End of year harvesting at the community garden plot.

Today turned out to be a nice day, so I was planning on working on the trailer some more, but plans have a way of changing. I usually walk around the yard for a bit when I first go outside, just to look at the garden and stuff. Today the garden caught my attention. After doing some work in my home garden, mostly weed removal and some cleanup of the raised bed where the tomato plants are, I decided to take a ride up to the community garden. It's been about a week since the last time I went up there. At that time, I picked some of the corn to see if it was ready, and brought home a couple of ripe pumpkins. I knew it was time to pick the corn, so I decided to do that today, along with picking up the squash and the rest of the pumpkins. I figured that I might have enough ambition to dig some of the potatoes also. I brought the wheelbarrow and several plastic totes to put the produce into to bring it home.

My garden plots are right next to one of the gates in the fence around the garden area, so this what you see from the gate. The corn stalks are getting dried up now.

Right in the corner of the garden is one of the pumpkins. This one is not ready to pick yet, it was probably the last pumpkin to develop on that plant. The leaves are full of powder mildew from all the rain that we've been getting, but the vine is still putting out flowers for some reason.

Here's a look at the garden plots from the other end. This is where the rows of potatoes are. The pumpkin and squash vines tried to take over the area with partial success.

A better look at the middle of the garden. You can see a couple of the pumpkins and a lot of the squash in this picture.

The first thing I did was to pick all the squash. The variety that I grew here is the Delecata winter squash. After I took this picture, I found 3 more of them.

Since the squash are heavy when they're all in the tote, the wheelbarrow is handy for getting them to my trailer, much easier on my back.

Next, I picked up most of the pumpkins. I left 2 in the garden because they're still fairly green and need more time to turn orange. These are small pumpkins, they sugar pie pumpkins. They don't get big like field pumpkins.

After that, I decided to pick the rest of the corn. I had a pretty good harvest of corn this year, perhaps not as good as it could have been, but still pretty good. This is a fairly primitive type of corn called Painted Mountain. It's a multi-color decorative corn that also is an excellent flour corn. You basically let it dry on the stalk and then pick it and let it dry some more.

I also managed to dig 2 rows of potatoes before I started running out of daylight. These rows have been yielding very well this year. These are Norland Red potatoes.

Here is the trailer, loaded up to go home.

I have to go back up there and dig the rest of the potatoes, I have 4 rows of the reds left to dig, and 2 rows of the blue potatoes that I planted late. Also at some point this fall, I have to back up there and clean up the garden plots for the winter. I plan on grinding up the corn stalks this year with the chipper/shredder instead of just hauling them away. I might as well add all that back into the garden, it will make good mulch for next year's garden.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!