lawn.  The weather is supposed to heat up again for the weekend, but I'm savoring the fall feel of the morning.

Frosted pumpkin leaf

Garden post-frost