When the forecast shows frost, it is a mad dash to get everything edible out of the garden. After all, you’ve spent hours and hours of your time cultivating, preparing, and tending to your garden. You don’t want to lose one thing!
The Harvest
Some people neglect to get their green tomatoes out of the garden. Please do not forget them! Not only can they be canned for various recipes, they will ripen indoors. Place them in a box inside or in a bag. If you want them to ripen quickly, put a banana near them. The gas the banana produces will cause them to ripen faster. I usually let them ripen slowly, because I need time to deal with all the other produce I’ve removed!
After my tomatoes are in a box, I clean all my winter squash off and let them cure before even thinking about cutting into them. This takes a good 2 weeks to develop flavor and 4 weeks if you want your squash to be the optimal sweetness. After that, I hang or lay all my herbs out to dry.
My next order of business is fresh green beans and summer squash. Green beans take priority, because summer squash can last a little bit in the refrigerator. Green beans begin to wrinkle after 2 days. I can them immediately or vacuum seal to freeze them. If I’m vacuum sealing them, I haven’t found that blanching makes them last any longer. I skip that step.
After Harvest
After everything has been harvested that would die in a frost, and after all the pressing preservations have been preserved (that was a fun sentence), it’s time to get my garlic out that I harvest in the early summer and plant it.
Garlic is probably the easiest crop to grow and plant. I just stick my thumb into the soil to the first knuckle, drop my clove in with the paper still on, and cover it up. That is it. In zone 8, I plant mid October to early November. For most zones, October is a good time to start considering planting garlic. I plant over 400 cloves. This ensures I have enough preserving, fresh eating, medicinal purposes, and seed for the next season.