First Harvest, next harvest

Here it is, the 10th of November, and I am only just getting produce out of the yard in a meaningful quantity. I picked up all the fallen Romas and grabbed the few that were about to tumble. Turns out to be about a gallon of tomatoes. I pulled a few tiny onions (leek sized) and grabbed a fist full of parsley, oregano, and basil. There is tomato sauce to be made and frozen in ziplock bags. A gallon of veggies is not enough to justify borrowing someone's canning rig. Does anyone else think it's weird to call it canning, when the food goes into glass jars?

Meanwhile, my little garden is shutting down for the season. The giant sunflowers have all gone to seed. The ground is littered with little hulls, so something is eating the seeds. The fence is now a wasteland of brown and yellow stalks from the sunflowers and corn. Pity about the corn - aphids and worms; we only got one ear. The basil is bolting and needs to be cut down. I'm letting the cilantro go and hope it re-seeds. Maybe the masses of green tomatoes that remain on the vines will ripen. We'll see.

There's a swampy mess brewing in the yard trimmings bin. I'm hoping that I can pitch in some torn-up paper bags and newspaper to balance the nitrogen and turn it into proper compost. The beauty of compost is that it focuses my thoughts forward. What to plant next? I'm thinking fava beans, sweet peas and perhaps some snap beans. These legumes will fix nitrogen in the soil, for the heavy feeding tomatoes that I intend to grow next year. (Tomatoes that will be started indoors during the final days of winter, so they can get into the ground before the middle of June.)