Still stained from picking wild raspberries and with dirt under
the nails, my fingers now come in from the garden to their all too
familiar spot on the keyboard. On this unseasonably cool and windy
July 4th it's a good day for picking and pecking.
Summertime gardening is now upon us and we have finally finished
our spring planting! The last of the sweet potatoes and the okra have
gone in and the melons and squashes are up and starting to flower. The
corn is of course "knee high" and the pole beans are starting to climb
on them with the squash spreading out underneath. We're even trying
our luck with some small patches of dried beans including pintos and
black beans. If things go well our small patch could yield us a couple
50 lb sacks.
And of course our spring crops are coming ripe and sometimes it's
hard for us to eat or preserve it fast enough. It was an overwhelming
spring for lettuce despite huge salads at every meal. Turnips, beets,
broccoli, kale and kohlrabi (my new favorite) have also come in with
an impressive harvest. And our peas, potatoes, onions, and fava beans
are finishing up their cycle. We even had enough strawberries for a
few quarts of jam and jelly.
Possibly our most abundant product from the garden is cabbage
loopers. These smooth, little, green caterpillars are the spawn of the
cabbage moth, a beautiful white butterfly that can often be seen
fluttering over our garden. Unfortunately the loopers' main occupation
in life is eating brassicas (broccoli, kale, kohlrabi, cauliflower,
cabbage, etc.). Everyday, one can pick a handful of loopers off just a
few plants or the less squeamish can squish them directly on the
plant. If left to their own loopers do not harvest sustainably but
will instead decimate an entire plant before it can reproduce to
provide them food for next year. Maybe we should stop battling the
loopers and decide to eat them instead of the broccoli!
So besides the weeding we can look forward to tomatoes, squash,
melons, and green beans as well as a nice crop of basil. It'll
probably be quite an effort just to get all the tomatoes picked and
processed as they come ripe. But food processing can be nice relaxing,
social, indoor work to balance with some of the outside heavy labor or
the lonely computer work. It's also time for some old fashioned
foraging: black raspberries, gooseberries, mulberries all grow wild in
these areas and will probably make up the bulk of our sweet preserves.
Come visit us soon if you like gardening and fresh produce. I find
the work goes quickly and is much more fun and relaxing when it's
shared with friends. Time to hoe some weeds I suppose...
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