End of Season Photo Tour

Time for some late 2024 harvest highlights! I haven’t tallied harvest weights yet, but there’s certainly an abundance coming in. This despite having to scale back a bit this year due to health challenges. I’m definitely appreciating all the work we put into this yard-farm over the past decade. We are literally reaping the rewards of perennial agriculture this year. We cultivated some healthy ecosystems, and now those ecosystems are giving back to us. Here are a few fun highlights…

Wow, I don’t know what to tell you, but every year I get a few three-legged carrots. I don't know why. There's this one part of one growing bed that regularly yields three-legged carrots. We throw new compost and soil in there; it’s amended with fresh growing medium every year. So, it's not the soil. Maybe it's something about how the sun hits that bed. I don't know. We grow Franken-carrots. I think they're funny.

 We’ve been enjoying apples and grapes too. We've been looking forward to that all year, watching the bees work on the apple tree in the spring and watching those grape clusters form since mid-summer. We got a couple pounds of grapes this year. This is a vine that's only had a couple years to establish itself, so we're pretty pleased with its productivity this year.

 You can see some elderberries in there too. We'll use those to make elderberry syrup later this winter. I'll just freeze them for now. That’s something I often do with berries. Berry crops often come in so fast and furious, all at the same time. We pick our berries, freeze them, and then in the winter time, we thaw them and make our jams and syrups. That works out well because once it’s wintertime, we have more time to process all that food and we don’t mind running the stove all day. Canning does NOT sound like fun when it’s still hitting the 80s and even 90s during the day. So we don’t do it now.

 Here's the kitchen garden in late-season. The raised bed closest in the foreground is mostly cabbage and tomatoes. In the background, there’s a fallow bed that was just covered in sunflowers planted by the birds. Beyond that is a raised bed with lovage, onions, and more tomatoes. Closer to the gate is our root crop bed full of parsnips, turnips and carrots.

This is also final herb-cutting season. We've been busy cutting and drying culinary herbs and teas before we head into the freezing temperatures. Though a lot of these herbs are pretty cold hardy. We'll cut a few sprigs here and there, sometimes even into November.

 Here you see oregano, thyme, sage, and lavender. We give them a rinse and wilt them out in the sun, make sure they're nice and dry, before we wrap them up into bundles and hang them to fully dehydrate in a cool, dry, place inside. I will also pick some lemon balm and mint before we head into freezing temperatures soon.