After I chopped off their pumpkin heads and scooped out their guts, I filled them full of the pie filling.

I hate to say this, but I felt very Martha Stewart’ish while making these. They were that cute.

They didn’t taste quite like pumpkin pie but they were good. It was a delicious fall sort of comfort food.

All my squash vines had bad cases of powdery mildew and were dying. My Jack Be Little pumpkin plant produced the most squash of any. It was a very bad garden year for squash. The next most productive variety was Carnival with four whole squash!

I seemed to have averaged one pumpkin or winter squash per vine with a couple of plants producing two. Pathetic! I’m not sure whether this was caused by the late planting, the very cool summer, or lack of pollination. It could very well be all three.

I have one very late green pumpkin that isn’t going to ripen in time. I left it out in the garden hoping for more sun. Most likely the frost or rain will kill it and then I will just feed it to the chickens.

I pulled out my Tiger Eye bean plants and shelled them. The beans did an excellent job drying on the plants. Someday we will grow enough dry beans to actually eat some.

Lee dug our two rows of potatoes. We planted them in late June (along with most everything else in our garden) and weren’t sure if we would even get a harvest.

We ended up with 108 lbs of potatoes from our 60 linear feet of row. That’s on par with past yields, and not too bad considering we planted third-generation potatoes really late in the season.

The popcorn is going to be a bust I think. I checked several ears of corn Saturday, but none of them were ready. We’ve had torrents of rain since then. I am expecting the corn to rot, as I don’t think there is much sun in the forecast for October. With the potatoes beds nicely tilled, I am going to plant garlic in them as soon as it stops raining. On a bad note, as we were digging potatoes we think we found a few symphylans. I am going to do the water soil test to make sure. If we do have them, rototilling and crop rotation seem to be your options for dealing with this pest.

My one cayenne pepper plant has turned red with peppers. I haven’t actually picked them yet as I’m not sure what to do with them. Does anyone else out there plant things without knowing what to do with them?

My Brussel sprouts are still growing. I tend to refer to them as “green balls” as I seem to forget their name 99% of the time. I actually had my first taste of Brussel sprouts this year, which was why I decided to plant some. It’s never too late to try a new veggie.

Our favorite cherry tomatoes, Sun Gold, are still chugging along. I actually have a lot of tomatoes that need to be picked, but I’ve been burnt out on canning for the last few days. As a final preserving project for the year, I’m going to can up some batches of stew tomatoes.

Lee’s hops look nice. Just looking at them on their bines is making Lee want to brew some beer.

I harvested my onions finally. I think I actually pulled them a bit too late. Several things I read said to harvest onions when half of their tops fell over and there were soft spots a few inches above the bulbs. Mine never did that. The middle stalks started getting really hard and some of the bulbs started going soft and shrinking.

The much lauded (or loathed?) zucchini has made its first appearance.

The cucumbers have arrived with a vengeance. If I get enough of them, I am going to try my hand at making fermented pickles this year.

We are hoping for a late summer so our two potato rows can finish. Some of the potatoes are starting to flower at this moment.

We have one row of popcorn. Some of it is small because of how late I planted it, while some of it is bigger. I feel great about my big popcorn plants until I drive by someone else’s corn stand. Then I feel a sense of gardener envy. We are REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hoping for that late summer so we can harvest our corn. This is bad, because I would prefer popcorn over the potatoes and Lee would prefer vice versa.

And … um … I took this picture from a low perspective so my corn would look bigger.

For the first time ever in our gardening lives we have onions! Somehow we had gardening misadventures with the previous two years of onions. It was almost a third year of misadventures, but thankfully some of onions survived despite how badly we treated the starts. Not all of the onions have big bulbs. This is a crop that Lee and I need to get more on the ball about growing, because onions are a staple in our house.

Our cole crop is still growing despite how out of season it was when I planted it. I’ve had to spray twice with BT to kill the worms, but that is to be expected.

We’ve even harvested some broccoli already. Color me surprised. I guess you can plant late and still get a little bit of everything.

One of our pumpkins has set a lone fruit. I’m not too hopeful about any of our pumpkins or winter squash (which haven’t set any fruit on yet) being able to finish before winter comes.

My peppers are quite a funny bedraggled group. Some of the plants are tiny and other plants are huge. I’m pretty sure there was a huge amount of rodent tunneling under the black plastic. I think it affected which plants grew and which didn’t. We had to stop putting out vole traps in mid July, as we started catching Garner snakes along with the rodents.

My tomatoes are also a mixed bag. Some have green fruit on them, others nothing much. Some plants look awesome, and others look a little sad. Good grief, haven’t my plants heard of consistency?

For the last couple of weeks I have been getting small handfuls of blueberries. Yummo!

Last week I harvested some purple garlic. Now you might ask what variety it is, but lets just say … I have no idea. There was a garden accident that involved permanent markers and masking tape. Now this usually works well for the summer but … um … it doesn’t work so well over a long rainy winter. In fact it works down right terrible! So I have 4 varieties of no-name garlic now.

This particular garlic we are going to eat and not save for replanting. Most of the bulbs are small with only a few large ones. Lee and I like big bulbs, because it’s a pain in the butt peeling lots of small cloves.

My other three varieties of no-name garlic did pretty well. I dug them up today.