Vegetable Garden Winding Down and Thinking Ahead

I don't know whether this time of year makes me sad or happy. On the one hand, the vegetable garden is winding down. Tomorrow's task list includes taking out the tobacco sticks (long sticks with pointed ends that were using to harvest tobacco in olden times; I got a bunch of them from a neighbor who was cleaning out his barn and I use them as tomato stakes), removing the dead tomatoes and peppers, and trimming back the herbs. I found a few wayward carrots and those will need to be pulled too.  I also found my onions. I'd planted a bunch but thought they'd all died. Lo and behold, after cleaning out the beets a few weeks ago, I found a few shoots, and left them alone.  They're still rather small so I may leave them over the winter and see what happens.

Yesterday as I wrapped up my latest book, Attracting Birds to the Garden, and now settle back to await the galley proofs before it can be released to Lulu and Amazon for printing, I started thinking about my next book. That led me to research on heirloom vegetables and bean seeds.  I've said before that the two things that grow best in my vegetable garden are root crops and beans, and the herbs are fairly good, so that's what I'm focusing on next year.  A bit of poking around again into the fascinating world of heirloom vegetables rekindled my interest in the topic; I'm hoping not only to grow them next year, but to write about them.

Beans have fascinated me for a long time too, not just the green beans typical of the suburban garden but the plethora of heirloom beans that were once grown by Native Americans, European settlers and more throughout North America. Many of them are easy to find in the supermarket - kidney beans, white beans, navy beans, black beans - so I probably won't grow those. But what about the yin-yang bean with its amazing coloration that looks like the Chinese yin-yang sign? Jacob's Cattle bean, once a staple food? There are dozens of beans like this and I spent quite a while last night on the Vermont Bean Seed company website, thinking of what to plant.

I know that I will plant broccoli rabe next spring. I missed planting it this year and I enjoy it even if my family has yet to grow to love the bitter taste.  And...it goes well with beans....

Can you tell I'm getting a wee bit obsessed again?  Yet it's this interest, this delving into one topic and following all sorts of routes and side routes of information that has kept me interested in gardening all these years.

So tomorrow is clean up time in the vegetable garden. I will redraw my garden plan so that during the winter I can remember where all the bulbs went - I tend to lose them from fall planting to spring blooming. If time permits, we'll add another 200 daffodil bulbs to the orchard lawn, and move more truckloads of compost into the vegetable beds.  Typical Saturday!