This has been a tough year in general for gardening. Between chickens, rabbits, squash bugs, fungi, deluges of rain followed by heat and no rain, everything has struggled. The weeds have done extremely well. I have been operating at about 40% energy and strength. Put that together, and you will get meager harvests.
And yet, we eat prod
uce from the garden every day. We eat very well, in fact. It’s amazing what you can do with some basil, a few cherry tomatoes, and two medium zucchini (that took two weeks to get to harvestable size!)
The basil has done very well. And the tomatoes, although many of them have blossom rot and the vines are suffering from extreme blight, will ripen into a great harvest if the sun continues to shine (which I’m thinking it will).
But the cucumbers, although covered in blossoms from early on, have just not produced. And what they’ve produced has been small and struggling. The bottom ends have curled– I think a sign of not enough water. I blame squash bugs. Cucumber ends are notoriously bitter, a defense against predators eating them, so I see the curling ends as a protest against the bugs. It’s not the pickle factory of past years, but to tell the truth I don’t feel up to making pickles this year. We’re eating the occasional cucumber salad and it is very, very good.
Yes, there are four or five cucumbers hanging there, and I picked four after taking the photo, but they are small and misshapen. The high quantity of seeds inside speaks to their desire to reproduce against all odds.
Then there are the green beans. Last year I had such a great harvest from the bush beans, I decided to just grow that type this year. Who needs the bother of a trellis, always threatening to fall over in the wind and needing to be staked? Well, I learned a lesson about that this year. Rabbits love bean blossoms and tender bean stems. We got some beans early on, but they are gone now. Still, the plants continue to put out fresh shoots and blossoms… and there are actually a lot of beans on the “dry beans” plants.
But even the kale plant is short…
I never did get around to planting all the onions– though I stuck some in a bed thinking I’d harvest them as green onions or small onions. Small onions I got, a whole box full.
And I have garlic to beat the band (planted in two beds last October, the scapes dutifully cut by friend Henry Ebel, pulled by me and Nancy Ebel and drying in the barn). Which is a good thing because I won’t make it to the garlic festival this Saturday and will need these for seed garlic as well as winter eating. This photo is half the harvest.
And despite borers of some sort and some very sad looking plants, the winter squash are producing– this butternut squash was on a plant I almost pulled up a few weeks ago because it looked beyond hope of recovery from the borer at its root. My friend Kate pointed out the new growth on the end.
For me one of the big disappointments of the post-chemo phase was that I just didn’t have the energy to go pick blueberries. I’d missed strawberry picking (around my birthday in June) but to miss blueberries– that was a travesty. But then, crazily, through the magic of the FB algorithm, I got this post about The Fruit Club.
Now I’d heard of this semi truck loaded with fruit bought direclty from growers back in 2009 when I was strawberry picking. But that was the last I heard of it, and even at the time it sounded like a myth. Then here it was, with blueberries and Georgia peaches, and it would be a mile from my house on Sunday from 12:30-2. So I ordered a couple cases of blueberries and one of peaches and showed up. And yes, there was the semi, a bunch of people waiting in their vehicles, and in no time a woman and her teenage sons had set up operations and were handing out fruit.
No, I didn’t pick these 10 lbs of blueberries. But they are seriously good, fresh, and in addition to freezing quarts and quarts and giving some away, I can eat them by the fistful. And I am. With both hands. Superfood.
And I see some grilled peaches in my future, too. Fruit has been my mainstay for sweet things since anything with sugar in it tends to taste medicinal or chemical. Pears, peaches, and blueberries have been especially good. So thank you Fruit Club! I didn’t even have to fight anyone. And the teenager offered to carry my boxes, presumably because of my headscarf (he didn’t offer for anyone else) but I could carry them. (I hope I’m not breaking any rules of Fruit Club to say what happens at Fruit Club.)
All in all, this little garden has done well for us. Going into fall we’ll have garlic, onions, winter squash, and potatoes. And plenty of tomatoes in the freezer. No pickles or red salsa (oddly, the cherry tomatoes have fared way worse than the larger ones, but there are more than enough tomatillos for green salsa and tomatillo sauce, which hopefully freezes well).
And every day we get our little harvest, sometimes a zucchini or yellow squash, sometimes a few beans, sometimes a few cucumbers, always a couple tomatoes.
I know my sister is out there making parallels to the way my little body has done over these months. I’ll let you work the metaphor if you’d like.