The kids and I have been busy bees and productive in the garden lately, picking, pulling, tilling, planting again… Sweet Husband has been farming away in the big fields, but here is what gardening at home in October looks like for our family.

We dug our second batch of potatoes (red pontiac) early in October. We were, again, disappointed with the grub pressure, though this is a larger harvest than most years. Fix it: next year, I will be adding another 1-2 Japanese beetle traps in the yard/garden area. I didn’t weigh these spuds, and you can see we separated the worst ones (behind the kneeling pad). The keepers are curing in the basement on a cloth shower curtain. Then, they’ll be stored away from the onions and out of the direct light. We don’t have a root cellar, but they still keep pretty well.

We didn’t get as many butternut squashes this summer as last. That’s ok, but I was sad the bugs came in and had a picnic. The other issue: I didn’t trim back the long vines so the plants could put energy into growing the fruits. These are curing on our deck for another week or so.

Our dried beans: we planted Black Turtle(top two bins) and October beans (not shown here) specifically for dried beans. We also use our green beans that dry on the vine(bottom bin) for dried beans as well. They’re called Cherokee Trail of Tears. And, somewhere in there I had a few Jacob’s Cattle beans to grow just for seed for next year. They will surely stand out when we harvest the beans.

This was our final tomato harvest! (see below for how we used them)

The boys helped me plant garlic here on the north end of our garden. With fall garlic, you plant between Oct 1-15 (we are Zone 5) and space them approximately 6 inches apart (hence the magna-tile). My 13 year old planted the garlic while my 11 year old broke the bulbs into cloves. You plant one clove every 6″, flat side down, about 2 inches below the soil. We did two 30 foot rows, so hoping for about 120 cloves of garlic next July!

You may think my 8 year old daughter never helps, but she does. She has preferences just like anyone, and while the boys planted garlic, she folded laundry. Here, she was just outside the photo shot, but she picked a ton of green tomatoes. We are saving them and rationing them to the chickens each day.

I enjoyed listening to a podcast and picking these lovely October beans (aka Dwarf Horticultural) one sunny afternoon before taking field snacks to our farmers. We planted 3 rows of these. This was a bean we grew and ate when I was a child- nostalgia!

Here are all of our dried beans, finishing drying before we shell them. We use the pillowcase method of shelling (more on that in the future). Aren’t we blessed??

Here, we are processing our last picking of tomatoes. We ended up with about 6 cups of sauce.

And, we turned it into ketchup!! For the first time ever, I tried my hand at ketchup and bbq sauce. We love these types of sauces but haven’t used these homemade ones yet. I have made our own mustard for several years now. But adding these was simply fun!

The final project I’ll share: apples! These here are homegrown apples(we don’t know the variety). But we also purchased 2 bushels of Jonagold from a local Amish market and saved some for fresh eating. The rest we made into juice and sauce. I tried both regular and cranberry apple sauce. The latter is going to be my new favorite! You can see in the photo my new steam juicing tool- wow! Two products for the time it takes to make one!(see our Facebook page for the finished product photo!!)

Not shown: we planted the bare garden space in two types of cover crop: Groundbreaker Mix and Buckwheat. It is already germinating in spots!

(first photo above): The only crop left standing yet to be harvested is our Glass Gem popcorn. I asked Sweet Husband (our resident corn growing expert) to see what he thought about the moisture level without having to mechanically check it. He said (after feeling and tasting it) it wasn’t ready yet. We are letting it dry on the stalk a bit longer. Popcorn, I’ve learned, should be between 13-14.5 percent moisture inside the kernel. When we grew it two years ago, we must have let it dry too long because it won’t pop! No loss though- we grind it for cornmeal!

What does your garden look like in October?