I had every intention of posting more than once this week, but apparently it wasn’t to be. I’ll have at least one additional post next week, (I hope!), although things are slowing down a lot in the garden.

Oh yeah, major change in the landscape this week! Our vegetable arbor is gone, so we can see the rest of the garden a bit better. All the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, vine crops, and basil are gone. All we have left are the flowers, the brassicas, root vegetables, leafy greens, and sweet potatoes. And a bunch of herbs.

After a particularly crazy September, our tomato harvests were slowing way down. We picked all the ripe tomatoes and the good sized green tomatoes when we took the plants out. This isn’t quite all of them, but we wouldn’t have gotten many more tomatoes this fall even if we had left the vines in place.

I’ve seen several good sized grasshoppers around the garden today. This one is hanging out on a cauliflower plant. I saw a particularly big green one in the parsnips, but didn’t have my camera at the moment. We aren’t going to do anything about them. At this stage, not much is going to kill them other than a heavy boot.

When we pull out our tomatoes and peppers, I always like to take a look at the roots. All our plants had nice healthy roots this year, with no signs of nematodes. The roots are nice and smooth, have good color, lots of root hairs, and no knobby distorted growths. Hurray! Before we redid the garden, we almost always had some bad nematode problems on the tomatoes.

While almost all the broccoli is well on its way to forming heads, the cauliflower is still just thinking about it. But, the fact that they haven’t bolted (sent up flower/seed stalks) is a good sign and the weather forecast for the next couple weeks looks ideal for producing great quality cauliflower. I’m excited to share pictures of all the different colors!

Have a great weekend!