Thus Ends the Growing Season

I've said it once and I'll say it again, the first year of gardening was reasonably successful.  It is all about managing expectation and mine were pretty low given I had no idea what I was doing.  We spent a couple hours clearing out the garden area after the NC trip since everything froze while we were gone.  I was amazed at how shallowly rooted the massive pumpkin and watermelon vines were, but that made it all that much easier to clear them out.

We did some work to start training the raspberries and blackberries, hopefully next year they will produce a little more.The raised beds are back to square one which is perfect for our plans for next season.  There is currently a massive research effort going on to identify what, how, when to grow and potentially why.  The last harvest of the season yielded much watermelon . . .

It was only after eating the green tomatoes that I found out you can let them ripen off the vine, they sure were  tasty as fried green tomatoes . . . for which the Rise & Shine secret chicken dredge worked perfectly.

G definitely provides some good support and motivation for getting things done around the house and the yard.  The pile of mulch that sat on the strawberry area finally got spread to other parts of the yard and the strawberry pot is now centered with a number of this year's runners planted in the ground.  Again, the hope is to increase yield beyond the handful of strawberries we had.

 Along with the end of the growing season comes the end of this being a part-time gardening blog.  Having a little more time in life has not only given me the opportunity to start updating the ol' blog again, but we've even left town a few times with more travel coming up . . .