The aftermath

This has not been an easy summer. I was on antibiotics for 6 weeks, and they were the sort of antibiotics that precluded sun exposure. I even got sunburned through my clothing. And my dog died. The last thing on my mind was the garden, and it showed. Today Mr. Yak and I deforested the place. I'm afraid I needed a permit to pull some of those weeds out of the bean bed, they were that big. I had to remove all of the fava beans as well.

I made a note that I fed the zucchini, eggplant and cucumbers on July 10th. Sometime between then and the end of the month, I went outside and found that every single fava bean had been surgically removed from its pod. Every single one, and there had been thousands. We’d had a huge crop, and that was after I’d successfully dealt with the aphids with a concoction made up of diluted dish soap, olive oil, cayenne pepper and crushed garlic (strained through cheesecloth - otherwise it clogs the nozzle of the sprayer, ask me how I know). I’m guessing the culprits were birds. I was seriously bummed.

We got a nice crop out of the shelling peas, but they’ve kind of spent their wad and I pulled up nearly 2/3rds of them that were mostly dead. A few are still eking out a living at the tips of their vines, but I’m not sure they’ll produce anything substantial. It’s probably time to replant a new crop. And about that person who printed on the package that the peas don’t need support? That person’s nuts. I’m glad we had the pea fences up - the ones on the ground rotted and generally got into trouble and made nuisances of themselves.

The favas probably could have used a different type of support than I had. They were so overwhelmingly huge that the pea fences did little for them. I think poles with ties would have been better, since favas don’t have tendrils to hook themselves up into things. Now that the favas are gone, I am wondering if the other beans that were shadowed by them will grow bigger - the Italian rose beans are actually producing, but the plants are too small to amount to much.

I’ve got tomatoes, but they’re rotting before they ripen. I am not sure if it’s due to predation, disease or malnutrition. I’ve been too overwhelmed to investigate. The zucchini and pumpkins are putting out enormous quantities of fruits that rot before the ripen, from the flower end back. I read that this means calcium deficiency somewhere. Tomorrow I will go to the hardware store to see if I can buy a soil amender for it.

It’s not all bad news, though. I pulled up the rest of the carrots I had planted. The purple dragon carrots were an unqualified success. The beets are also doing well, although I only pulled up a few of these. And the surprise of the garden is the cucumbers... The plants are not growing huge, but they sure are putting out some huge cucumbers. I pulled 6 large fellows off today, and I guess we’re just going to eat them sliced. They’re kind of too huge to pickle.

And then, there are the things I just don’t know how to evaluate. The eggplants are small and shrubby looking, but suddenly a few of them are full of flowers. And the big russian sunflowers that I planted just for fun, well, one enormous flower has bloomed and gone, it’s ponderous head drooping down to face the ground. The birds seem to be leaving it alone. Do I just leave it like that and hope that I can get the seeds when it’s well and truly spent?

Overall, I planted too closely. And I wasn’t able to pay attention to problems from early summer onward, so I haven’t been able to troubleshoot the zucchini, pumpkins and tomatoes. I think the fava business happened overnight - I’m not sure I’d have been able to prevent that even had I been on top of it. I am guessing I need bird netting - I may try that on a small section next time around.

I think I will let the beds I cleared lie fallow for a month or two, make the attempt to fix the zucchini/pumpkin problem and the tomato problem, harvest what I can from what I’ve got already in the ground, mulch like crazy and then go with a sparse planting of winter crops.

At the end of the day, the prettiest butterfly landed on the lounge chair. I took it as a good omen, and a reminder that my troubles are minor in the grand scheme of things.