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| A single day's harvest of cucumbers (the yellow ones are lemon cukes). |
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| Yet another single-day harvest. |
I told Zach yesterday, “I think I’m less fed up with summer right now than I ever have been before at this point in August.” Thanks to a two-week cool snap that allowed open windows and even— just once— long pants, I’m recharged and ready to take on the last several months of summer. (Haha, just kidding. I know summer is only going to last two more months.)
And the garden? Well, that’s a mixed bag. We have the “thrivers” (which are the majority, fortunately), the “barely survivors” (not many, but mostly the more expensive plants), and the “totally dead” categories.
The thrivers.
Our cucumbers have been producing so quickly that I can’t keep up with them, even with making a few gallons of pickles and foisting cucumbers off on everyone in close proximity. At long last the vines turned yellow and I decided to tear them up, thinking there weren’t that many cukes left on the vines. However, the vines showed me I was wrong:
The pumpkins and butternut squash show no signs of slowing down. It’s kind of terrifying how quickly they’ve eaten both the front and back yard. Not that I’m complaining— I’m just subconsciously nervous that we’re going to wake up one morning to a shattered window with butternut squash vines crawling into our room. (Plus, I found out that if I touch squash leaves I get a rash, which means I have to do all sorts of gymnastics to safely walk through the back yard.) I’m excited to have a store of squash for the winter!
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| Who needs a front lawn, anyway? (Butternut squash on the left, sweet potatoes on the right.) |
Our tomatoes are another plant totally out of control. They are bearing so quickly that we can barely keep up, but I’ve been drying them, making them into sauce, and throwing them on pizza. We eat a lot of tomatoes these days, savoring the flavor of the season.
The Jerusalem artichokes are kind of insane. The tallest one is probably eight feet high, and they still have several weeks of growing left. We’ll see how big the tubers end up being, but the biomass alone is enough to make them worthwhile. Birds love to perch in them, beans twine up the huge stalks, and our tomatoes have started trellising on them. An all-around good plant.
Other successes include the sugar baby watermelons, peppermint, and massive sweet potato bed.
The chickens have also been happy in the cooler weather. Bobbie Dylan even started laying again, after months of striking! (It might’ve been the weather, or it might’ve been her overhearing us talking about putting her in the stew pot.)
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| Zach pruning out squash so we can walk in the backyard. Note the yellowed cucumbers and completely dead apple tree to the right of the photo. |
The barely-survivors and totally dead.
A lot of our fruit and nut trees are in pretty dire straits. The pear trees and elderberries are growing mottled (I think it’s spider mites), our currant is covered in blotchy patches and has lost most of its leaves, three hazels are covered in spots and bug-eaten edges, our blueberries are just about to die of sadness (and acid starvation), one hazel is super dead, and one of our apple trees just dropped it leaves and flat-out died before we could figure out what was wrong with it. Losing a plant is one thing, but losing trees is really disheartening. Zach reminded me, though, that we shouldn’t be keeping plants that require babying; they have to be tough or they shouldn’t be in our yard.
Still, we’ve got to do what we can to prevent anything else from dying. In the past week I’ve been frantically flipping through a copy of What’s Wrong with my Fruit Garden?, trying to figure out the plethora of maladies sweeping through my yard.
The downside of planting a bazillion things is that it’s hard to keep track of them. The upside of planting a bazillion thing is that something is sure to succeed. Knee-deep in tomatoes and cucumbers, I can’t feel too sorry for myself.
What are you growing this time of year?
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