End of Summer Garden

So along with the close of the summer comes the close of my vegetable garden. The veggies and my sunflowers and a few weeds, who snuck their way in, just totally took over and became overgrown and looked raggedy. I loved the abundance and the sheer shock of how well everything grew from seed, but it's time to clear all that out to let my other plants to breathe and have time to shine for the fall. I have two, what were small plants when I bought them last year, that are now 4 ft x 4 ft and have bloomed these tiny, pretty, bright, purple flowers that were totally over taken by my gourds and other plants and now after my purging they are the show stoppers in the garden.

My sunflowers got so tall and the heads so heavy that the heads would fall down and they just looked so sad. So I finally cut most of them down but I cannot get all of the stalks out of the ground. The stalks are massive.



I have SOOOOOO many gourds. So some interesting facts about gourds: 1) the plants are spiky as hell, 2) their vines have little tendrils that shoot out and grab onto anything, 3) They got some horrible powdery mildew going on, and 4) the vines get long.

A couple of my bell pepper plants survived and I've got a couple of small peppers. My cukes are still coming in. Right now my zucchini are coming in like crazy. I am getting huge zucchini's. I have baked 4 loaves of 2 different types of zucchini bread, made two zucchini bakes (kind of like a quiche) and pasta with zucchini for four days lunch, all this week. I still have another zucchini in the fridge and it too is massive.




I've learned a lot about vegetable gardening. About what grows well here and what I grow well. I've also learned that I need to tone down how much I plant. I also have some major moving of some of my large perennials to do. They've grown bigger than I eve expected and they are crowding each other out. Many of these are my fall plants, so think I may wait until Spring to move the plants. I also need to move a bunch of my herbs and I think I am going to test the limits of many of my different mint plants and see if they can survive in pots over the winter. The regular mint plant is super invasive, and the other type of mint plants I have aren't far behind. I bought seed mix for a cover crop in my vegetable section and will start that next week and continue until all of my vegetables are done. Even with what seems like half of the foliage gone, my mosquitoes are not. I was out there for five minutes today and have about 8 bites on one forearm alone.