Every crop is doing well this year… except berries. Even the corn is a foot higher than it should be in mid-July and the rains have been so good that there isn’t that usual spikiness to the leaves from a hot, dry summer.
I did a serious pruning of the tomato plants today. Though I’d decided not to prune this year and just see what I got, the rains have made the plants really leafy and I could tell there were tomatoes in there if only I could see them. In fact, there are a lot of tomatoes setting, and nearly all the plants seem to be “indeterminate” and continue to grow upward and outward. There is not nearly as much blight as I expected given the rains and the thick foliage. I may start getting red tomatoes next week, before it becomes a race for tomato vs. blight.
I even dug up all the red potatoes, hoping to get them before the gigantism of last year set in. They are lovely, although I do think the late frost reduced the yield, and the rain compressed the soil which also affects the yield. But I didn’t see a single potato bug, a first. There were lots of “hoppers,” miniature grasshoppers that prey on potato plants, but they don’t seem to do much damage even to the leaves. They’re nowhere as destructive as potato beetles.
blueberry jam cooking
And yet, berry farms are really struggling. The place where I picked blueberries last year didn’t even have a season this year. I did find a place that has berries, and it seems like they’re new and not many people knew about them. They are “Blueberry Summer,” another of these places with gorgeously groomed rows of well mulched blueberry bushes. The proprietor was just fantastic– as I approached the garage for a basket, she came from the house chomping away on handfuls of blueberries. She told me to pick wherever I wanted, and advised me that they had seven kinds of blueberries so I should be sure to get a mix. The small blue ones, perfectly the same size, were the best for blueberry muffins, she said. I’m sad to say I cannot quite tell one blueberry bush from another. However, with permission to go to a bush here and a bush there, all of them loaded with giant berries, I had six pounds of blueberries in no time and was on my way.
She did say that half of their bushes didn’t produce this year. And over at the strawberry farm, they actually lost 50% of their strawberry plants. It was devastating, and I was lucky to get over there in the five-seven days they had berries to be picked. The berries were small but very sweet, and I made my batch of strawberry jam (straight up this time, no rhubarb).
The problem was no snow cover. Last winter we got a deep, early snow in November and then not much more. Most of the winter the ground was bare, so even though it wasn’t as cold as the winter before, there were still frozen pipes, and it was bad for the berry plants.
Raspberries are the only things that haven’t seemed to suffer. In my backyard I have a little stand that has produced enough for sauce for ice cream, toppings for birthday angel-food cake, and a “bottomless” pint for yogurt and cereal for a week. I have a larger set of bushes that have lots of fresh new canes but no blossoms. I’m not sure if they were subject to the late frost (they’re a later bearing variety) or if the deer ate the second-year canes down (those produce berries) or what happened. It’s fine, as blueberry and strawberry jam is enough for me this year. And once again I’m not tempted at all to put in my fruit patch!
