I used to grow Big Boys, and really liked them, but since I no longer plant 24-36 tomato plants, I stopped growing any beefsteaks and grow only Celebrity and Amish/Roma. We are finally harvesting some tomatoes! The Amish are huge, perfectly formed, and getting very red. The Celebrities are all cracked and splitting before they are ripe. Folks in my gardening groups are picking their tomatoes at first blush and letting them ripen inside. This is not my idea of a home-grown tomato, BUT this morning I picked a basket of large, perfectly formed, not-quite-red Celebrities.

In my 38 years of gardening here, this one has been absolutely awful. Too much rain and hardly any sun, interspersed with a few days of 90+ temperatures. Some seeds didn't germinate; some grew, all green, no fruit; some produced fruit, small, never ripened; most didn't produce anything until last week. I can't wait for next June and a fresh start.

Mike, I'm hankering for stuffed spaghetti squash since reading your post last week. When I return from NY next week, I'll pull all my edibles, and put the garden to bed. It's been a good year, for the last month of summer, for peppers. I harvested about 3 dozen, about half green and half red, all New Ace. Tomatoes were a bust; we did not always have a ripe tomato for BLTs etc when I wanted them, and I processed only about 6-9 quarts of sauce for the winter, plus a few jars of salsa and pizza sauce. Chippy ate all but a few cherry tomatoes. No yellow summer squash, not one. Plenty of zucchini. Six nice cauliflowers, plenty of broccoli early on, only 3 cabbage out of 6 plants. Quite a few winter squash, especially spaghetti, plus buttercup, butternut, delicata. Currently, I have plenty of herbs and greens still growing on the deck. And my last planting of green and yellow beans is producing nicely, although slowly due to day temps in the upper 50s and night temp in the upper 30s. Our average frost day is the 15th, today! I do have a planter of young lettuces growing in my sunroom, so I'll need to set up the grow lights, tranplant some herbs and start others, and figure out what else I want to try for this winter. I'm looking forward to starting over again next June.

Our temperature high today was 80 degrees.

We've not had a frost yet, so we're still picking green beans and lettuces and raspberries. However, it looks like that will end after Tuesday night's low. The garden is cleaned up, just waiting now for the leaves and grass from the last mow of the season to spread over it. All the pots on the deck are inside, and the planters cleaned up except for one of lettuces and one of beans. I will trim the pots of herbs and then transplant or root some of them, although I will plant seeds of some. I am really looking forward to next summer's garden!

Our temperatures will go below freezing tonight, so that is the end of the outside garden. My husband has planted some lettuce and kale and is using the grow lights. We will see how that goes.

For next year, I have already put in a request for us to plant fairy tale pumpkin. We can probably run the vine along the side of the house.