Category: Gardening

It’s been a weird growing season. Yes, I started things like tomatoes late, but the okra, beans, and corn were planted at appropriate times. You wouldn’t know it from looking at them. The okra is the smallest of them, just finally peeking over the edge of the raised bed it’s planted in. There are a few beans on the bushes, and most of the corn is still shorter than me. (And I’m pretty short!) The back vegetable garden has just been growing slowly this year, well, except for the kale and chard, which are huge. The surviving squash, cucumber, and melon plants in the back are just barely showing off flowers. And it’s mostly been outside our control, just the weird range of hot and dry weather we had earlier in the season, with the occasional cool dips. The surviving plants have started to expand – later than usual – as the weather has almost settled into something resembling normal. And our grass has replenished from the intermixed brown that carried into July.

It’s not all bad though… our berries have been amazing this year, from the ever-bearing strawberries (now preparing for a third harvest round), raspberries, and a mulberry tree that would normally have been done a month ago and is still filled with a plethora of red (still ripening to purple) berries. Our grand success for the season, however, sits in the front yard, a placeholder for an area that will acquire more fruit in future years. In fact, the white pumpkins’ vines filled those placeholder spots and sprawled across the new herb garden, eclipsing the basil and cilantro in their beds. With an anticipated two months or more of growth still left, some of the pumpkins are already huge and new ones are still forming. If we’re lucky, at least in terms of the garden, fall will come slowly and we’ll be able to harvest some delicious treats from the back yard.

It’s been a weird start to our growing season, between our travel and a cooler than normal spring. Because of our travel, anything that was supposed to be started indoors for our client – typically in March or thereabouts – was started early May in our house. That accounts for the eggplant (complete failure this year, none of them started), two varieties of broccoli, and two varieties of large tomatoes. They moved outside last week and are still small enough in their garden beds that they didn’t photograph well. Fortunately, we have some vegetables that are proceeding nicely… not the okra though, where only three plants have appeared so far.

Though not pictured, it is also strawberry season, which will be joined soon by raspberry and mulberry season. That said, I’m stepping outside to plant more okra, three plants just doesn’t cut it.

Shrubs, bushes, trees… whatever. We thought it would be wise to grow more food in our garden, so in addition to the vegetable beds (which we are not currently planning to expand), we added several fruit-producing, well, twigs at the moment. Except the peach, that is almost as tall as me, and we have an American plum that just arrived today that is taller (and not pictured, since it’s not in the ground yet).

The holiday tree remnants around some of the twigs are to increase the acidity of the soil… yes, we deliberately saved pieces when we discarded the tree in January. Where there are two of something – hazelnut and blueberries – it’s because that’s needed for cross-pollination; otherwise, we’d just have a couple sad bushes with no fruit. And now we return to the bit where gardening is built on hope… and patience.

This gardening season has been… strange. You may recall I started the season with sixteen eggplant seedlings. We have no eggplants. Early summer saw an unusually high number of rabbits in our garden; I’m guessing they enjoyed the seedlings. That or the burst of exceedingly warm weather around the same time, followed by a temperature drop, and fairly sparse rain throughout the season killed them off. Given those choices, I’d prefer if the rabbits ate them.

Fortunately, some of our other plants thrived. Not surprisingly, we have tomatoes again – all volunteers from seeds dropped in previous years – along with small pumpkins (a volunteer from the composter in the keyhole bed), and three varieties of cucumbers that I planted. The strangest of those are the lemon cucumbers, a round yellow variety that have a delightful crunch to them.

This was our first sizable harvest, a few days before we left on a trip to England and Scotland. Cucumbers, like other plants in the squash family, have a tendency to spread their vines under (or over!) other plants, resulting in what I refer to as stealth fruit, which are ones I don’t find until they’re either larger than usual or otherwise overripe. The two cucumbers pictured above with yellowing (orange-ing?) skin are examples of stealth fruit. We made an effort to finish our early harvest before leaving on vacation, knowing that we would likely be coming home to more ripened fruit.

