For me, October is harvest time, it marks the end of my gardening season.
I’m fairly pleased with my crop this year, especially considering that I didn’t take very good care of my garden this year.
Every May, I eagerly plant my garden. I love being outside in the fresh air and sunshine. I even enjoy the manual labor of preparing the soil for the new seedlings and planting the seeds. For the first month or so, I took great care of the garden. I watered it daily and dug out every little weed as soon as it sprung up. Then, sometime near the end of July or beginning of August, I start to not take such good care. I start resenting having to water every night, especially while getting eaten alive by mosquitos. The weeds start taking over, and I just ignore them. Usually, I still am blessed with a decent harvest.
This year, however, my luck ran out. My above ground crops didn’t do very well at all. Plenty of grape tomatoes, but only a few bell peppers and cucumbers. My broccoli did ok, enough for meals throughout the summer, but no extra for the freezer like in years past.
I had a decent sweet potato harvest. I’ve cured them and they are now in my crawl space to hopefully last through next spring again. Last year, we enjoyed the last of our crop in a sweet potato casserole for Easter dinner.
I also had a nice crop of carrots again this year. Last year, I preserved them by blanching, and then freezing. It worked great but required a lot of prep work. This year, I just didn’t have the time, so I found some articles about storing them in a root cellar. I don’t have a root cellar, but I have a crawl space that stays fairly cool. Most of the articles recommended storing the carrots in sand, straw or peat moss. I also read one that stored them in leaves. I have six large trees on my property, so, this time of year, let’s just say that I have plenty of leaves 🙂
So, this year, I’m experimenting with my harvest – half of my carrot crop is stored in a 5-gallon bucket covered in leaves. The other half was cleaned, chopped, blanched and frozen in ziplock baggies. I’ll let you know how it turns out 🙂
Do you like to garden? How do you preserve your harvest?