It will be just a few more days and it will be time to put our gardens to sleep; by that, I mean cleaning the gardens of debris, tomato stakes, dead plants, etc., and making it look nice and clean when we start back next season. It’s a suitable time to fertilize your garden and make sure a soil test is completed on the garden space and ready for the next season.

I have been working on our harvest report. I’m not saying we are finished gardening and harvesting our gardens. I check on all the gardeners every week or they send report to me. Several have finished except for harvesting potatoes, sweet potatoes and a few other things like peppers. Some have planted another crop of beans and turnips. One gardener planted more cucumbers.  Our gardeners have had a good year with beans, corn, and tomatoes. We don’t know about potatoes yet, since not all of them have been harvested. No one had any remorse about the gardens, just a few were kind of upset over their cucumbers. Our tomatoes were a really good crop this season. Corn was plentiful. A lot of canning and freezing was done this summer.

Several people in our groups are widows or low-income recipients. Canning and freezing all this food will help them in the months to come with their food bill.  We all know that we have experienced a few items that have been hard to get. I believe everyone enjoyed gardening. Yes, its hard work and the sun is hot, but the rewards are very good.

We have already started signing people up for next season, and we have several new gardeners already. But we are looking for some young people in the ages of 12-16 to join.