We were not wrong. There are a handful of green, of varying shades, cucumbers on the vine; we picked every one that looked ripe or overripe, including a couple lemon cucumbers that had been partially eaten. The eaten ones were left in a garden bed, so someone can finish eating them or the seeds can have a chance of germinating next year. We did find that the skin becomes less edible at this stage, so the lemon cucumbers will likely be peeled before eating. Unfortunately, it didn’t rain much while we were away, so many of the cucumber vines have dried out, which means they’re not likely to produce more flowers or fruit.

Of course, we also have an abundance of tomatoes! Amongst the traditional red cherry and yellow pear tomatoes, I found the occasional batch of yellow cherry and red pear, a consequence of growing the two varieties side by side for so many years. We have the usual sprawl of tomato plants, refusing to be contained in their beds and cages, so I expect we’ll miss some during the harvest process and have volunteers again next year. Fortunately, the rain has arrived, which should keep the tomato plants happy for the next few weeks. At some break in the rain, we need to harvest raspberries and strawberries too.

It’s been a busy week and my brain is working through a plethora of stuff, so this is a short post. I was super excited to notice flowers on the strawberry plants this week!

Or as I prefer to refer to them… future strawberries.

Great, now I’m hungry. And we don’t have any strawberries in the house. I suppose that’s OK, I know storebought won’t taste as good as homegrown ones.

Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona Aurora, where we lay our scene….

More alike than different, these plants are currently segregated: whites on one side, purple on the other. I know, nothing looks white or purple right now… that doesn’t happen until much later in the season, when the fruit ripens. They won’t even go into the ground for another month, at which point we’ll have to decide whether we really need sixteen plants worth of eggplants, or if I should hand some off to friends.

Oddly, I hadn’t intended to start plants indoors this year. I was taking a cavalier attitude of only using last year’s leftover seeds and free seeds from the library. (Yes, our public library has a seed library!) That worked until I found out about a free seed event near me – the selection was lovely – and I was halfway home before I remembered that eggplants require starting indoors for our climate.

If you’re wondering why there’s loose dirt in the box, that’s because a cat sat in it and knocked some of the starter pots over.

On a recent morning, after feeding the cats, I noticed how dark it was outside, a combination of the early hour and the overcast sky. I turned off the kitchen light and stepped outside, standing just in the entryway – calling the area a “porch” would be too generous – listening to the pitter patter of the much-needed rain.

There’s a lot of green in our yard now, more so with the recent rain that has revived the lawn. Amidst that green is this small patch of brown and a growing patch of yellow – a recently cleared flower bed and a single mum. There are multiple little things to appreciate here:

The grass was cleared using my neighbor’s sod remover, which made the task far shorter than if I had been working with just a shovel.

The sod I removed ended up near our back compost pile, mostly yard waste, helping suppress weeds.

The mum itself was a gift from a different neighbor, delivered a couple days after I had cleared the sod. Our front yard is visible from their front window, so hopefully she’s enjoying its growth as much as I am.

If you’re wondering why it’s alone in the flower bed, it’s because we had already purchased bulbs to plant there, which should emerge in the spring. If our timing was good and the winter somewhat mild, the mum may still be there.

Somehow it’s mid-September already and, as expected, the temperatures have started dropping as we near the end of a strange growing season. It started off cold and dry, we had a couple weird heat waves (also dry), with most comfortably warm weather in the middle – warm enough to have the air-conditioning on during the day with windows open most nights. Now we’re at the point where the windows can be open during the day, with just a couple cracked open for fresh air at night.

We haven’t had a frost yet – probably won’t for another month or so – but the cooler temperatures have slowed down the garden growth. The potato plants began fading last week, so I dug them up this morning. While it’s a small crop, far smaller than the last two year’s potato harvest, the potatoes were a late planting from store-bought potatoes that had sprouted. The Red Alabama okra may be done flowering at this point, and I’m probably safe harvesting every three days instead of every two.

The tomatoes and raspberries, and even the strawberries are still ripening steadily. Our tomato supply has been smaller this year, partially because some of the plants are intertwined with pumpkin vines, which are both overwhelming the tomatoes and can be a bit scratchy when harvesting through. (No, we don’t need to discuss my catnip. Really, it’s fine, it’s a perennial and we’re never running out.)

What was your best garden crop this year?