The garden is almost ready to for the winter. We removed the remaining sad tomato plants and the squash and trellises this week. The only “warm season” things left are the pole beans, the flowering sages, and the annual flowers.

We don’t have a lot of cool season plants either. Just the lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, and a few herbs and strawberries. You might notice that we left the straw after removing the plants. I feel like we are constantly trying to balance protecting the soil by leaving the straw on over the winter with reducing insect pressure by removing a place that insects could overwinter (in the straw).

We harvested the remaining squashes as we took down the trellises, but most of them weren’t mature yet. Squash is technically edible at almost any stage, but a winter/hard squash that is not fully hard yet will likely not have very sweet or good flavor. They were still cool looking though!

Since we talked about ripening green tomatoes last week, I thought I’d show you a couple before and after pictures. My office gets pretty warm, hence the quick ripening. Again, if they were in a cooler spot, they wouldn’t have ripened so quickly.

 Even the really green tomatoes in this batch have mostly ripened! There are still a few holdouts, so the question is if they were truly mature and will ripen eventually or if they weren’t completely mature and thus will not ripen at all.

The pole beans are still doing well. The green ones have slowed down some, but the purples are still producing like crazy. The purple variety is ‘Carminat’ and it is probably one of the sweetest snap beans I’ve ever eaten raw. Different bean varieties really do have slightly different flavors, and this particular variety is very sweet. Some varieties are nutty without having any sweetness and other just taste green/like grass.

The most photogenic thing left in the garden is clearly the Pineapple Sage (red) and the Mexican Blue Sage (purple). They have pretty much taken over their bed and with the tomatoes gone can really show off now!

Have a great weekend!