Month: September 2020

It’s mid-september and I haven’t updated this blog since August 30. Things have definitely been happening– good things sometimes… I have even found joy in it sometimes… but not the abundant joy that causes me to sit and admire my work while updating the blog.

The garden is good, for the most part, as you’ll see in the handful of photos below. I had a little bit of a watering issue with both the drip system (it was set for too short a cycle for the hot days) and with my hand watering. The hand watering suffered from the malaise of 2020… all parties have decided that I can’t be trusted to water regularly when the heat gives me migraines, the world is on fire, and there’s a global pandemic.

The patty pan and delicata on the driveway slope are doing just fine despite my lack of watering. The purple rhody does NOT like all that sun. Maybe we should move it someday, or give it some more shade somehow. There will be lots of delicata this year, which is a bright spot.

For P’s birthday I made a flourless chocolate cake, and we ate it up with the berries I could rustle up each day (blue, black, and the occasional late strawberry.) That was awesome.

We have gotten a pretty good harvest off most of the plants. The tomatillos are crazy, the tomatoes and peppers are tiny. The runner definitely suffered from the short water cycle, but the green beans are still producing well– and coming back from the deer damage SO quickly.

Other people didn’t have my tomato issues- B gave me a bunch of slicing tomatoes she has grown (and grown sick of) and I cut the top off and roasted them for soup. I used the peels to make paste and turned one of the soups into a sauce, then dried out the peels in the over to make “tomato flakes” for future use (refrigerated cause I’m not confident of their dryness). There was a lot of extra tomato juice in the pan after roasting, so I added that to the growing collection of broths in the freezer.

I’m not sure why… but I got a late harvest of peas this year. I’m glad I didn’t turn the watering off in their bed. The lower plant all looked dead, but up at the top there was a dense forest with lots of little peas. They were delicious. Right after that they gave up the ghost. (I ate the last peas out of the fridge 9/17)

And then came the smoke…. it’s been REALLY bad. Worst air quality in years, maybe ever, for almost two weeks now. I can’t go out without a N95 mask, and the air inside is stagnant and we have sore throats and coughs. We finally got an air filter rigged up, and were able to buy a couple more.  We’re supposed to see some clearing by Saturday…. It’s not great for the mind. (They say being outside for a day is the lung equivalent to 9 cigarettes. It feels worse.)

It’s such a weird place to be to have to consider every activity… going outside? Grab the respirator… going to the grocery? you’ll have to change out of the respirator into a cloth mask to protect against the coronavirus. Have hand sanitizer, a bottle of water, antihistamines.

I think the smoke is another hard reminder that we’ve thus survived the emotional toll of the pandemic because at least we could go outside. But the endless rainy misery is coming, and you’ll still not be able to see your friends or family.

Where the green beans recovered from the deer after P put up the nifty deer fence, the tomatoes he snacked on are still struggling. Carrot beet tomato combo is a win though— at least for the root veggies.

The green beans are coming back with new growth and flowers. I may get a longer season from them, even?

Here’s the handy deer fence P put up. It only covered the part we’ve cleared blackberry from. When we were installing the neighbor came over and we got to talk to him for the first time. It was really nice. He grew up on the property (70+ years) and his mother used to have her garden where we’re planted ours. The house was built for his sister, and he even planed a lot of the beams and wood.

My big success this year would have to be tomatillos. We’ve done two full batches of salsa (I’ve been freezing the fruit I pick in their papers for later use. ~1 big ziplock is a single batch from the canning book.) Mixed in that bed and hard to seee- the peppers are doing alright as well. Better than the ones in the bags. There was also a volunteer runner bean that I left.

Might have a couple of slicing tomatoes sometime this month, but mostly the tomatoes have come slowly (see watering issues.) We’ll see if I have enough to can.

The new soil for the cilantro and basil is doing well inside.