Anytime after the first freeze of fall I am on the lookout for a few days of nice weather in order to put the garden to bed. This weekend was perfect for the job, with temperatures in the 60s, bright blue skies and sun streaming through the red, orange and yellow trees. Such glorious weather is, I suppose, a small consolation for what is one of my saddest markers of seasonal change. Take a look at this pathetic sight:

I started with the tomatoes, cutting them down from their stakes.

I always use cotton or jute twine to stake my tomatoes so that at the end of the season everything can go right in the compost, which beats having to pick pieces of plastic or wire out of the jumbled vines. I wasn’t too meticulous with picking up the dropped fruit as I plan on running the chickens in here during winter and they will appreciate the treats.

Then I moved on to ripping up the cosmos and zinnias, and as I did I saved seed heads from varieties that did particularly well. I plan to scatter these seeds over some bare spots in hope of starting a wildflower patch.

Then I cut the hyacinth bean vines off of the deer fence. A tedious job, indeed, to avoid cutting the plastic fence. Next year I will sow my hyacinth bean up the sides of the metal chicken run. Finally I pulled the frozen peppers out. I was annoyed at myself to find that there were so many peppers that I hadn’t harvested before it was too late. This is what happens when the first frost happens when the farmer is out of town for a couple of days!

Then I took a break from the vegetable garden to walk through the pastures, cutting out the prickly shrubs that are the first woody plants to initiate reforestation of cleared areas. It took several big tractor bucket loads to get everything to the compost and brush piles in the woods.

By then the sun was setting and I had been working outside for more than seven hours in a row. So when the chickens headed into roost, I did the same, straight for a hot epsom salt bath. Up next: day two of vegetable garden cleanup.

The 2013 growing season came to an end last night with the first freeze of the fall. When I woke up this morning, it was 26 degrees and the ground was covered in thick white frost.

A brisk walk around the farm revealed blackened and sagging flowers, mottled and falling leaves, and the last of the garden peppers reduced to mush inside skin. It is always, for me, the saddest morning of the year. It means no more digging in the dirt and no more daily joy watching my labor become food and flowers. Now all that’s left to do is tear out the dead plants and drag them to the compost pile.

I suppose the only saving grace of this inevitable transition is that it’s now woodstove season. I made my first fire this morning to warm up a 50-degree house. I hadn’t turned my heat on yet this fall, and now it’s up to Jotul to beat back the chill. The stove started right up, drew perfectly, and seems so happy to be back to work and the center of attention. It is the warm white heart of this home.

I’ll be back soon with the 2013 garden success and failure post, as well as more info on all sorts of projects that I didn’t get a chance to write about during the busyness of summer. But now it’s time to go put another log on the fire.

I took my hops in to the house and divided them up onto two baking sheets. My oven has a pretty convenient dehydrate feature, so I figured I’d give it a try. It basically just maintains the oven temperature at 120 degrees while running the convection fan.

After I took this photo I slipped a couple of wire cooling racks under the cones to elevate them off the baking sheets. I figured it would improve air circulation and thus drying.

It took a couple of hours for the cones to get lighter and more crispy. During this time the house smelled so delicious.

When I judged the hops dry enough, I packed them into quart zip-top bags and used the old straw trick to suck the air out around them. Then I tossed them in the freezer. I ended up with two quart bags of harvest.

I also took a few of the hops and packed them in a glass jar with 100 proof vodka to make a tincture. Hops tincture is relaxing, soothing to the digestive system, sedative, and good for insomnia. I will let the mixture sit for six weeks and then strain out the hops and bottle the tincture. This is the first medicine I have made from home-grown material, and it feels pretty wonderful to be working with plants in this new way.

And that concludes the 2013 hops harvest. When the frost kills back the top growth on the hops plants, I will cut it off to compost and mulch the roots well. Then next year I will restring the ropes and expect an even bigger harvest if all goes well.

I found hops to be relatively maintenance free. I didn’t give them any supplemental water, thanks to our abnormally wet summer, nor did I give them any extra fertilizer. Deer left them alone. The hops did attract stink bug nymphs during the last few weeks, but the insects didn’t appear to damage the plants or the cones. I’m going to go ahead and call the first year of hops experiment a success.

I don’t have plans yet for the frozen hops. They may make their way into tea, or maybe beer. We’ll see!