We are back from another amazing, memorable trip. This time we decided to stay in our explore part of our own country and visited beautiful, serene Newfoundland. It was definitely one of our favourite trips to date. We were spoiled with sunny, warm weather for the majority of our trip with only a few rainy days. What we expected to be a cold and drizzly trip ended up quite pleasant and warm.

The same could be said of the weather when we arrived home. Following suit of our unseasonably wet and cool summer, fall seems to have arrived early and it is packing rain. Our garden, lawn and yard showed us just how well it had been watered while we were away.

My parent are awesome and managed to get our back lawn mowed for us before we got back, which was good because it was a few days before it stopped raining long enough to get the other lawn mowed.

The garden had continued to explode with growth and produce. We FINALLY got a few cucumbers! Just in time for the plant to start getting powdered leaves. At least I managed to grow two this year…which is odd considering we usually harvest a ridiculous amount (over 100 per season usually).

The Peter Pan plant was also getting powdery leaves, and it had taken on a jungle vibe. None of the Peter pans were harvested while we were away, resulting in dinner plate size squash all over. Although you can eat them at that size, they aren’t that great of a texture once they reach it. It didn’t look like it was going to produce much more due to the early fall-like temperatures so we decided to pull it for the year. I managed to get a few smaller sized ones to end the season with.

Our pepper plants were also finishing their final harvest. The peppers starting to turn orange and red. I harvested another large bowl and will pickle them for K to snack on throughout the winter. We have learned that once banana peppers start changing colour, it is important to harvest them because they will go bad quickly.

Our strawberries are still flowering and producing so we will leave them to continue growing into the fall. Unfortunately, there were a lot of rotten berries in the bed, so there are also now quite a few fruit flies. The good thing is the bed is as far away from the house as possible, so we shouldn’t have an issue with them inside. I grabbed all that I could to freeze for some jam making later this fall. We did however, turn off the water to this bed as it seems to be getting too much. We found a strawberry that had grown a coat of fur to keep itself warm. Yuck.

We also turned off the water to the tomatoes. Well, we actually turned off the water to the whole garden for now with the amount of rain we are getting. I don’t foresee us needing to turn it back on this season. The tomatoes are so waterlogged that as they ripen they are splitting, a good indicator of too much water. Hopefully by turning off the water, the rest of the tomatoes will have a chance to ripen without splitting.

We also decided to empty one of our potato towers. We will leave the other two to harvest once we have finished the first harvest. We got a good haul of potatoes, but from just a small strip in the tower. The straw on top had no potatoes, but the soil/straw mixture in the middle had the whole harvest. The bottom of the towers also did not yield any potatoes. Next year we will start them lower and make sure we keep the soil/straw mixture consistent all the way through.

A few more weeks and we will do our cleanup of the two raised beds so that we can remove them in preparation for our spring re-build of new beds with the 10′ privacy screen.