Happy Solstice, everyone!
Last night, at my house, I "harvested" some parsley and cut some onion tops (= green onions) to add to a late-season Roma tomato sauce for pasta. Parsley, onion tops, and the very last orange/red and red Romas were collected by the light of a flashlight.
Today at MIL's house in Palo Alto (Sunset Zone 15), I removed the once-frozen tomato vines from the Square Foot Garden DH and I created there in June. I smoothed over the soil and planted kale (Red Russian) seeds, rapini (broccoli raab) seeds, and fava beans.
I don't know whether I'll actually get any food from these seeds, but I just couldn't STAND thinking about all that really nice growing medium for the next month...and no competition for the bird- or squirrel-distributed weed seeds.
Can't say that I've ever planted on the Winter Solstice before...but it felt like a seasonally supportive thing to do! And I definitely did NOT want weeds to have the SFG to themselves during the rainy season.
And all the tomato vines (four or five 5-gallon buckets' worth of squashed vines out of less than 16 square feet

) went into the Biostack composter I set up last June at MIL's house. Talk about low-maintenance compost: I throw things into it once a month, when I visit. I add water once a month, when I visit. I'll probably turn it, or at least aerate it, in March to see whether I have any results. I'll be truly surprised if I do, because the proto-compost is very low in browns. It's almost entirely yard waste, but no leaves (MIL has a magnolia tree) have been added to it so far as I know.
But again, Happy Solstice and happy gardening (or garden planning...)!
Cynthia H.
Sunset Zone 17, USDA Zone 9