Final Garden Tour of the Season What s Still Growing How I Prepped for Winter

Today we are going to take the final tour of the 2025 garden. I'm feeling a little sad about it, a little bit nostalgic for the beautiful summer that we had. We are going to go through all of the different things that I still have left to harvest here in my garden and there is actually a fair bit of food left in here. We have had two, I think two hard frosts over the last couple of days but up until a couple of days ago we still had beautiful blooming dahlias. I don't know if you can see them back there, they're looking kind of sad now because the frost definitely hit them but it was absolutely gorgeous in here up until a couple of days ago. If you are new here my name is Chelsea, welcome to Little Mountain Ranch and if you've been here before welcome back. Up until a couple of days ago I was still harvesting dahlias out of my northern garden which is fantastic. We had our first hard frost two nights ago which definitely killed off anything that was left in the garden that was at all sensitive but I still have a lot in here that's nice and hardy and actually tastes better after a frost. This beautiful kale here just gets sweeter with frost which is fantastic. So like I said we've had one good frost, I'll be able to leave this out here for a little while yet and actually if you live in a milder zone than we do you can even be harvesting off kale all winter long. It is incredibly cold hardy so what our plan is is we're going to be picking all of this kale in the next couple of days and I will be freeze drying it and then grinding it up for our green powder that we add to our smoothies in the winter time. I also will often chop it up and blanch it and freeze it and then I'll add that into soups in the winter as well. So this patch here these are carrots and they have been munched on by the cow that got in here loves carrot tops but fortunately the roots that are underneath the ground are still fantastic. So I did want to show you this though. Can you see these tops of these carrots here that have been munched on like that? This one as well. So a couple of different critters can do this. Rabbits can do this which is what I believe the culprit is in this case but mice can also do this as well. I like to get my carrots out of the ground before it starts getting cold like this and this is the exact reason why I choose to do that. So if you do have a problem with like rabbits or mice or anything like that in your garden might be worth pulling their carrots out early before those little critters find them and do this to the tops of all your carrots. Fortunately I don't have that as a problem on all of these carrots but I will be getting these out within the next couple of days. Look at these beauties. This one is called red acre. The heads aren't super large on these because I planted these in the ground late but I still have a few I'm going to be able to pull out here. These are going to be nice and sweet and absolutely delicious. The beans of course they do not like frost at all and they have been thoroughly destroyed by it. This row here is a combination of a win and a loss. This is the row where I had my garlic planted and when I pulled them out I decided to try to plant some second plantings of beets and of green beans. It was a little bit late in the season and I did start them in my little greenhouse over there so they did have a bit of a head start. Transplanted out here. The beets have done fantastic. Also been munched on by that pesky cow but they are looking really good. I am super pleased with these. They are not huge by any stretch of the imagination but they are super sweet because they have had that frost and they are going to make delicious recipes of all kinds. I absolutely love beets. Talk about this all the time. So I'm thrilled to have this second planting of beets that I get to pull out of the ground we store our beets in our root cellar so that's where these are all going to be going. I didn't plant a ton of beets in the early spring not sure why so that's why I decided to go with the second planting and I'm super glad that I did. When it comes to the beans I planted the wrong kind of bean. I planted a bean that is supposed to be a drying bean and when I planted them I didn't the package thoroughly enough they were light I think they were called purple gray bean and I just looked at them and I had the extra pack of seeds in my greenhouse from the spring and I hadn't planted any so I thought well we'll throw those in the ground and I did do a couple of green beans and those ones actually did well as far as being able to produce enough beans to make it worthwhile to do that later planting. So it was kind of a little bit of a failure I guess in a way because I planted the wrong beans. Had I planted it with just a standard green bean or a yellow wax bean or something like that it would have been fine and I would have ended up with a fairly decent harvest off of this little second planting here. Generally speaking I don't do successive plantings so with a few things I do with lettuce and spinach. I do spinach because it bolts in the heat so I usually will plant some in August because it does well in the cooler temperatures of our autumns and then lettuce just because it is something that we just eat throughout the whole summer so we want to have good heads of lettuce throughout the entire summer. But for the rest of everything because we have such a short growing season here around 110 frost free days usually this year was much more more like 130 which was fantastic. But because of that short growing season I tend to plant really aggressively in the spring everything that I need and then as soon as it's ready to harvest I harvest all of it and that takes a lot of work because I grow a fairly large amount and then I move on to the next thing that's coming out of the garden and the last thing I want to do is go have to focus on planting another round of things in hopes that we'll have a long enough autumn to make it through. I don't know if I'll do this again the beets for sure I will because these nice small beets that are nice and sweet like these little tiny ones are are fantastic. I will say though it's a little bit of a myth I have found when it comes to beets that when they get really large they tend to get really woody or maybe it's not a myth and maybe they do but because of the way we generally cook beets by slow roasting them over