Spent the weekend putting the summer garden to bed – coiling up hoses, deconstructing tomato structures, pulling old plants, and harvesting green tomatoes, the few remaining peppers and purple tomatillos, and the last of this year’s pomegranates.  Biggest pomegranate harvest so far, with perhaps seven full-sized fruits and three or four smaller ones. This particular pomegranate tree has been on a predictable fruiting trajectory, each year producing more flowers and more fruit.  If it maintains its pace, there should be a dozen or more pomegranates next year.

I also transplanted four blueberries from the nursery to the fourth of the food forest plots. In this fourth plot, I’ve planted hackberry for the canopy layer, figs as understory trees, and now blueberries in the shrub layer, plus some assorted herbs (sorrel, yarrow, cress, and others I can’t quite remember) and also garlic, shallots, elephant garlic and horseradish.  The hackberry and figs have their own individual protective cages.  To protect the blueberries from hungry deer, at least until the plants are established, I constructed this pen from t-posts, scraps of wire fencing and an old garden gate.

Unsightly, but functional!