Garden Harvest - First Frost - Maybe

As we were working on getting the garden prepared for the first frost of the season, we discovered that the mice had started to harvest one patch of our carrots before us. Naomi decided to beat them to the rest of the harvest and so she stands with a bucket of carrots and the garden fork in her hand.

We picked squash and mulched the vines. We ate the last of the sweet corn for lunch. All the savors of the summer foods - tomatoes, cucumbers, etc., take on a bittersweet emotional tone as the season advances. This first frost is always a marker. The smells change from seedy and flowery to musty and mouldy as the bacteria and fungi begin to dominate in the life processes.

The garden has been abundant this year. You can see it is also rather wild and rank. We sometimes long for the precise orderly gardens one sees in the magazines, but it doesn't seem to be in our nature. We are always trying to cram more into life than there is room for.

The web of fencing you see most clearly against the sky is 8 feet high and extends 4 feet underground - protection from the deer and the woodchucks. Behind Naomi and to the right (click on the photo to enlarge) are a couple of ceramic sculptures done by one of our daughters when she was in college. In the background on the right is Moose Mountain. Like it's companion, Owl Pate, it is about 2500 feet and about 1600 feet above the garden on the valley floor. The air drainage from those two mountains and the others in our neighborhood gives us some of the coldest temperatures in the region on those quiet clear nights of fall and winter.
PS: Wouldn't you know, it didn't freeze!

PPS: First Frost occurred sometime while we were away on the weekend of Sept.19-20-21.