Harvesting Seeds from The Garden and a Fall Garden Update

Today was a pulling weeds kinda day, and taking plants to hang for a few weeks to harvest the seeds from them. That is one of the more important tasks of the fall when gardening. I have planted one of my smaller raised beds with plants purely for the idea of letting it go to seed so that I can have more for next season. The following plants both out in the garden and in the house for my herbs, for winter.

This is my mint plant I use all winter. It is ready to harvest these stalks for their seeds for next year.

This is my oregano, with a small bundle of seeds ready to put away.
Now going outside here are some of my plants ready for hanging.

This is my Cilantro. I love this fresh for my spaghetti sauces and I also use it when canning my Salsa.

This is Fennel, if your not familiar with this plant, it tastes similar to leeks and it is a great addition to soups. I am just waiting a bit longer for this one before I hang it.

Ah Lettuce, Leaf lettuce to be precise. This has been ready for a little while, and will be hanging and harvesting what I can today for seed. I grow Lettuce all winter so these seeds will be put to good use in the next weeks when I plant the rest of my cold frames.

Lastly this is one of my broccoli plants that I allowed to go to seed. I will also be planting this for winter, and using the seeds. I am hanging this one to dry for a couple of weeks.

Here are just some photo's of what else is going on in the garden this late in the season.

Lots of ever bearing Strawberries still coming.

Still have a few Cantalope trying to make the cut for this season. I am hopeful that they will be large enough before a couple good frost.

This little guy might not make it, but you never know, as it is in a raised bed.

I am ready to snip some of these shallot onions off and put them away for planting in the spring.

It is always nice to see this beauty Sedum with it's brilliant pink. It's just so pretty.

Now the battle begins. As the squirrels are frantic to get their food stored for the winter, they are robbing my bird feeders, so I tried to put the plate thing on the top so they could not access the feeder but they just cracked the plate so back to the drawing board.

I put this ugly Owl up to scare not only the pigeon or seagulls but the squirrels too, not working for either of them. They are ruthless suckers.

These are my precious roses. They are considerably smaller this year than any of the past years that I have had them. It is interesting to watch how the climate affects the growth of plants. These roses were 2X this size at this time last year, but with so much rain all summer and very little sun, which roses thrive on, they are much smaller and not as abundant than year past.

So with all these strange and weird climate patterns that this world has experienced this season of growing here in Canada, I thought it was important to document all the time frames of development and growth right to the end of the plants usefulness of harvesting the seeds. Let's all pray that next season, will provide a very different story.

Happy Trails