Gardening 2017: September (last of the harvest)

And the harvest kept coming.

I planted a hundred or more tomatillo seeds, fearing that they might not come up, as I had no experience growing them. Well, I soon had a tomatillo forest, and I was only able to pick a couple hundred of the fruit. There were many hundreds. Interestingly, due to the density of the tomatillo plants, all of the fruit came out miniature, each maybe the size of a garbanzo bean on average.

I ventured to make tomatillo-pineapple salsa, and it turned out so well.
That was a first (both the salsa and the wellness). Gardens are so motivating.

Plenty of beets and carrots. These carrots actually tasted like carrots, contrary to the ones we grew in Virginia (which tasted like wood). The ground is so hard and clay here that the beets didn't push down into the soil and swell into round beets. Instead, they pushed down just enough to get water, and their tops swelled at ground level, so they all came out looking oblong and distorted. They were still very tasty, though.  

We harvested a few canteloupes, but they didn't taste very good. This one was over-ripe.

We finally had to pick the watermelons, since several of them had stopped developing, and we were getting into the cold season when they would perish anyway. If this one had a couple of weeks longer, it would have been perfect.

One of the personal-sized melons turned out triangular and wasn't growing, so we finally picked it to investigate.

It must have interbred with the pumpkins, and the inside looked and smelled like a pumpkin. We did not taste it.

We had so much fun experimenting with our garden this year, and we can't wait to see what adventures the next season will bring.