a long period of time or putting them in soups I usually grate my beets for to adding into soup and that woodiness I never really experience. Sure if I was to pull a big giant beet out of the garden compared to one of these little ones cut it and eat it fresh in the garden there's probably a difference there but because of the way we cook them don't worry about it if your beets get too big because they'll be just fine and they store really well when they're really big too. Look at this we still have pansies. Pansies are very hardy little flowers we still have those blooming and calendula is also surprisingly hardy as well and is still growing. One of the things that we're going to be doing together over the next week is doing a whole bunch of seed saving all throughout my garden so these are the calendula seeds here and I want to collect a bunch of them. Now the one thing about calendula is it does self-seed so all the calendula that I have this one these guys over here that big patch that's over there are all volunteers so just be aware of that that they will self-seed especially if you live in a warmer climate than we do because even in the north here they self-seed quite readily. I do like to save some seeds anyway though because they are one of my favorite flowers and they're so cheerful and the petals have all kinds of good nutrients in them that are super good for the skin so I dehydrate and infuse olive oil with these petals and then use that to make salves and lip chapstick and things like that which we will also do together in the coming weeks. We have started forming our beds here this is one of the beds we have beautifully formed and then the chickens came through and kicked out a bunch of the dirt there and that's my own fault for just not putting in the effort to catch them all and get them put away but I just wanted to show you something that I have never seen before ever in my northern garden and that is some fresh weeds coming up here this never happens this time of year these are all annual weeds though so what's kind of great about this is all of these seeds would have come up in the spring and they have now come up now and the frost is going to kill them all off so hopefully that will mean I'll have a little bit less weed pressure next year. I do have to redo the bed though shasta daisies are still blooming although they do need to be kept back now they are definitely done for the year look at this guys this is also I've never seen this in my garden either these are all baby pak choy that self-seeded from where my pak choy went and they have all come up here that's wild what's kind of funny about that is I tried two plantings of the pak choy and both of them bolted and now I have literally hundreds of little pak choy that are coming up there that's funny okay this is very sad what you see behind me here because like I said two days ago these were blooming and looked beautiful they had not yet been killed off by the frost that obviously got them this time I actually picked a beautiful bouquet of these dahlias that are that's currently sitting on my kitchen table so I get to enjoy them for a little bit yet just the other day so this is the first time that I have ever grown dahlias to this scale I've grown a few I think last year was the first year that I grew just a few fell in love with them planted this whole bed with them and they were the joy of the garden for me this summer I got so much pleasure out of these beautiful plants so I have done a lot of reading into how to pull the tubers up out of the ground and store them for winter and fortunately because I do have a root cellar that is the ideal place to to store these I have been asked so many times if I had pulled my tubers out of the garden yet and the answer is obviously no and the reason that I haven't is that I was waiting for the kill off like this what would have been even better than the plants being killed by frost is if they had died back naturally so what happens with tubers and this goes for any root actually is that a lot of the energy that is produced during the summer through the photosynthesis and all of those good sugars being produced in these leaves is that energy goes down into the root this is for potatoes beets turnips parsnips flowers like this gladiolas anything that forms a bulb or a tuber or a corm anything like that and the reason for that is because the root needs to get all of that energy it stores it up over the winter and then it uses that energy to send up the flower the following year or the plant the following year and if you cut them down too soon then the storage ability of that root can be compromised and also the energy that that plant has to grow a beautiful flower the following spring can also be compromised so you do want to leave them in as long as you possibly can however if you live in the north like me you want to get them out of the ground before the ground freezes because in the case of dahlias and gladiolas anemones what else did I plant this year I think that was it for bulbs that I actually need to pull out of the ground or in this case tubers so what we're going to be doing here is getting these all cut back pulling them out of the ground maybe that's something that we can do together if you're interested in that over the next couple of days I have a lot of work in front of me over the next couple of days with harvesting out of this garden I've got to get all those carrots up the beets could stay in the ground for a little bit longer but the same as with the carrots where the tops can start to get munched on by critters the beets are the same so I'll probably get those out need to get those cabbages out the kale the kale can also stay for a little bit but these I cannot I cannot leave these in the ground because if they freeze then I lose them all and these were just all so beautiful the nice thing about pulling the tubers out of the ground is I am going to get the exact same flower as I got off of these this year there's no cross-pollination that happens within the tuber it's going to be the same as these ones however I'm also going to try harvesting seed off of the flower heads here because the seed that is produced will be cross-pollinated and I think that might be kind of fun to to see some of the cross-pollinations between all these beautiful dahlias that I had here I have never harvested seed to be honest I don't even know what the dahlia seed looks like but this is a dyed back flower so we'll