Shirley's Vegetable Garden™ 
By Shirley Barriger
October - Preparing for winter
Picking and preparing your vegetables and preparing your garden for winter
I hope you have been enjoying the fresh vegetables from your gardens. It is best to bring things in from the garden just before you are going to eat them or prepare them for storage in the freezer or canning in jars. With every minute that passes from the time the produce is picked until the time it is eaten or processed, the vegetables lose quality and food value. Never leave fresh vegetables sitting around a long time. If they aren’t to be used soon, keep them in the refrigerator. If you want the plants to continue to bear vegetables, you must keep them harvested. Pick everything you can as soon as it is ready, even if you know that it is impossible for you to use it all. Make plans to preserve the extra or share some vegetables with a neighbor or needy folks. Giving fresh vegetables away is the friendliest gesture I know of.
Do you still have green tomatoes on the vines and the weather is getting colder where you live? Pick them before a frost occurs and bring them indoors. Wrap the blemish-free tomatoes individually in a sheet of newspaper and place them in a cardboard box or on a shelf. In a short time they will ripen. Be sure to inspect them once in a while to check for spoilage and for the stage of ripening. The green cherry tomatoes I brought into my kitchen, still on the vine, have been ripening every day just sitting on the counter in a bowl. I have my other large green tomatoes wrapped in newspaper waiting to ripen. Green tomatoes also can be substituted for cucumbers in a relish recipe.
What you do in the fall in your garden will affect the success of your garden next year. Don’t neglect putting your garden to bed, so to speak. Be sure you work up, or till, all crop residues. If you leave them in the garden over the winter, you will be creating a haven for insects, worms and disease. Once this material is tilled under, the microorganisms in the soil will take care of it. You can till almost any organic material into your garden soil such as leaves, lawn clippings and kitchen wastes (such as your vegetable peelings and other scraps). Leaves are nature’s complete and perfect fertilizer. Rotted leaves are very close to being pure humus. All leaves contain many essential trace minerals that plants need and also some nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. Fall leaves that are chopped up and tilled directly into your soil disintegrate and become rich humus by the following spring, thanks to the always hungry earthworms (search for information on how the earthworms do their jobs) and microorganisms that you are feeding.
It’s a lot of work preparing your soil before winter, but the benefits of a healthy garden next year will be worth it. Good luck!
