busy

Haven't posted for a while although the garden has been busy. Raking fall leaves, and piling them into the compost. The bin is full but sinks a bit every day so I can add more. Two more Broccoli plants are getting nice heads, the one we cut earlier is growing several more small ones around the main stalk. The Nasturtiums are growing wild and taking over all the space left over from where zucchini came out, and putting out thick tendrils into the lush Lettuce patch. The Bell Pepper plant has a few new peppers on it but I don't know if they'll get big enough to ripen and wonder if I should bring it indoors in a pot. I did so with the Basil, two large pots in the mudroom and three smaller ones in the deep living room windowsill; they've just begun recovering and putting out new leaves. We still have a few green Tomatoes ripening in the window but only three plants left outside; when their tomatoes give a hint of rosiness and come into the house they'll come out of the ground too.

The Green Beans had thick heavy pods from the two weeks they were left untouched; we picked them all to dry and pulled apart the beans set aside earlier; sixty dry white beans for seed and all those others that are now hanging in a mesh bag. Come time to plant in spring I'll choose the fattest ones and hope for the best. I had left the plants in the ground thinking they might produce a bit more after that but they just withered so yesterday pulled out and chopped up for composting. The few Bean plants among the lettuces are giving beans, but they don't have very good flavor so I might yank them, too. Just last week I levered all the droopy old yucky-looking Sunflower stalks out of the ground and chopped them up for compost too. That was a tough job- the stalks thick, the root balls heavy. Daughter picked apart the browned heads for seeds and wants to save them for planting again like she sees me do with basil and green beans. I don't know if they'll grow (or if they were hybrid plants we'll get something wild and unlovely) but package them up like the rest into a jar in the fridge to see.