'I'm keeping it simple." Ha ha ha. That's amusing, Bon. No you won't. "Keeping it simple" and "cutting back" sounds great in autumn at the close of an exhausting year, but winter dreams will drive those thoughts out of your mind as the spring planting orgy approaches. You know it will. It is okay. We're all like that here. We understand. (grin)

If I even ever manage to cut back the grow list in one category, I just make up for it by making some other category huge. You know---less tomatoes? Okay, that leaves room for more corn....or lettuce....or potatoes....or herbs....or flowers....or strawberries. I've accepted that I am always going to try to cram in twice as many plants as I have space to grow. I've always been that way. I'll always be that way. Even when I am cutting back. I embrace the craziness. Then, when I think I have it all figured out, and most of it is planted, and 4,000 volunteer zinnia, cosmos, datura, salvia,, ornamental peppers, catnip, lemon balm, French hollyhock, and moss rose volunteers pop up everywhere, I start trying to figure out how to dig all of them up, pot them up and then transplant them to fill in any "holes" in my planting scheme. Who I am kidding? I don't leave any holes to begin with. So, instead I use all those volunteers to make the garden a jam-packed crazy quilt of living plants. At least when you overplant that much, the weeds don't have much space to sprout and grow. Oh, and it gives snakes more plants to hide beneath. That's good and bad, you know. If I don't see venomous snakes in the garden, I don't flee it in distress. And it is bad, of course, because you want to see the venomous snakes before they see you.

Finally, if it is mid-October, and you are in severe drought, and the daytime highs are running 20 degrees above average, and you still have a ton of plants somehow surviving in the garden, you'll be happy to have them. All those extra plants give all the newly hatching, 1/8"-long grasshoppers something to eat. So there! The power of not cutting back is that you have lots of plants to serve as Grasshopper Chow. I just wish I was growing something that would poison all the grasshoppers when they eat it. That would be awesome.

Don't forget that you can enrich the not-so-rich-yet soil in non-planting areas by growing green manure plants there year-round. That's how you keep enlarging the garden, by growing your own green manure/cover crops in place and letting them stay in/on the soil and rot there. It is amazing how quickly soil improves if all you do is give it a cover crop every year, or grow a green manure crop in rotation there, and it is easier than hauling in tons of compost.

I never come out with the right amount of anything. I must have had a craving for habanero gold jam when I was planting peppers this year.

I built my sixth compost pile, today. (These are just big enough to do the job.) I was desperate for green material so I weed eated some of the overgrowth from the edge of the neighbors' in the alley. About an hour later they came out and mowed. I know they don't have a weed eater, but I guess I made them conscientious. That lot was always empty and always unkempt, anyway. It's just habit. I hauled in approximately 2 - 55 gallon drums worth of dirt and piled it into new berm. Whew! Loving it.

I need more comfrey! Would divvying up some of the roots at this time of year be a bad idea?

Carol, That's why my canning is never precisely planned. I never know which thing is going to over-produce like crazy in any given year, but something always does. I just adjust my canning plans accordingly.

Bon, I've never tried to divide it at this time of the year, but I doubt you can go wrong by trying. Comfrey won't die voluntarily on its own and, as far as I know, you cannot kill it. I never watered the back garden (nor planted it!) this year because of the flooding. About 90% of my comfrey is in the back garden. After the flooding dried up and the subsequent flash drought had progressed to Severe Drought, I noticed all the comfrey died back to the ground. We have had about 1.2" or so of rain in the last couple of months and the comfrey is growing back from the ground even though we are in Extreme Drought. It is pretty tough and it wants to grow.

Dawn

thanks Dawn. I'll nab some and plug them around. Hopefully, they'll pop up in spring.