While we managed to pull out all the garlic plants last weekend (in order to plant new ones next weekend!), we weren’t quite sure where to actually store all the garlic.  I know we were supposed to keep them in a cool, dry place so the only real storage place that came to mind was an empty wine fridge we have in the basement of our Long Island house.

“Joy” to our Garlic!

Since we actually didn’t keep any wine in the fridge other than a bottle of champagne someone had gifted Lynn one holiday season, it seemed the perfect home for the garlic.  So there the garlic sits.

After digging up the garlic, I turned to deal with the sunflowers.  Since I had never been very successful in getting anything to grow from seed packets I had picked up at a hardware store, I was particularly tickled that these sunflowers grew big and tall.

I’m particularly fond of large sunflowers primarily because when we would travel with the kids through southern France, many many summers ago, we would see fields and fields of sunflowers blowing in the wind.  Rachel, who was around nine-years-old at the time, nicknamed the sunflowers, appropriately I thought, “happy heads.” The name stuck, and to this day that’s still what we call sunflowers when we see them growing on someone’s property.

Unfortunately, I know I should have read up about harvesting the sunflower seeds, but the birds beat me to it.  This is what was left:

I also had a profusion of green beans, you know the kind that are overgrown and kind of stringy.  I did manage to pull most of them off their vines; the ones that were fairly small I steamed up, the others that were too big, I shelled them and saved the beans.

Strangely, though, while most of the veggies seemed on the way out, the bamboo on the property was flowering! (I’d like to say I remember this happening last year too, but really, I thought it was flowering in May, not September!).

Especially since all around the property, the leaves were already starting to turn colors. See?

So by the time I had raked over where the garlic had been planted, pulled out the sunflowers and generally tided up the garden, I came across a small baby potato.

All I can say is I’m so glad I’m not trying to make a living growing things, because I’d be broke and starving!

Really, I think nature was having a little bit of fun with me because a day later, I came across what I thought was a weed, but on closer inspection it proved to be something closely resembling a carrot top poking out of the ground. I carefully pulled away all the weeds surrounding it and very gently tried to dig it up.  By the time I was done, the garden had yielded one more surprise find: one teeny, tiny baby carrot.

The last time I had visited the farmer’s market, I came across one farmer’s carrots that were absolutely stunning. In fact they were the most vibrant purple, orange and yellows I had seen that they almost looked like they burst out of a still life painting!

Obviously, this is something I want to aspire to when trying to grow vegetables in next year’s garden!

Oh yeah, and my tiny little carrot?  I actually washed him off (yes, I decided he was male), sliced him up, (which yielded a total of 5 pinkie-sized coins), and threw them in with some scrambled eggs for breakfast.