The garden is changing from a production area to a scene to prepare for next season.

The trick is to get out in the garden between rain showers to pull weeds, take down fencing, and pull up plastic ground cover for reuse next year. The next plot to be worked is this year’s greens plot. Once it is cleaned up, it will become next year’s garlic plot. Garlic planting is in October.

Some vegetables will continue until the first hard frost. As they do, I take stock of the season. In late summer, I had way too many hot peppers, an over abundance of tomatillos, and eggplants enough to be cooking them for many weeks.

When I look back at the photographs of harvests I took, the variety is more than I imagined possible when I planted my first tomato and cucumber plants in 1983.

Rainy days provide an opportunity to work on the less physical part of gardening. I have been reviewing what I planted this year and beginning a seed list for next. Deciding what to grow, what not to grow, and how much of each, is part of the Midwest gardening cycle. This year’s abundance becomes next year’s adjustments.

Growing vegetables is one thing. Using them is something different.

This season I made an effort to use what the garden produced from week-to-week. Cooking mostly from what is on hand can produce delicious and interesting results. For the most part, what I made tasted good, and fit our blended vegan/ovo-lacto-vegetarian way of eating.

I have been putting off organizing the freezers.

There were too many instances of shoving bags of produce into whatever space presented itself. I sort of had a plan, and that plan got away from me with a bountiful harvest. At some point I need to find out what is actually in those freezers, organize it, and make the contents usable again.

For now, there are still garden plots to clean up and vegetables to harvest. The work moves back and forth between this year’s garden and the one next year. Pulling out the old, composting organic matter, saving what can be reused, making notes about what worked, and preparing the ground for garlic are all parts of the same cycle.

Garlic planting begins a new season.

We are positioned for another great harvest next year. I hope readers will follow along.