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I placed my seed order before Christmas with our local Coop. They do a bulk order to Fedco and get free shipping and 20% discount. They send me a post card with the order is in and I pick it up at the store. It's a nice advantage, and they are based in Maine so the varieties they recommend are adaptable to my cooler climate. Here's what I ordered for this year's garden to add to the seeds from previous years.
Beans & Peas
Fortex Pole Beans
Roma II Romano type Beans
Cannellini Dried Beans
Windsor Fava Beans
Mammouth Melting Sugar Peas
Corn
Dakota Blue Popcorn (I hope it will be a good experiment)
Squash
Coastata Romanesca Zucchini
Benning's Green Tint Patty Pan Squash
Marina di Chioggia Winter Squash
Root Vegetables
Over the Rainbow Carrot Mix
Touchstone Gold Beet
Red Marble Onion Seed
Varsity Yellow Onion Seed
Greens
Giant Winter Spinach
Winter Lettuce Mix
Red Tinged Winter Lettuce
Minutina
Pink Lettucy Mustard Gene Pool
Brassica Family
Piracicaba Broccoli (had to try this after seeing it in so many harvest photos last year)
Gustus Brussels Sprouts
Rainbow Lacinato Kale
Peppers
Boldo Hungarian Spice Paprika
Jimmy Nardello's Pepper
Carmen Sweet Peppers (on Henbogle's recommendation)
Tomatoes
Cosmonaut Volkov Tomato
Black Prince Tomato
Sun Gold Cherry Tomato
Herbs
Genovese Basil
Lime Basil
Bodegold Chamomile
Ziar breadseed poppy
My potato order had to be sent separately as the coop doesn't do a bulk order for those. I ordered 1# of Rose Finn Apple Fingerlings, 2.5 # each of Irish Cobbler and Adirondack Blue, and 5# of Romanze, a red-skinned storage potato.
The rest of the seed catalogs were waiting for me when I returned home from Christmas travels. However, as I paged through, there wasn't much that I was interested in. Fedco's catalog is so extensive that others feel brief and lacking in variety. Two things did catch my eye and that was artichokes and edamame. Thomas had such beautiful artichokes last year. The artichokes caught my eye in another catalog but when I compared prices, Fedco was still the best. So I'll put in a one line order for artichokes. Edamame will wait for another year.
This list is not the entirety of what I'll plant next year, nor is it all my new seeds. I picked up some seed packets on sale at the end of the season last year. They included American Flag Leeks, Gardener's Delight Cherry Tomatoes, Asparagus Yard Long Beans, Dwarf Grey Sugar Peas, Laxton's Progress # Shelling Pea & Moon & Stars Watermelon. With the seeds left from last year, there is plenty of variety.
In less than a month it will be time to start some hardy seeds for the cold frame!
The first year of my new garden is almost at an end. Above you'll find a collage of photos of the garden through the months with roughly two photos each month. You can click on it for a larger version.
This year the garden gave us over 460 pounds of produce. It was a great year!
Last year's version of the collage in my old garden is here.
I enjoyed doing the collage of the photos of my garden through out the year (posting later this week) so I thought I'd do one of the harvests too. It seemed apt to publish it on the last Harvest Monday of the year. It was hard to choose just six photos for each month to represent the harvest. And then I got to December and found I only had just a few photos. You can click for a larger version of the collage.
Yesterday I wrote how the weather was balmy. It didn't stay that way for long. The snow started yesterday evening. We only got about two inches but it is the first significant snow of the season. Here's the garden today. Unfortunately the window in the attic that I usually open to take a clear overview of the garden is now frozen shut. So you get a bit of the screen in this photo from the bedroom window.
Quite a contrast to yesterday's photo (see post below).
The blog has been quiet lately because of travel and preparations for Thanksgiving. I'll be back with more next week, but for now here are photos after the first snow today.
This week I got over 2 more pounds of tomatoes ripening from the green tomato box.
I picked 8 oz of kale, including some red kale that leafed out. It overwintered from the previous owners garden, went to seed,I saved seeds, and now it is producing again. 
I picked 11.5 oz of leeks, 6 oz of chard, and 1 pound of brussels sprouts (not pictured).
Now that the garden is winding down, I'll sometimes share what we're eating from what we saved from the garden. This weekend we roasted our first jarrahdale pumpkin. It was a 15 pound one. My husband cut it in half.
Then we quartered it and scooped out the seeds. I roasted it in the oven for over an hour until the flesh was soft. This photo is before it was baked.
The flesh was good, not stringing, not too strong either. The only downside was the seeds. They looked wonderful, but some how different. When we roasted them we found they were too tough.
We roasted apples and onions after the pumpkin was done and used them all to make soup with a stock made with apple cores and pumpkin scrapings. It was all pureed to a smooth soup. We had plenty for a gathering of 8 adults and 12 kids and still some left over to freeze.
Total this week: 5.08 pounds
Total this year: 441.69 pounds
You can see what other gardeners harvested this week at Daphne's Dandelions.
The garden has changed quite a bit in the last two weeks. Here's what it looked like on September 14th.
Two weeks later on the 29th, I had taken down the cucumbers, harvested and weeded the potato row, pulled the last of the winter squash, and brought down the tomatillos. I seeded winter rye in all those places, except where the tomatillos were.
Only a few days later on October 2nd, the tomatoes came down, the hoop house went up, the pumpkins went out, the cold frame windows went on.
A few details. Around September 20th, I dug up four pepper plants and put them in pots.
