The Fall Garden

This week Adam is working hard to transition into our fall garden. That means ripping out all the tomato plants:

 They were still bearing, but they were massacred by horn worms and other pests, and the fruit was awful-looking.

 I made one more quart of good tomato sauce from a last picking, and then the plants went into the compost.
He also removed the first cucumber bed ... nice and clean now!

He's put Wando sweet peas in these three beds. We discovered in early summer that we could eat about as many peas as we could grow, haha!
And he nourished the soil with Worm Tea from our worm bin.

"Black Gold! Texas Tea!"

The asparagus is looking fine. In the other small raised bed, and in the old cucumber bed, he'll plant lettuces and spinach for autumn salads.

Today he's also weed-eating the bean mounds. Our beans were pitiful this year, in spite of doing a second planting. Molested by bugs at first, they did recover, and they've bloomed, etc., but never really yielded many good beans.

Our pepper plants are bearing well now:

But one of them is decimated by something eating away at it. Not sure what.

Our second planting of zucchini and squash are looking quite healthy -- they are on the far left in the photo below:

 Oh -- the purpose of the photo above is also to show that we didn't rip out absolutely all of the tomato plants. We have about six plants left that are still bearing well. We kept them.
And our two horseradish plants are looking fabulous now that Adam ripped out the old broccoli plants around them:

The dogs love to play while Adam works.

But Beau sometimes tires of these antics and hides under the truck.

While Adam poured Worm Tea into the beds, I sat in a chair in the shade and perused our little farm that he's worked so hard on. He is the labor; I am the photographer, chicken lady, and occasional help. Here's a short video, complete with road noise and insects humming:

It's so peaceful sitting there. I'm very thankful for where we live.

More on chickens and hostas in the next post!