The Gardens at Tidewater Farm: Fall 2025

Garden Update

We’ve reached fall!  The colors and textures are changing daily at Tidewater as the season shifts. Chipmunks are busy digging endless holes to store their winter caches, and the landscape is alive with seasonal transitions. This time of year highlights plants and shrubs that offer late-season forage for bees and fruits for songbirds, like the goldenrod in the fields and the chokeberry near the Children’s Garden.

September treated us to the golden light and mild weather of late summer, and we’re deeply grateful for access to water and irrigation, especially as much of Maine experienced moderate to extreme drought. Despite the dry conditions, the annual flowers and most vegetables thrived, with reduced foliar diseases and extended harvests. Peppers, for example, are still going strong.

If you visited recently, we hope you had the chance to wander among the vibrant annual cut flowers filling out the Market Garden. Thanks to a dedicated team of Master Gardener Volunteers, over 130 bouquets have been harvested and arranged for Northern Light Home Hospice and the Ronald McDonald House, with plenty of blooms left to be enjoyed by Tidewater visitors.

So far this season, 1,545 pounds of produce have been donated to Portland-area pantries, with more to come. Recently, MGVs harvested and cured all the storage onions, and the garlic crop was plentiful enough to share seed with other MGV projects.

A light frost in late September touched a few areas farther from the road, mainly affecting some summer squash plants. Thankfully, they had already produced an impressive 1,399 green and yellow zucchini, counted as part of a seed trial in collaboration with Vitalis Organics.

Fall is also the perfect time to test your garden soil, just as we do at Tidewater every other year. We focus soil testing and amendments on areas used for production crops, like vegetables, herbs, and cut flowers. Testing now gives us time to make any needed adjustments before spring planting begins. 

And of course, we’re keeping an eye on the tropical crops in the high tunnel, hoping for an above-average harvest this year!

As we begin to close out the season and look ahead to next year, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to the UMaine Gardens at Tidewater Farm. As a self-funded project of the University of Maine, Tidewater relies on the generosity of our visitors and supporters to remain a vibrant, educational resource for the community. Every donation, no matter the size, helps support our mission of education, food security, and sustainable gardening.

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Upcoming Events at Tidewater

Grow Your Own Garlic
Wednesday, October 15, 2:00 – 3:00 PM

Join us for a hands-on workshop and learn how to grow your own garlic from planting to harvest! In this interactive session, we’ll discuss how to select garlic varieties, plant garlic seed, provide seasonal care, and properly harvest, cure, and store your crop. Each participant will have the opportunity to plant garlic at Tidewater Farm and take home a garlic head to plant in their own garden.

Register online, program fee is offered on a sliding scale.

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Featured Recipe: Curried Lentil Squash Soup

Cozy up to fall and savor every spoonful of this curried lentil squash soup!

Ingredients:

• 1 teaspoon vegetable oil
• 1 large onion, diced
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 Tablespoon fresh grated ginger, or ¼ Tablespoon of dried ground ginger root
• 1 butternut squash, peeled and cut into ½” pieces
• 2 Tablespoons curry powder
• 1 (28 ounce container or 6½ cups) of vegetable or chicken broth
• 2 cups water
• 12 ounce package dry red lentils

Instructions:

1. In a stock pot or large soup pot, sauté onions, garlic and ginger in 1 tsp. of cooking oil over medium heat for 3 to 4 minutes.
2. Add squash and curry and sauté 5 minutes more.
3. Add stock and water, bring to a boil and reduce to a simmer for 10 minutes.
4. Stir in lentils and cook 15 minutes until lentils and squash are soft. Optional – puree in a blender.

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Wildlife Sighting

The stunning cedar waxwings made their appearance at Tidewater this September! These social birds arrived in flocks, filling the air with their distinctive trilling, buzzing, and sighing whistle calls. They spent the month flitting through the crabapple trees and swooping gracefully around the gardens. 

To attract cedar waxwings to your own yard, consider planting native trees and shrubs that produce small fruits—some of their favorites include dogwood, serviceberry, cedar (the berries they were historically named for), juniper, hawthorn, and winterberry. Just as important: be sure to remove any non-native honeysuckle, which waxwings are known to eat. Unfortunately, they help spread this invasive plant by dispersing its seeds.

At Tidewater, the flock made excellent use of the fountain in the Children’s Garden during the drought, tipping their heads back and letting the flowing water stream right into their beaks. With a fruiting chokeberry bush conveniently located nearby, the area became a perfect buffet for waxwings.

In addition to their behavior and calls, waxwings are visually striking. With their silky-smooth plumage, they sport a tan head and breast, yellowish belly, and gray-brown upperparts. A bold black “superhero mask” outlined in white gives them an unforgettable look, and their tail feathers are tipped with a bright yellow band. Some even have waxy red tips on their wing feathers, giving the species its name.

While they’re common in Maine for most of the year, many waxwings migrate to more southern regions for the winter. For now, we’re grateful they chose Tidewater as their fall hangout.