Fall-ish garden talk

I LOVE fall.  And I popped onto my quiet little blog tonight just to tell you that.  The weather has not quite turned from summer...today it was in the 90's.  But, when I got up this morning, the Hubby had propped open the windows (something he only does when the air out there is cooler than in here) and I smelled IT.  If you love fall as much as I do, you'll know what I am talking about.  IT--the smell of fall.  That crisp, nose-tickly, leaves crackling, cooler breeze smell.  That smell that means that summer is wrapping up, and fall is on the next page.  Summer is ok.  Winter is fun...but Fall and Spring...you have my heart.  I love the colors of fall.  The smells.  The recipes.  The Harvest.  The feeling of accomplishment while harvesting the garden I've nurtured all summer.  Don't even get me started on the pumpkin bread, the zucchini casserole, the home canned applesauce....aahhh.

My meager little garden didn't do so well.  Let me back up. We're still waiting on a few things.  The tomatoes look like they are gearing up to give us one last round of vegetables, and if they are successful, that will be the most we've gotten out of our garden.  It's a pretty depressing story actually.  All the plants were doing really well, growing like crazy, putting out lots of flowers.  Even the rabbits seemed to have resigned themselves to the fact that they could not gnaw a hole in the fence.  I was gearing up for large amounts of produce.  (I do this by looking on pinterest at lots of different recipes.  It's really exhausting work.)  I was poised in anticipation.  Then....nothing happened.  The flowers withered and died without producing anything.  I watched repeatedly as little baby pumpkins and zucchini would start to grow and then wither into nothing.  All unsuccessful.  I found out later it was those stinky little melon beetles. 

Final count:  1 (small)watermelon, 1 (small)pumpkin, and 1 (extremely large) zucchini (which we deftly made into batter fried zucchini-as per our tradition).  Now we're waiting to see what our tomatoes are going to do.  C'mon, little tomatoes!  Grow!

At the beginning of the summer, I was in my garden thinning out the plants.  I have to admit, I HATE this job.  It seems so unfair to strike down a perfectly good little plant, whose always done everything I asked it to do, who is growing so sweet and so well, and I have to pluck it out and kill it just because it's too close to another.  It seems so unjust.  And apparently, I've passed that opinion on to my kids.  I was thinning the watermelon seedlings in the garden at the beginning of the summer, and Dev walked by and saw all the doomed seedlings on the ground, and decided that she was going to try to rid the world of injustice.  She took two, and planted them in the front garden (where the tomato plants are).  Fast forward three months, Dev's little adopted watermelon have taken over my front porch. And Dev keeps reminding me, "remember how you wanted to kill them?  We would never have had this watermelon to eat." 

I wish I had something to harvest this year.  And I wish that I was near family that would be willing to help me can and then eat said harvest, but instead I am here, harvest-less.  But it's ok.  I still love fall.