The last of the garden

It is that time of year when the garden has to be covered some nights. There is snow on the hills around town. The heirloom tomato varieties are the best tasting tomatos I've ever had.
To make salsa:
some finely chopped cayenne pepper--less than one.
some finely chopped garlic
some coarsely chopped onion
some chopped tomatos
some chopped tomatillas
some cillantro
some lime juice

Mix well and enjoy! Watch out for those peppers, though, it took three hand-washings to get the oil from them off my fingers. The cayennes are still green, some with yellow tinges. The tomatillas and tomatos are ripening at their own slow pace, probably because the weather has cooled.
There are Armenian cucumbers growing, we thought we had lost all the plants to the bugs but one, at least, survived. I had forgotten the variety I got was a striped cucumber until my husband called me out to the garden to show me them yesterday. There are four pumpkins, two orange, one green with an orange spot, and one green with small yellow spots, all on the one plant. Good big pumpkins, too, plenty for pie and eating. Two kabocha squash on the one surviving plant, one looks about ripe, the other is still small. The pumpkins and squash will stay out until the vines have frosted, then we'll haul them to my parents' basement, which is the right temperature for storage. Well, the pumpkins, anyway. I have a feeling the kabocha will not last one dinner past harvesting, since there are only two, and one may not make it to ripen.
The tomatilla is still blooming. The tomatos have better sense, and are throwing their energy into ripening their green fruits. The zucchini are sulking, I guess. I won't put them in pots again, they just haven't produced much.
If we are still here next year (since my husband has not found many jobs to apply for in this area it is looking less and less likely) we plan to double our garden space. If we are not here, well, we'll just have to see where we are and what we can do with it! I've got a pot of spinach started in a southern window, by my computer. The seeds are just coming up, so it'll be a bit before we have fresh spinach, but maybe we can have spinach salad for Thanksgiving. I've got some other plants I'd like to try inside, some Napa cabbage and some brocoli (it gets aphid infestations outside here, or so I'm told).
Now, if those lettuce seeds would just ripen, so I could save some for next year . . .
My parents are at higher elevation, and picked all their green tomatos already. Their garden is gone. Their Winesaps are ready, so my husband will (hopefully remember to) pick up some suet on his way home so I can make green tomato mincemeat. A new experiment.