Every gardener I talk to says the same thing, even the professional growers. Sure, endless watering because it refused to rain (the drought finally broke last week)...but holy crap the bugs. I've been gardening for 25 years, and I've never felt so under assault. That fella there in the picture is a red-legged grasshopper, measuring over 2 inches long. There are dozens like him out in the yard, each capable of devouring many times his body weight in tasty plant material every day. Add to that his lesser cousins, numbering in the thousands. Factor in the flea, tortoise, and cucumber beetles, the cabbage loopers and moth worms, centi- and millipedes, slugs and snails, all in quantities enough to make me queasy; it's a wonder there's a single leaf left. But.
I am vigilant. I prevail. And my garden thrives, flourishes – and feeds us.
We've had gorgeous heads of lettuce and bowls full of lesser salad greens, more than enough peas to satisfy this glutton, sweet carrots and beets both red and gold (all mostly safe from bugs once they grow past the seedling stage of slug delicacy). I've snatched fresh cilantro, basil, and dill, jalapeños, scallions, and shallots as staples, and harvested about 120 heads of garlic 3 weeks ago (2 weeks earlier than 'normal'). Some of the fattest heads I've ever grown; it's all bundled and curing in the woodshed, but I keep swiping a head here and there for cooking.
The more substantial crops are approaching maturity now. Three varieties of onions are in their final bulging stage, pushing up out of the dirt as their tops start to lose their vigor and die. My cabbages were being decimated by both cabbage loopers and cabbage moth caterpillars in the weeks before we left for vacation. I was checking 3 times a day and picking/squishing, but they were still getting ahead of me, and I was afraid that if I let them be, there would be nothing left when we returned home. I sprayed them with DiPel (a brand of bacillus thuringiensis bacterium used for organic control of certain worms and caterpillars), and also sprayed the tomato plants in anticipation of the dreaded Tomato Hornworm. It was the right thing to do; I now have a dozen cabbage plants starting to tighten up healthy fat hole-free heads that I can use for slaws and a supply of sauerkraut to get us through the winter.
And the tomato plants are so far free of, you know, that awful pest. The plants have easily topped out their 5-ft. stakes and have filled out their cages, and they're well-hung with happy green fruit (almost entirely free of blossom-end rot, thanks to the handful of ground eggshell I mixed into each hole when I planted them). Now it's more of the garden waiting game, with obsessive checking for signs of color...does that look sort of orange to you? I mean, sure it's still green, but doesn't it look just a leeeeetle bit sort of orange-ish right on its shoulder? No? Ffff.
Jaune Flammée on the left; Granadero plum tomato on the right.
I already have my triage plan for when they DO start to ripen. Cherry tomatoes: eat straight from the vine until we can't keep up, then start oven-roasting them for freezing, then try the tomato mostarda recipe I've got tucked away. Jaune Flammée: eat with abandon for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for several days, then scale back and wait for a few pounds to ripen and make the first couple of pints of salsa to save for the winter. Resume uncontrolled consumption until crop overwhelms. Make more salsa. Paste tomatoes: use first several pounds for spicy tomato jam. Use next several pounds for sauce. Use next several pounds for jam. More sauce. Can some whole. More sauce.
I have four gorgeous long slender eggplants ready for harvest. Tomorrow, I think. But...Asian, Middle-Eastern, or Italian? I'm leaning towards an oven-roasted preparation, tossed with ginger/garlic sautéed minced pork with a little fish sauce. The jalapeños are being generous this year, plenty for salsa-making. The surplus will get candied (something I literally dreamed up last year; it's delicious and weirdly addictive).
I planted both celery and celeriac (celery root) this year. If you've never had homegrown celery, it may be hard to understand why celery is part of the trinity of aromatics in cooking (onion, carrot, celery). The California-grown stuff is so wan and watery; when you start cooking with the real thing you have to be careful as it can actually overwhelm if you overdo it. I read somewhere that you could dig up celery plants and pot them for overwintering in the root cellar. I tried it last year, and was cutting my own fresh celery for soups right into January. Celeriac...I like to cube and cook and add to mashed potatoes (as I do with parsnips – also growing in the bed with the carrots and beets). Or shred it raw and make it into slaw or add it to salads.
Celery root still sporting the copper collar that kept the slugs away; Cousin Celery.
The cucumbers started to produce, then got all misshapen and bitter from the lack of water, then started to produce again, sort of. I've used a few for salads, but I really grow them for pickling. For which I need critical mass. Which I haven't achieved yet. So I keep picking the overgrown ones and chucking them into the undergrowth to try and keep the plants flowering, in hopes of getting 5 or 6 pounds at once so I can put up some sweet chunk pickles (my favorite). And if I get more after that I'll make some whole dills. And after that some tiny sour cornichons. Or some hot dog relish. I've grown all kinds of squash over the years, summer and winter varieties. I can't even keep up with the output from a single zucchini plant, so if I want/need zucchini (or pattypan or crookneck), I just buy it at the farmer's market. As for winter squashes: butternut, acorn, really? Have you never eaten a Delicata squash? There really is no comparison. Delicata squash is like candy. Think of the best stickiest sweet potato you ever had, then heap on a little gravitas in the flavor department. That's Delicata. Mine seem to be fairly productive, although some squash vine borers showed up over the weekend. Only a few, in secondary parts of the vines...
Scallions, leeks, and filet beans in the bed they share with the fennel:
We got a late start planting the potatoes, which turns out to have been a good thing, as we seem to have missed the potato beetles (although I'm loathe to make too confident a pronouncement). So far, the plants seem very healthy, and little bothered by bugs. They're just now starting to flower.
I'd been anxious to get more stuff sown for fall after I harvested the garlic and freed up those two beds, but with a stretch of hot hot dry weather, I wasn't optimistic. Last week, the weather pattern broke, and we had several overcast, less hot (not exactly cooler), sort of rainy days, and I managed to get spinach, beets, carrots, scallions, broccoli rabe, pak choi, and more filet beans to germinate!
The metal rod in the photo is an old tent pole that I use to mark rows for planting seeds.
With the more temperate weather continuing, I yanked out all the bolted salad greens and planted more cutting and heading lettuce, arugula, cilantro, and fennel, and seeded some white and red swiss chard.
I've started into a month of a pretty demanding workload, so trying to keep up the blog while canning needs to be done will be a challenge. Best intentions, my friends.
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