Putting the gardens to bed

I cleared out the back garden of tomatoes today. At first I was just going to pick any red ones. Then I realized most of the red ones were split and half rotten (I haven't harvested for a week, and the weather has been in the mid-40's (~7 C) every night). So then I planned to just pick all of them, red and green. (Mom has a recipe for Pickalily with green tomatoes that she made years ago and it was delicious on beef pasties.) But in the end, the whole tomato /green-bean /pepper garden was dismantled and put in the yard-debris garbage -- and then the herb garden and a few of the over-the-hill flowers around the yard until the debris bag was full. Once again I wished we had a compost, but we don't.

I planted four tomato plants in April; one started producing large cherry tomatoes in late July, the rest came into full fruiting in mid-August, so we had almost three full months of fresh tomatoes. It is a good thing, a tomato grown in your own backyard.

On the other hand, we had a total of 3 green beans (beans, not plants), and the one pepper fruited so late that the plant died leaving a sorry and rock hard 1-inch proto-pepper clutched in its dry, withered leaves. Apparently one of the few things that the Willamette Valley cannot produce naturally is a good sweet bell pepper. They require temperatures in the upper 70's (21+ C) minimally during both the day and the night, but the temperatures drop here at night, even in summer. Great for summer sleeping, not good for homegrown peppers. (The local farmers who do grow them use heaters.)

By accident I planted one heirloom cannelini plant (I thought it was a green bean), which produced several nice fat pods full of nice fat beans. That is, about 1/4 cup, not enough for a bowl of soup. So I have dried the beans and will plant them next spring -- if each bean produces a plant with as many pods as we had this summer, I should have at least 2-3 cups of beans, and I hope that next fall we can have a pot of homegrown minestrone (with purchased pasta). Actually, the cannelini didn't get planted until August and in a shady northern corner, so I expect I can have a much better harvest next year.

Hope springs even in fall. One of the tomatoes had three new blossoms; the passion flower on the patio is still blooming. Andrew suggested the maniacal grin for the photo.