Dog Days of Summer

Yep, Summer has come and gone, and nary a post was made.
The garden was not forgotten, nor left utterly untended, but many other things drew me away from devoting the time I wanted to it. The farm, the kids, and many other projects - large and small - that required immediate attention.
As it was, those decisions were easy to make and  not regretted - as we had freakish weather here in Southern Georgia this year - many of the people I know and do work for out in the farmlands all but abandoned 'hobby gardens' this year because of it.

I see dead things....

 For several weeks we had heavy rains in the mornings, which cleared by midday, in time for the brunt of the Summer heat - although rain and sunshine are very welcome normally, you want them in the other order - a cool bright morning sun, followed by a cooling afternoon rain.  The end result was a humidity oven that evaporated all that morning moisture and raised temps - playing hell with mature plants, and if a seed was lucky enough not to be washed out (along with most the good stuff in the soil), it was soon fried, or drowned the next morning.

For the better part of half a month I planted and re-planted, tried to shade, and re-water before consulting my network of Farmers Wives... 'Is this just me?.....' and the answer was 'No... sometimes you just have to give up and wait it out' - and so that was what I did.  Even at that stage nearly every thing in a container was dead or dying - including my prize gift-rose and the thyme I'd had growing for over a year and a half. Thankfully the rose pulled through - it has sentimental value and is the only non-edible plant I own.

Other plants seemed to adjust well - the Brussels Sprouts had a good enough jump to eat up that sunshine and drink the morning rain - as did my Kale.  The Broccoli I had moved from containers (you can see the dead ones left over in the square pots above) thrived... I'll jump ahead of myself a little here as this really is an Autumn issue (and this is a Summer recap) - I never got the hang of harvesting this - I either found the florents too early or late, or was waiting for a secondary one to pop (as harvesting a tiny little bit seemed stupid) - as a result it jumped to flower.  I still have one of them in the garden growing atm - the plants overran the square and grew into the walkthrough area, the one in this pic is currently about 7ft long.  So I'm very up-in-the-air about growing them for food next year... I will, however, plant at least one - as the one outside at the moment has attracted bees from far and wide - possibly more bees than if I totaled the amounts I've seen since I moved in (not a swarm - just I have seen very few bees).  So as a means of attracting pollinators, broccolli is 'the shiznitz'.

The way this is reading you'd think Summer was a total loss, and it really wasn't - only mature plants were available to me, but they did give a good yield.  Eggplants and Peppers were the food of the day.  This pic was pretty much average for the take.  Peppers would have been much more, but for the sun.  Peppers love the sun to grow and fruit - but that same fruit is destroyed quickly by it - for every 2 peppers shown here, one was composted.

In the circle-patch where I planned to grow a blueberry, a solitary surviving Butternut Squash took off and spread out.  I was surprised due to the acidic nature of the soil I've cultivated there - but it seems to love it.  In fact I just ate on of the squashes for dinner tonight, and several more are on the vine.

Herbs continue to grow fairly well, I've harvested and dried out dill seeds and coriander. Sage if doing very well, and there is an abundance of Basil (still). Parsley gave up the ghost, but enough of it was harvested and dried that I doubt I'll be out of it (or Basil) at any time during the winter.  There will be one more big herb harvest and preserve session before the end of Autumn to make sure I get the most out of this.





Vermicomposting slowed during the Summer as well, I resorted to putting frozen water bottles and a box fan in front of the worm farms to keep temps down as much as I could - but even that just kept them in the range of not being in danger of dying.  Even so, there was an improvement in the worm-casting take during this time, and with time to prepare - hopefully the problems that plagued me this year will be prevented next Summer.

Cheers!