Bidding my garden goodbye for the winter

As I sit here, drinking my coffee and surveying the frost covering my grass and garden, I come to the realization that my vegetable gardening season has come to an end.  I'll miss the daily trips out to the garden to pick whatever was ripe.  My dog Beans will miss eating grape tomatoes fresh off the vine.  But the one thing I will miss the most are homegrown tomatoes.  We joyfully consumed them all summer, and I canned many quarts of them for enjoyment over the long winter.  But, soon I will be forced to buy......gasp......tomatoes from the grocery store.  They are a sad substitute for the homegrowns, but they will have to do until summer next year.

Here are some of the things I learned from my garden this year:

1.  Growing broccoli is a waste of time and precious garden space.  It takes up a lot of room, and yields very little.  I will be content to buy broccoli from the grocery store, and use the space in my garden for better things.

2.  Kohlrabi rocks!  Strange looking little cabbage-like globes that are wonderful sliced then eaten raw, or even roasted in the oven or grilled.  I will plant more of these next year, we ate them up too quickly.

3.  Yellow tomatoes are pretty, and that's about all they are.  I planted a regular sized yellow tomato plant, and a yellow mini pear tomato plant this year just out of curiosity.  I learned that, while the bright and sunny yellow color is pleasing to the eyes, their flavor is nothing special.  So, next year, I will eliminate them from my garden, and seek out a new heirloom variety or two to take their places.

4.  Pole style green beans are easy to grow, taste great, and don't require bending over to pick.  Many beans were left on the vines, hidden between the dense foliage of the plants, often resulting in beans over 6 inches long, and containing 10-12 bean pods inside.  I will plant at least two rows of green pole beans, but I will also try the purple variety, hoping they will be much more visible!

5.  Two grape tomato plants will yield more tomatoes than a family of four can eat.  I will plant two plants again next year, but I will cage them with two cages each, one stacked on top of the other, to a height of 8 feet.  this will prevent them from invading the rest of my tomato patch.  I often found grape tomato vines and their fruit winding their way through other tomato plants as far as 4 feet away.  Containment will be the key next year.

6.  Plant more eggplants.  I planted one regular plant, and one of the japanese variety this year, and once I tasted them, I immediately wished that I had planted more plants.  The japanese variety yield cucumber sized and shaped eggplants, which were wonderful sliced and roasted in the oven until golden brown.  The regular sized eggplants were used in eggplant parmesan, and often cut up and put into vegetable soups.  I will plant at least two plants of each variety, and perhaps an additional two of the japanese variety.

7.  While the Rutgers variety of tomato produced a lot of lovely tomatoes for me this year, they didn't produce what I call the "BLT Tomato" that my family loves.  By this I mean softball sized tomatoes that yield slices that will cover an entire slice of bread.  I'll reduce the number of Rutgers, and re-introduce the wonderful Porterhouse variety.

In January, when the mayhem of the holidays is past us, I will begin my annual obsession with seed catalogs.  In March, I'll start my tomato plants, basil, and cilantro from seed.  My dining room and living room will be taken over by grow lights, and seed starting trays through mid-May, when I'll plant the precious plants in the garden.  I'll plant kohlrabi, beets and swiss chard seeds directly into the soil.  Then, once again comes the hard part, waiting for all of the wonderful bounty.

So, to my garden, you were good to my family and me this year.  I wish you a peaceful slumber over the cold winter months, and can't wait to work with you again in the spring.