Garden Journal, End of September Report

Hello, and welcome to my garden!

Well, September has come and gone now, and it took summer with it when it left. Where I live, we've had a more cool and rainy September than average, including several early frosts. The last week has had rain almost every day, making it more difficult to do my fall gardening work. Hopefully, we'll get some dry weather in the next couple of weeks so that I can get the rest of my potatoes dug.

About half of the rows of potatoes still need to be dug up. I hope they have a better yield per row than the first few rows that I dug here at the home garden. Here's the potato rows that still need to be dug. Also, you can see how I gathered up most of the Potimarron squash and put them in one area. Some of the squash vines are still growing.
I have bags of compost sitting in the raised bed, waiting for decent weather so that I can spread them out. The soil in the raised bed is a bit tired and could use the extra nutrients.
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The marigolds in the other raised bed are still blooming really prolifically. There's still a few tomato plants hiding among the marigolds, I just haven't been able to get them pulled out yet.
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There's still a few tomatoes on the plants, but they probably won't ripen. I've pretty much given up on getting any more tomatoes this year.
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This is a tomato plant that came up in the larger raised bed during the middle of the summer. The frost didn't get this plant, and it's still alive. I don't expect to see any ripe tomatoes from it, but I'm going to leave it in until the frost kills it.
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The Hidatsa beans are still alive and have a lot of green pods, as well as a fair amount of dried pods that are ready to pick. I think I'll get a pretty good harvest of these dry beans this year.
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This seems to have been a good year for the carrots. Some of the carrots have produced seed tops this year, which is unusual as carrots usually go to seed in their second year.
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There are a few really huge carrots this year. The white carrots are odd, they grow up out of the ground almost as much as they do down into the ground. Also, they turn green when exposed to the light. I don't usually see that with other carrot types.
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My volunteer compost heap squash seem to have done really well before the rains started. Now they're being infested with powder mildew. I'm not going to worry about the powder mildew now, the frost will kill the plants pretty soon anyway. There are 3 of the weird hybrid squash on these plants, they're the same ones that I had up at the community garden.
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That's about all that's left of my garden this year. The green beans did well, with 55 pints canned. The tomatoes didn't yield as well, with only 29 pints canned to show for it. I had a good yield of both yellow summer squash and zucchini. I have 19 quarts of squash canned, and more squash in the basement waiting for my ambition to can them also. The big zucchinis will keep for a couple of months, but usually not all winter, so I'll have to get to them fairly soon.

Well, that's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!

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Oh man this is some great gardening! I'm looking forward to when we own some land to be able to start this type of planting. We've tried doing things in pots but it's just not the same, you constantly have to monitor the nutrients and the roots just don't do as well.

It's funny, the marigolds picture I was thinking was all tomato plants but then once I saw the zoomed in version, I saw that it was a lot of red flowers!

We just canned our first things this year. We got really good deals on tomatoes from one of the local farms we buy our CSA's from and got 20 pounds for 5$ so we bought about 20 boxes and now have dozens of mason jars all cooked up, sitting in the cabinet! I've been a bit behind on posting up the pictures and results for it but I'm hoping to be able to do it this week.

Some awesome gardening you're doing here!

By the way, I see you're from Wisconsin. My favorite radio hosts, Dave and Chuck the freak broadcast here in Boston. Some hilarious stuff goes on with that show, not sure if you listen to them!

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Thanks for the great comments!
Those marigolds are the best ones that I've ever grown. In the past, the plants stayed smaller, getting no taller than about a foot. These are at least 2 feet tall for the most part. I need to look at the seeds that I used this year to see if I can get the same ones for next year. I'm going to save seeds from these plants to use next year also.
20 pounds of tomatoes is a really good price, I would have jumped on that myself!
Container gardening is easier with larger containers. I'm planning on buying a couple more 25 gallon pots for my outdoor container garden. the 15 gallon pots just aren't big enough for the root space for more than 1 tomato plant, and even a 15 gallon pot takes a fair amount of monitoring with 1 tomato plant. I use the 15 gallon pots in the greenhouse because the 25 gallon pots take up too much space.

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Yeah having a greenhouse is awesome but in a place like the UP of Michigan you definitely need it if you want to grow things late in the season. Are you able to maintain a garden year round or at least a few months into the cold weather?

I think we might have had one fifteen gallon pot but a bunch of smaller ones. I didn’t look at the tags but one is huge, the others I’m not sure if they are like 3-4 gallon pots.

Our deck is good enough to grow herbs that are low maintenance. We are going to pick all the basil tomorrow, it’s gotten into the 40’s here last night and tonight so I want to salvage them before they die. Fresh dried basil is so much better than the store crap!

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Yup, my garden is winding down too. A Decent harvest for a novice like me with plenty of green beans, carrots, squash, some tomatoes, etc with my strawberries and blueberries. Planning to start winterizing.
I could use a green house.

Thanks for sharing

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Thanks!
I'm glad to hear that your garden was successful this year!
A greenhouse is certainly nice, if you have a place to put it.

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Nice update on your garden. Wish we had a little of your rain...

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Thanks!
I'd be happy to send you some rain if I could... :-)

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Wow! That still looks amazing, to be honest. There's not a whole lot left here.
Really jealous of your carrots. For some unknown reason, I never had any success growing them. If they grow at all, they stay really small. I didn't bother this year, but after seeing yours, I might give them another try next year.

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Thank you!
I think one of the secrets to good carrots is good soil with some looseness to it. Carrots don't grow well at all in dense or compacted soil.

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