We went out to the garden yesterday to do some harvesting and fall clean-up. I didn’t expect there to be much to harvest because the cucumber vines are starting to die back and I figured the squash plants would be pretty much finished up by now, but I was surprised by how many cucumbers and zucchini were hiding out there. The cucumber plants and squash plants start getting mildew-y around here this time of year and I did pull some up that were done producing, but was still surprised by how many I was able to leave and let keep growing. (I saved every flower and tiny squash because Jeff loves to sautee the squash flowers, something we were told about a few years ago.)

Some pumpkins popped up in the garden on their own this year, Bracken was especially happy to see those. He helped me harvest our spaghetti squash while Jeff cleaned out the chicken yard. We grew spaghetti squash for the first time in our garden this year and though it was a humble harvest, as you can see, we were all excited to have our own homegrown spaghetti squash. We are all huge fans of it. I wasn’t sure when they would be ready to harvest, I thought they would turn more yellow, but I was told it was time to harvest when the vines started dying back, so I’m sure they were ready.

Jeff reminded me that we needed to harvest some comfrey because we are due to make another batch of our Magical Healing Salve. While I was busy with garden harvesting and clean-up, Jeff and Bracken hauled load after load of leaves from the front yard, back to the chicken coop yard. (Bracken loved getting wheelbarrow rides and laying in the leaves!) The chicken yard gets so muddy when the rains come in the winter, and the leaves make their yard so much nicer. Though soon they will be spending less time in their yard because we will be letting them free range in the garden for their annual fall clean-up duty. They really do an excellent job at that. And I’m grateful that they are still giving us plenty of eggs right now.

The most exciting garden news was the fact that we harvested our lemon yesterday!! (Yes, the lemon we’ve been waiting an entire year to harvest.) It was only a wee bit green (which you can’t see much in the pictures) and looked ready to harvest. We haven’t used it yet, it’s waiting in the refrigerator and I feel like it should be used for something really special because we’ve been waiting so darn long for it and have been anticipating it all this time! I thought yesterday would be a “final harvest” of sorts, where I pulled up many of the plants and put the garden to sleep for the season. (Besides greens, there’s still lots of kale and collards to harvest for awhile yet.) But the garden is still growing out there and I’m behind in picking green beans, Jeff is the only one who has been picking them lately. I started clearing some beds to plant garlic. We didn’t plant any last year (oh, how we missed it!) and were so spoiled in having our own homegrown garlic the year before, that we certainly don’t want to miss planting it this fall!