Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Gardening in Wyoming

Well if you've ever gardened in Wyoming or anywhere else with a similarly short growing season this is inevitably a picture you are familiar with.... the harvest after an early freeze.

So a freeze took our tomato and squash plants last week, the first one on September 6 and another hit on the 9th. This is a little less than half of the tomatoes that Lorna and I divided up.  They will faithfully continue ripening until we've eaten all of them.  The squash, that I'm not so sure about, we'll see if that ripens.

Garden update:
  • The frozen tomato and squash stems are pulled and in the compost pile. 
  • The greens (kale and swiss chard) haven't slowed down yet,
  • The carrots, turnips, and beets are doing great! 
  • We got 4 red potatoes from something left over from last year as we didn't plant potatoes. 
  • All onions, shallots and garlic are pulled - and were a great success! 
  • Broccoli struggled this year - probably because we thought we were the broccoli queens last year, we needed to be taken down a notch.
  • And we have one nice head of Cauliflower - that was a plant we had no idea what it was until about 2 weeks ago!
  • I have to say it was a bonus year for tomatoes, and just when I'd determined it wasn't worth the effort.  I think the key is going with a smaller version that doesn't have to grow for so long - but that will probably change next year.
  • Cabbage is doing well and is yummy I must say.
  • Parsley is the herb of the year.
  • What struggled: Peas, green beans, and squash - well we planted them - - that's about all we can say ...,

3 comments:

  1. Hi Christine, Martha sent me your link. I enjoyed hearing about your garden. My tomatoes did very poorly this year, but my watermelon was great. I learned the secret of knowing when a watermelon is ripe.
    You turn it over and look real close in the yellow area where it has been sitting on the ground and you look for little black dots. These dots are like tiny. They are called sugar marks and if you see a bunch of those you know if the watermelon is ready to pick.

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