pull these off here I don't see any seed at the end of those petals which can sometimes be the case oh there we go I can see seed down in there can you see that so I am going to try some seed saving because I just think it would be fun to see some cross-pollinated dahlias they'd probably be just beautiful so yeah anyway this makes me a little bit sad but it is what it is it's the way gardening goes what's really nice about what I planted these in is this I filled with potting soil so the soil is really loose let me show you let's just break off a couple of these the soil is going to be nice and loose because it's potting soil so these should be fairly easy to pull out of here so I'm just going to go grab a pitchfork and pull this out and see how big it is I'm kind of excited because I'm probably going to have a lot more on here than I started with in the spring it's so big my goodness how am I going to get this out without breaking it okay there we go so that really was not so bad this is not going to take me long at all so what I understand anyone who has more experience than me which wouldn't take much since I've never done this before do tell so my plan was according to everything I've read is to wash these off really well so that all the dirt is off of them and then dry them out a little bit and then get them right into the root cellar and not let them dry out too much because that can actually kill them so if that's what I should do let me know I'm planning on doing this in the next couple of days we'll get all of these pulled out I will take a knife and cut these off nice and neatly up here and yeah that's looking pretty good I'm pretty excited about that I'm definitely going to have to get to dealing with this though within the next couple of days because the temperatures are dropping again snapdragons are another one that are very hardy when it comes to the cold and these are actually all self-seeded beautiful snapdragons look at that that self-seeded in this bed this is where I planted my snapdragons last year and I didn't actually plant any this year so it's kind of nice to have a few little volunteers this bed is pretty much all weeds what I did try to grow in here was artichokes which as you can see did not did not grow at all I had the worst time with dealing with aphids I won't be planting artichokes again because they are just an aphid magnet but um I so I just gave up on them and right after I gave up on them all of these guys started blooming so that was kind of perfect I did plant a whole bunch of sweet peas along the back here that are still blooming which is also kind of wild we are going to be seed saving a ton of beautiful seed out of these pods when we do our seed saving walk around the garden in the next week this green stock here I planted strawberries in back in the early early spring and they looked just beautiful when I had them in my little greenhouse but I brought them outside so normally strawberries will start coming up in the early spring here they're very hardy they do fairly well out in the garden but because I had been growing them early I got them going early in the little greenhouse and they were quite big and beautiful and then I put them outside into the cold weather we weren't getting frost at that point it just seemed to stunt them and they never really did anything and they're looking kind of sad but this will be a bit of an experiment where I'm going to take this and put it in my little greenhouse where it does stay a little bit warmer at least in the daytime and see if I can't overwinter these strawberry plants because we can overwinter them in the ground out here no problem in the green stock and we'll see what happens come spring and see how many end up actually coming back and then what I'll do as soon as they start coming out of dormancy and they start just breaking the surface I will bring them outside and let them just do their thing out and hope that we can get some beautiful strawberries out of this green stock next year. This was my first year with anemones and these anemones are still blooming too which is kind of crazy they were just beautiful and I loved them so you know what I'm going to do right now because these are another one that we have to actually pull out of the ground so I'm going to go grab my pitchfork again and we're going to pull this out of the ground because these will not live over winter in our climate so I need to get them up too so we have one there I'm just going to dig around in the spot where I pulled this out and see if there's any that kind of grew off of this one definitely going to want to get to this too before the ground gets number one frozen but two too cold for me to work in I'm going to have to just dig up this whole thing and kind of just go through it to find them because most of the tops have already died back I'm not finding a ton in there so maybe they don't really spread that much so yeah these are really small so I definitely want to get in there the ground is actually not cold at all so I might do this later on today and get all of these pulled out so all of the what did I plant from Costco the gladiolas the dahlias the anemones I also did I think some lilies and a few other things every single one of those plants outside of the clematis the clematis did not do did not grow but everything else did absolutely beautifully so I cannot recommend the Costco bulbs I'm not sure what the actual company is that that supplies them but I can't recommend them enough because they were amazing quality so I'm going to put that on my list of things that I need to get done in the next couple of days all right now we're down in the high tunnel and as you can see we have it all pretty much ready for winter the only thing I have left to do is to pull down my bunting flags I pull them down in winter just so that they don't have that extra exposure to the sun which fades them out I'm actually going to have to dye them in the spring which I'm looking forward to doing just to brighten them up a little bit because they have faded out over the last couple of years but I still love them but I need to take those down but other than that everything has been taken out of here I have the green stock over here emptied out and I just have this one last flower pot it is still blooming which is just fantastic definitely within the next two days it's going to be completely dead but I'll leave it here to bloom until the last flower has faded and then I'll pull it