Goodnight, Garden

She's gone. My late night lover and early morning snuggler all summer, my slow, drowsy, rich and earthy, fertile and bounteous companion is six feet under.

Under tarps, our garden is, for a well-deserved rest. Free tarps from RONA - one of the best kept secrets in the recycling world is that lumber yards get all their wood in huge bunches wrapped in huge tarps, which then just get thrown away. Just ask, and you've got garden cover, tree-fort roofs, random outside junk cover, firewood protectors...

These tarps will be keeping the weeds down on our hard-won garden, and killing the grass on the next section (more than doubling our garden size and tripling its output next year).

With just a few beets, cabbages and winter greens to continue picking through the winter, here's what we have to live on.

In the freezer:
Fruit: Apple Pulp (6 bags), Black currants (3), Blackberries (24), Blueberries (4 boxes), Cherries (38), Dried blueberries (2), Figs (2), Rhubarb (15), Saskatoon berries (1), Shredded apple (3), Strawberries (19)
Veggies: Corn (79), Green beans (2), Nettles (7), Peas (2), Pickles (8), Pumpkin (2), Red Pepper (1), Summer squash (8), Tomato (2), Zucchini (24), Spot prawns (6)

In our pantry:
Juice: apple (30), plum (19), cherry 10), grape (11)
Jam/jelly: grape (15), cherry (3), plum-cherry (9), "plumple" (plum-apple - 14), apple (8), blackberry (12), strawberry (6), crab-apple (3)
Tomato: stewed (8), pieces (3), puree (5), pasta sauce (12), green tomato chutney (10)
Syrup: Crab-apple (2), maple (2), cherry (4), quince syrup (15)
Misc: Grape butter (4), apple butter (24), apple sauce (28), dried apple (3), dried kale (10), sauerkraut (2), candied apple (2), chutney (8)

In the root cellar:
garlic (108), apples (8 boxes), onions, potatoes

It's gonna be a good winter.