The Fall Wind-down
Farewell, summer veggies
Good morning!
I don’t know about y’all but I have definite mixed feelings about fall. On the one hand, I welcome the cool, overcast days and the break from battling weeds and blight in the garden.
But, on the other, I’m already missing my fresh summer vegetables, especially tomatoes and cukes. Every day I go to make myself a big tomato salad and suddenly remember … oh, yeah, they’re done 😭.
Of course, one can extend the season with a greenhouse, but there’s also a part of me that secretly appreciates the effect of absence. As in, absence makes the heart grow fonder … for homegrown tomatoes, peppers, melons, cucumbers, carrots, squash, basil and whatnot.
It’s makes spring so much more exciting, the anticipation of what’s soon to return. I have a few tasks left in the garden (below), and then I’ll hunker down with my planning journal and start dreaming of next year.
Garlic
As content as I am to close down my garden for the year and give my back a little break while waiting for the new seed catalogs, there’s one final gardening task that I look forward to every year: planting garlic.
While the garlic won’t grow until spring, it enjoys a significant advantage when planted the previous fall, in the same way that tulips and crocus do. I wait as long as possible — late October, early November — and plant just before the first ground-hardening freeze.
If you’re new to growing garlic, I enthusiastically recommend the hardneck varieties for size and unmatched flavor (softnecks are what you find in the grocery). Many nurseries still have hardnecks available for sale and if you’re okay with purchasing online, you’ll have a decent selection to choose from (try Keene Garlic — I’ve had a lot of success with their garlics).
How much garlic should you order? Remember that you plant individual cloves from the bulb, with each clove sprouting into a full bulb in the spring. For my own culinary purposes, I plant 30 to 50 cloves each fall, which is about six to nine bulbs total, depending on the variety.
I set aside my best and healthiest garlic bulbs each summer to replant in the fall, so I already have 2024’s crop on hand (photo above).
Last year’s crop (above) going in the ground. I pre-dig all of the clove holes to ensure that everything is spaced properly (you can see the tucked-in cloves in the photo on the right).
Temps are still in the 70’s here, so I’m guessing I’ll be planting early or mid-November.
Anyway, if you love garlic, I’m just here to say that it’s not too late to grow garlic next year. It’s a wonderfully easy crop with big rewards.
Tomatoes’ Last Hurrah
The last of my tomato plants came down last week, and before that, I harvested all of the unripe tomatoes I could find. One of my very favorite food preservation projects is pickling all the unripe, hard, and otherwise unappetizing cherry tomatoes.
I first tried pickled green tomatoes many years ago and if nothing else gets preserved — I always make big plans for freezing my basil leaves, but never seem to get it done lol — I make sure my green tomatoes are pickled!
I love practically anything pickled, but green tomatoes — or in the case of my indigo cherries, purple and green — are my very favorite pickle. So easy, too.
These are refrigerator pickles, which means no water-bath canning. I usually don’t have enough green tomatoes at the end of the season to warrant doing the whole canning rigmorale. Plus — and this is key — the prolonged heat of water-bath canning will soften the tomatoes quite a bit, whereas these refrigerator pickles remain wonderfully crunchy!
I usually have enough green tomatoes to do a few jars of pickles, which I’ll easily go through in a month or two (another reason that shelf storage is unnecessary).
If you’re interested in learning more, I’m also a food blogger, and my recipe for pickled green tomatoes is on my other blog, SoupAddict.com. The link below will take you there.
Sweet Potatoes
While garlic is one crop that I always wait until the minute to plant in the fall, my sweet potatoes are always the crop I wait until the last minute to harvest.
Sweet potatoes grow very happily in this hardiness zone 6a, and I’ve never had a failed crop. I could probably harvest my sweet potatoes in late September or early October and still have an amazing yield, but the bed of sweet potato vines is so pretty, I just have a hard time wanting to rip it all up.
If you have your own bed of sweet potatoes, or are thinking about growing them next year, here’s my process for harvesting to ensure that I get every last gorgeous sweet potato!
Until next time, friend, stay kind 🫶🏻, get some rest, and prepare for the happy onslaught of the seed catalogs!