End of the Growing Season?

Well, since the forecast is for a hard freeze on Saturday, we raided the garden last night to get the pumpkins, squash and other stuff and to see if our melons have ripened yet. They turned out to be pretty good, but not quite fully ripe, so let's hope the next few days get things done!



The big pumpkins in the picture are the Big Max variety, the small ones are Baby Pam (which are supposed to be excellent for pie), a honeydew, a watermelon (Sugar Baby), some butternut squash and green peppers as well as several tomatoes, a cucumber and a zucchini.

We also did lettuce, sunflowers, cantaloupe, spinach, peas, and another pumpkin called Howden, which grew pumpkins the boys described as "demented." We'll probably stick to the traditional-looking ones in the future. I'd have to say the garden was a success this year, despite all our summer squash and pumpkin plants getting powdery mildew and dying off over the last 2-3 weeks and the onions, beans, cauliflower, broccoli and hot peppers (jalapeno and habanero) being a complete bust.

We're saving seed from our spinach, peas, Big Max pumpkins, watermelon, butternut and sunflowers. All the other melons, squash and pumpkins will cross with each other or were hybrids, so we aren't saving seed for those. We bought a cool book called Seed to Seed that covers a ton of information on saving seed, so we're going to give it a whirl. Wish us luck!