October Harvest

 Cleared the bean patch today and harvested so many bean pods!  Decided to leave them on the plants and just cut or pull up the entire plants.  Then spread them out on a ladder laid horizontally between two garbage dumpsters in my garage to dry out.  Even moved the whole operation a few inches at a time out the door on a sunny day to assure they were dry.  Finally stripped off all the pods and laid on trays all over my breezeway for further drying.  Rich helped my shell the beans.  I estimated that all together it took about 10 hours to get about eight pounds of beans out of the pods.  I have a new appreciation for Thoreau who tried to live on beans and potatoes he grew at Walden Pond.

First heavy frost on October 19--but not wind, so I easily covered the veggies with frost blankets from Breda--just enough protection to keep the morning frost from settling on the garden.   (Oct 18-19 was the women's overnight campout on Indian hill---we froze, but the garden survived!) 

The pineapple sage on the east side of the SAGE barn has done really well.  Seems to love it there!   (Tried to keep it going until the Nov. 21 SAGE farm-to-table dinner, but we finally cut and dried some of it for tea just before the rewst of it froze.

The veggies on the other hand, we went all out trying to protect.   In late October and early November, Amy, Kathleen and I built a tent of frost blankets and plastic sheeting, with sawhorses under it strung with light bulbs.  It worked to protect the lettuce, broccoli, and parsley.  We also covered the chard, carrots, and some herbs with rubbermaid containers and plastic.  It worked!  We had a couple of nights of temps in the low 20's, then uncovered it for a few warmer days, then covered it again when the temperature dropped, then uncovered for a day, and picked evrything just before a disastrously cold night.  We put everything in the big rubbermaid containers in the walk-in cooler at the lodge and almost everything lasted 10 days for the SAGE dinner Nov. 21.   A do-it-yourself freeze-protection success--except the red leaf lettuce which looked too funky after 10 days to serve..but we had plenty of green!