out and throw that into the compost I am going to be saving seeds off of my petunias this year which I'm really excited to show you the petunias that are up by my house are still looking absolutely glorious I'm hoping to get a few more days out of those ones before we start harvesting oh look at this we have a kitty visiting that's Nala and the cats like hanging out in here in the daytime they're inside outside cats so they do come outside but I do find them this time of year down in the high tunnel fairly often the other thing that we need to do is roll up the sides we do roll up our sides during the winter but we roll them so that the roll is on the inside instead of the outside so that the snow can come down and kind of shluff off and not build up against the side and put kind of pressure on the on the wall of the high tunnel and that way that snow just kind of comes inside and keeps these beds nice and moist which is something that I do like one of the things that's recommended with high tunnels is every few years to take the plastic off and allow it to stay exposed to the elements over the winter time because this isn't getting naturally washed the soil's not being cleaned by rain it builds up salts and minerals in the soil that can be detrimental to your plants so fortunately for me we did have our plastic it ripped well this wasn't fortunate but we ended up having to replace the plastic this year so we kept it off all last winter so I have a few years where I don't have to worry about taking the plastic off it is a bit of a pain to do it it's held on with these wiggle wires and it's a lot of work and then you end up tearing it and everything else so leaving it on is definitely easier than having to take it off this is so cute look at this this is my shade cloth right here that makes a nice bed for the cats apparently as long as they don't pee on it I'm fine with that one of the other questions that I have seen in the comment section over the last little while is how we deal with the drip irrigation system so the drip irrigation itself this tape here it's called drip tape is quite fragile and I have found that when I pull it up and try to roll it up it doesn't roll and it ends up cracking a little bit on the folds where you're trying to roll it and and it damages it so what I have found to be better is actually just to leave it laying in the beds like this it just seems to last better so this is kind of what I mean so if I went to try to roll this it folds instead of rolls and then ends up cracking right at the fold so that's why I just leave it laying like that so we just make sure that there's no water left in here so it's been all drained off and and then open so that in case any water gets in there it doesn't freeze and then crack this the reason that we have that filtration there is because we have spring water and it's very silty the water that comes through to our house is run through a filtration system but the water that feeds our livestock and the gardens and everything isn't so it's quite silty which is actually fantastic when it comes to watering the garden because all that silt has nutrients in it that go into the soil but not so much when you are trying to run silty water through things with little tiny holes it ends up plugging them up but that filter has worked fantastic I do have to rinse it every time I water my high tunnel because it gets gummed up with all that silt but it hasn't plugged up any of these lines over the last couple of years and this drip irrigation was an absolute game changer for me I was having huge issues with blossom end rot blossom end rot is a calcium deficiency or caused by a calcium deficiency and a few other minerals as well in the plant in the tomatoes and it causes the blossom end of the tomato to rot and it's very discouraging when you go to pick a beautiful big red tomato and the bottom of it is rotten you might think that if you just add more calcium to your soil that that will remedy the problem but what the issue actually is is that in order for the plant to uptake the calcium that is in the soil and most soils have sufficient calcium it needs regular watering in order to do that it can't uptake the calcium without sufficient water so if you end up with times during the summer where your plants experience drought they can't uptake the calcium during that period of time and if that happens right when that plant is developing at the point of where that blossom end rot can develop if it happens during that window then you're going to end up with blossom end rot and I was having huge issues because I was hand watering this which was very time consuming took me over an hour once I put the drip irrigation in and I had consistent watering in here I have maybe had two or three tomatoes with blossom end rot since we put in our drip irrigation so highly recommend it for a growing situation like this I would have drip irrigation in my entire garden if we didn't have this silty water problem but with the amount of times I would have to wash out the filter while I was watering all my gardens would just be too much of a pain and plus I kind of want that silt in my garden anyway so I don't mind doing the overhead sprinklers they seem to work just fine in my garden I know it's kind of sad seeing the high tunnel all empty like this and seeing the garden come to an end for another year but I have so much preservation to do over the next four weeks or so just endless endless preservation so I'm kind of ready to not have to worry about the garden and just get everything pulled out of it and start getting all of that put up into the pantry we are going to be doing our pantry tour at probably the end of the month beginning of beginning of or sorry end of October beginning of November is when we usually do it every year and I'm excited to share with you all of the things that we have grown and preserved in our garden like I said we're going to be doing a ton of preserving over the next month at least if not a little bit longer and then we are going to be moving into cooking with all of this food that we've grown and preserved over the summer and the fall and I'm looking forward to sharing all of that with you a reminder that we have our harvest call on October 17th and I would love to see as many of you there as possible you can click the link below this video in the show notes or in the pinned comment I hope you all have a fantastic day and I look forward to seeing you again next time bye