Where did the summer go?

No posts (garden or otherwise) since the middle of July?! I'm terrible, I know. All I can say is that I became so involved with the garden that I barely touched the computer unless it was to do veggie-related research. Along with being up to my armpits in soil and tomatoes, we had visitors from Ireland (which meant finishing the guest room), a trip to a cottage on Georgian Bay, I started a new job and there has been a new addition to the family (more on that later!) so blogging took a back seat. I will do a slight recap of what has happened since July, but as it's NOVEMBER I won't spend too much time going too far into detail.

Let's start with the garden...

After being excited and snapping so many photos of the first few vegetables I quickly became overwhelmed by the volume of veg that the garden was spitting out that I stopped taking photos. What more can I say?! Below are some snaps of the garden that stole my heart this past summer.

 

I dare not take and post photos of what the garden looks like now...lets just say there are four empty boxes full of soil in the back yard, covered in leaves topped with a light sprinkling of snow! As far as garden successes and failures, there were many! One of two zucchini plants was extremely productive, the other not so much, but I still managed a total of 51 zooks that were all a very decent size. The chard and kale (the few plants that survived the caterpillars of doom) showed their worth towards the end of the summer, in fact I harvested the last of both just a few weeks ago (blanched and frozen into cubes). Lemon cucumbers were a winner, producing so many so fast I couldn't keep up with them. I only got about two dozen carrots but what I did harvest was great and I can't complain since the seeds were free! As for tomatoes?! I harvested over 85lbs! That was far more than I expected, especially since the weather was pretty rainy and damp and we didn't have as much heat as we often do through August. Sadly there was a lot of lost veg from the week away at the cottage - a soggy, rain filled week that helped rot take hold of the few remaining toms. Radishes were great, beets and turnips didn't do so well and the parsnips? I got about 10 parsnips, some a bit small, others a great size but taste-wise they were lacking. I suppose they could have used longer in the ground (several frosts?). I waited until they had experienced two frosts but perhaps they needed more? Now what on earth did we do with all this produce you ask?! Well there is still a considerable amount of veg frozen in the freezer, we ate veggies non-stop through the summer, I supplied family with more tomatoes than they could handle and box after box of veg went with the man to work!

Of course now that the growing season is finished all I can do is daydream, research and make plans for next years garden - I cannot wait! And stay tuned, my recap of the past few months will continue with a post on our visitors from Ireland, the Georgian Bay cottage trip and I will reveal the new addition to our family!