From Left to right: Habanero, Hungarian Wax, Purple Bell, Cayenne. I sprayed them daily with a soapy water solution. This past week we got some rain and then a bigger storm was forecasted with cold temps to follow. I brought them in on Wednesday because I didn't want them water logged when they came in the house. They are sunning themselves in the front windows and so far are doing ok. I'm continuing to spray hping that I don't have aphids with them. I'm hoping to overwinter them.TomatoesHere's what the tomato support looked like after 5" of rain. It was worse, the metal props had fallen away and it was leaning even more. I propped it back up so that I could at least cut down the tomatoes.
Here's the after photo from the other side. I haven't weeded it yet, nor seeded it. The bed to the right is where the winter squash were and has been seeded with winter rye.
Here's how the winter rye looks in the potato bed, seeded a week before.
I also planted garlic in the former pumpkin bed. I ordered 6 heads of Red Russian and 3 heads of Music. 
All total it was 60 some cloves planted. It took up half of the bed.
So in all the garden is looking a lot more like fall. Many peppers and eggplant remain in the garden and that's the only thing I'm covering to protect from frost. We had a light frost in the back field again on Saturday night. Each time, it creeps closer to the garden. I'm sure it will get the last of the beans soon.
A reader reminded me that I hadn't shown what the garden looks like in a while. When I look at this photo I see the cucumber vines on the trellis that I should have pulled weeks ago and the poor melon vines that got downy mildew and I didn't do anything about in the same row I need to get some cover crop seed this week and pull the dead plants and seed to protect the soil from erosion and weeds.
I do seem some good here too. I do see the cold frame filling out with greens, and the Brussels Sprouts looking good. The peppers and eggplants are still lush. You can't see them, but my fall peas have sprouted along with radishes. The pumpkin vines resisted the downy mildew and have spread into the grass as the pumpkins ripen.
Hiding in the back are my tomatoes. The ones that fell in August and were tied back up are suffering from leaf spot and dying back but the tomatoes continue to ripen. The frame is crooked and rigged to stay up until the end of the season. Next year we'll need a stronger frame.
So are beautiful and ugly parts to the garden right now. There is work to be done and I hope I get to it. And the garden continues to produce.
The goldfinches were the first to enjoy the sunflower seeds but I have yet to get a good photo of them doing so. Last week while I was weeding, I kept hearing a "thump, thump, thump". I found a downy woodpecker enjoying the sunflower seeds. He was rather enthralled and allowed me to stand a few feet away to take his picture eating the seeds.
Lately I've also seen the chickadees enjoying the seeds too. I'm glad there are so many visitors to my garden.
On Tuesday I spent a pleasant and full day in the garden. I spent a lot of time with my potatoes. I was concerned about their foliage, and they have been falling over for weeks.
I did some research to try to figure out if it was late blight, early blight, or something else. I decided it was either early blight or fusarium wilt.
Either way I surely didn't want it to spread to my tomatoes. So I cut back all the foliage and bagged it. I had been filching potatoes from my short row of Iris Cobbler potatoes, so I went ahead and dug the whole row. I also dug up a few of the All Blue and Yukon Gold to see what they potatoes look like. They are a fair size. Here are a few of the All Blue, straight out of the ground.
However, I've read that leaving them in the ground for a few weeks will help them harden up the skin to store better. So I'll be leaving the rest of them in the ground for a bit more.
I went on to check on the tomatoes and found a bit of leaf spot which I cut out, and some possible early blight on the lower inner leaves.
I trimmed out a bunch of the lower foliage to open up the plants some. Next year I'll plant them a bit farther apart. However, all in all they seem to be doing well. I'll continue to keep an eye on them.
I decided it was time to pull my onions. The bed looked like this. They were all flopped over, starting to brown on some of the leaves and I wanted to clear the space to put in some fall crops.
About one fourth of the onions were white and three quarters were yellow.
I lay them out on a tarp in the sun. At night I folded the tarp over them so the dew wouldn't get them wet. I turned them occasionally and left them in the sun for two days. Then we had threat of rain on Wednesday night so my husband and I brought them in and spread them on a sheet in our very warm attic. I'll let them dry there a week or so before bringing them down to trim, weigh, and string before hanging in a cooler place.
Now, the bed looks like this with only leeks left. The far end also has the All Blue potatoes still in the ground where the fork is sticking out. What's green in the front is grass I need to pull :)
I also pulled all my peas, the old broccoli and the asian greens that the slugs prevented me from enjoying.I pulled the lettuce that was bolting, and weeded out the cold frame where I have some more cabbage starting. My early cabbage seems to not be forming heads because of the heat we had. You can see a lot more bare earth in the garden.
Today I planted fall peas and tomorrow I want to put in fall carrots where the onions were. I also want to put in fall greens. I have some kale, tyfon, bok choy, asian green, broccoli (a long shot), and kolhrabi started in cell packs to transplant later too. Its hard to believe I need to be planning for fall when I'm still waiting on all those tomatoes.
This February is drastically different. I anticipate my start to the garden will be delayed this year while waiting for the snow to melt. Here's what it looked like today.
Since the forecast calls for sun and above freezing temperatures this week I decided to go out and shovel off the cold frame. I found it was easier to crawl over the surface of the snow than sink into the very deep paths of at least 30 inches.
When I found the coldframe there was 12-15 inches on top of it.
I slowly shoveled it off. I got to the last window and realized I hadn't gotten the edge.
Here's where I made my mistake. Instead of scraping across the window I went straight down on where I thought the edge of the wood was. Ooops! I broke the glass.
So I covered it with some plastic and come spring we'll have to replace it with plexiglass or something.
Here is how things look on the inside of the cold frame. Green but frozen. And smelling like a fish tank. When things begin to thaw out I'll have to clean out the dead plants and see what will rebound. 
Here's how the garden looks now.
