September was a busy month, the garden was very productive, and I had a hard time keeping up with everything. The summer plants were in full swing, and I harvested pounds of tomatoes. The weather was also quite nice and we had a lengthy growing season before the first frost hit in October.

A regular harvest, the cherry tomato plants sprouted up all over the place from dropped fruit from last year, and I left many of them to grow rather than pulling them out. The chipmunks liked the tomatoes too, so I ended up harvesting many of them early and let them ripen on the kitchen counter.

I harvested and dried a bunch of flowers from the garden, including these marigolds and calendula. I also saved cosmos and coreopsis for future natural dye projects.

I grew a bunch of marigolds this season scattered throughout the garden. A couple of the plants in the dahlia bed grew to be as tall as the dahlias!

The compost grown pumpkins really came into production in September. I was worried about the lack of fruit earlier in the season, but I did manage quite a good harvest. Two of the jack-o-lantern sized ones remained green since they had a late start, but they made for good decorations.

This particular pumpkin grew about 3 feet off the ground because the vine started climbing a nearby shrub. In order to support the vine, we put a plant stand underneath with a cardboard box on top so it wouldn’t get stuck in the slots.

The final full-size unrip pumpkin growing near our magnolia tree. The vine stretched about 25 feet from the compost pile to the border with our neighbor.

I brought home a free passionflower plant from work in mid-August and by late September it was recovering and blooming. The flowers are very unique and pretty.

I finally managed to fill the compost bin for the first time all season once I started clearing out summer plants at the end of September. Last year’s compost with the pumpkins growing is just visible behind this bin. The compost in that bin is finished, and I will spread it in the garden in spring. Once that bin is empty, I will turn this bin into it, break up any large stems, and then let it sit and break down for a full year. Composting is a long, slow process, but once I flip the pile, I can basically forget about it. I’m very grateful that we get a bunch of fall leaves, free mulch! I add a bunch to the compost pile to balance out the fresh material and use leaves to protect the fruit trees over winter.

My one-year-old Cortland apple tree actually produced fruit this year! I harvested 3 small apples from it. Looking forward to seeing how many more it grows next year.

I also bought an additional apple and pear tree from Stark Brothers Nursery because two of mine from last year was not doing well and I wanted to have a replacement if it died over winter. Thankfully they both survived so that meant I had to find new places for the “replacement” trees. They had lived in pots with the fig trees all summer but we planted them out so they could get settled in before the frost hit. We planted them in early September, staked them for additional support and put down a layer of straw mulch to suppress weeds.

In September I finally had enough cucumbers at once to make a small batch of refrigerator pickles. I’ve never tried canning, but the fresh method works well for making a few jars at a time.

The potted bell pepper plants finally started producing small peppers in late summer. I ended up harvesting them all green and using them when I made pasta sauce. I’m still trying to get peppers right, but I never seem to get fruit until late August/early September, and they almost never have a chance to ripen to their proper color. I will be trying to overwinter some of the plants indoors to see if I can get a faster start to the season next year.

The last bowl of cherry tomatoes before I removed the spent plants to the compost pile. There were many days where I harvested 1-2 pounds of tomatoes.

I did manage to get a modest fig harvest this year from my established trees, a few pounds total. These are two of the late season Green Ischia figs I had with breakfast on hobbit day.

The fall blooming Shasta daisies provided a nice pop of color when most of the other plants were fading away. I still have kale, celery, and some herbs in the outside beds. I planted a few lettuce seedlings in the greenhouse so I’m going to see if they survive winter.

This season proved to be very productive on the whole. There were some surprising wins and some difficult challenges to content with. The year started off with a lot of rain and the spring was very cold and cloudy. As a result, the garlic suffered, but I had my best lettuce season yet. I experimented and grew corn successfully for the first time, not huge ears, but they were edible. My attempt at growing willow did not work out, and the woodchuck ate my squash plants and a lot of the leafy greens. The pumpkins were slow to start but still did well, the other winter squash plants did not do much. The tomatoes did phenomenal; I harvested 73 pounds total! The dahlias were a happy surprise, and I cut over 220 flowers. Next year I will need to stake them better, so they don’t all fall over. I had just over 100 harvest days from the garden over the course of the year. There’s no way to know what next year will bring but I’m looking forward to it.