Some Fall Harvest

So far the fall harvest has been decent, especially for greens. And now, we are getting to harvest some of my favorites - broccoli and sweet potatoes. My experience for growing spring broccoli was not too good, so this gives me some encouragement that I can indeed grow a decent broccoli.

The piece of broccoli in the photo is the best that I have harvested thus far. For scale, the knife shown is about 7 inches in length, so the broccoli is a nice large-sized head.

The sweet potatoes are also some "jumbos". I haven't grown them before and didn't know when to harvest. Everything I had read had indicated to wait until a frost and the leaves turning brown. Well, we really haven't had a killing frost yet, and are about two weeks beyond our normal first freeze...so I dug them up anyway. All of the rain that we have been getting appears to have taken a bit of toll on the crop. Several large potatoes were split wide open...I assume form the excessive moisture (like a tomato does).

Artichokes are in the ground

I started some artichokes from seed back in the first part of August. I got some of them into the ground a week or so ago. They seem to be establishing themselves quite nicely now. We have had good rains and cool temperatures for the last month.

I am also trying to keep two of the plants in one gallon containers over the winter, to be planted into the ground in late winter or early spring. These two will probably not produce the first year, but, hopefully, will be robust the second spring.