Three weeks since the last post. Can you tell it's the end of the season?

Because the weather's been pretty poor and I've had a lot to do indoors lately I haven't done much of anything in the garden for a while. Today I noticed the tomato plants were all good and dead, so I pulled the stakes and put them in the shed. It wasn't a great year for tomatoes by most reckoning, but our season seemed to end a good month or two earlier than in previous years, which may have as much to do with our switch to hybrids as the bizarre climate. The weather forecast for the next few days is looking good (mid-50s by the weekend and no frosts for the next week or so), so I figure there will be much to do this weekend (hopefully Jim has his technical writing assignment finished by then...).

This week I plan to do some of the following: pull all of the plants that are at the end of their days (tomatoes, peppers, the beans that never made it, stray carrots, corn stalks), compost what fruits are left on the vine--and toss the branches in the woods; harvest the lettuce and mustard greens; harvest the oregano, sage, rosemary and parsley and dry or freeze it. This weekend Jim and I should take a lawnmower to the garden one last time, and begin to separate the hostas for replanting (it should be warm enough to transplant in the new space next to the medicinal herb patch). We should also find out about leaf collection to spread over the closed veg garden.

I'm not sure which Jim planted where, but I've seen dozens of new garlic/shallot bulb sprouts on the edge of the garden--more in one patch than the other, but I'm not sure if it's the onion or the garlic that's being so goshdarned hardy.