Above is a picture of what part of the garden looks like now in September. In the front are purple cabbages. Behind them are drying beans, carrots, beets and turnips and behind those are 2 rows of tomatoes.
I am proud of the leeks. I had to baby them from the time they were only one inch high.
I did grow lettuces which grew beautifully until the hot rainless days of July, when I couldn't germinate new batches no matter what I tried. I did try a Mesclun mix mid August and those germinated well due to our turn in weather with occasional rains and cooler nights.
What truly did not do well to my disappointment and I know why, were my peppers, eggplants and cucumbers. They went out too late because they were started too late. And, they are the favorites of the summer. Very disappointing. Darn!
Also, the onions needed more water and I haven't mastered how to grow garlic yet. We got both, but they aren't something I want to show off!
Anyway, I put up 40 quarts of tomatoes so far and froze about 14 lbs of green beans. There are about 5 lbs of raspberry in the freezer. Not much but we've been eating them. We saved a couple of bags of corn that I put in the freezer. Like I said, we ate and ate the fresh cobs. There was nothing like it.
We gathered wild grapes from the tangley vines around the property and made grape juice and jelly. This was a good squash year so I've been grating the missed zucchinis that had turned into clubs for zucchini bread. We harvested over 30lbs of zucchini and numbers of patty pan and yellow squash. I don't know the poundage of butternut yet. One of the largest weighed over 8lbs!
This was the year of my herb apprenticeship and much time has been spent focused on this. It, also, distracted me away from attending to the vegetables as closely as previous years. So what happened? I grew quite a bit of sweet basil. I have made several batches of pesto and have frozen several bags of leaves. This is new for me. That is to freeze the individual leaves. What else?
On the deck I have pots of curly leaf parsley and Italian flat leaf parsley, Purple Basil, Lemon Basil, Holy Basil, Lemon Balm, 3 large pots of Rosemary, 5 pots of Sunflowers, a bucket with a mix of Nasturtium, Parley, Purple Basil and Holy Basil, a planter of climbing Morning Glorys, a planter of Calundula and purple basil, a large pot of Lemon Verbena and a pot of miniature roses on the picnic table.
I have wild harvested and dried Yarrow, Wild Cherry bark, Burdock root, Dandelion root, and Witch hazel. I started from seed St. Johns Wort, Marshmallow, Nettle, Yarrow, Borage and Echinacea with some success. Uhh, I don't remember, off hand what others did not germinate well.
It's apple sauce making time and a large pot is on the stove as I write.
I am so sorry that I didn't keep up with writing about the garden or digging in the garden. What a strange summer for me. I worked at a garden nursery center and ended up taking care of a whole different set of plants. "The shoemaker's children have no shoes". Here I enjoyed the outdoors in a very stress-free job and it prevented me from being able to keep up with what I needed to do here.
Talk about needing Thyme!
