August is an odd month (and a busy one).  It’s still definitely summer, but you can start to see the first tiny signs of fall.  We’ve got hot humid weather in the 90s, but some of the trees are starting to show the first yellow leaves and it’s time to plant the fall garden.  It’s also time for some big canning projects.  Peaches are available starting in July, but they don’t separate from the pits until August and we got lots of cucumbers and tomatoes too for pickles, salsa and whole tomatoes.  That just leaves apple sauce, apple butter, raspberry jam and pears for September (and marmalade for winter).

So far the canning projects have gone well.  The salsa in particular worked out really well (yay for the ‘Zesty Salsa’ recipe from Ball!).  It’ll be interesting to see how long these last/how fast we eat them.  The goal is to eventually keep about a year’s supply so that’s the other half of this experiment.  We’ve got about 8 pints of salsa, 18 quarts of tomatoes, 6 quarts of pickles and 9 pints of peaches.

We have successfully visited the ocean! That may not sound very big to many people, but for us it’s a major life goal accomplished. And more than that, we had the chance to spend an entire week just being happy.  So it was also a mission accomplished in terms of going on a vacation.  It’s been a long time since we had something work out well (and moreover to do something without anything horrible happening), so I’m still a little bit stunned that everything went so well.

We were at Cape May for a week, so we rented a cottage.  The people we rented from were very nice, and the cottage was awesome.  It had a tiny 1950s kitchen (with original stove!) that I wish I could recreate at home and you could hear the ocean with the windows open.  They even had a tiny pond with koi fish in it.  Patrick figured out how to hook the laptop up to the TV (yay HDMI cables!) and we had our movie back ups with us so we could watch movies in the evening and play board games.  And the cottage was only a few blocks from the ocean so we could walk down whenever we wanted.

It was also only about a mile from the little pedestrian shopping area.  That was fun because the entire town was only about 10 miles in diameter so we were able to walk everywhere.  Next year hopefully we can bring bikes since there are lots of bike paths too.  Most of the houses near the town center are very old, with the gingerbread/Victorian style, so it was fun to just walk around and see all the neat architecture (and pretty flower gardens…).

They also have a lighthouse and several protected beaches for wildlife so we saw lots of interesting ocean birds, and dolphins catching fish only 30 or 40 feet off the beach.

Luckily the garden behaved itself while we were gone.  When I got back the zucchini were still reasonable size and the beans hadn’t gone crazy.  If I’m lucky I will get to pick zucchini this weekend.  I’m also going to be trimming back some of the ‘bush’ beans that are now about 5 ft tall and climbing the tomato trellis.  I need to trim them back to keep them from taking over the poor tomatoes.  Amusingly enough the happiest tomatoes are the volunteers in the compost bin and the cherry tomatoes by the back door…

Still the garden is doing well this year.  I’ve already frozen about a gallon of green and yellow beans and a whole bunch of wax and jalapeno peppers.  We’ve even got three tiny ripe tomatoes.  I’ve also got some lettuce that’s still going despite the heat.  Hopefully there will be zucchini and cucumbers soon.  And hopefully when we pull the garlic this week we’ll have good results!

We’ve made it to June, which for me is always the start of summer. Even if it’s not official until the end of the month, the pools are open, it’s hot enough for sun dresses and we’ve gotten the bikes and the grill out. Therefore it’s summer.

May was officially the hottest May we’ve ever had, so my spring vegetables are well and truly bolted. The summer ones seem to be enjoying the experience though. I have tiny tomatoes that are almost egg sized, and the corn is already knee-high (I think it’ll be plenty tall by July 4). I don’t know if we’ll get corn, but I’m enjoying the experiment.

The strawberries also did great this year. I got a year’s supply of jam (which doesn’t take much for us!) and some to freeze too, so I’m happy. I think Patrick’s also happy to escape lots of trips to the pick-your-own place. Maybe I’ll save that for pumpkins or Christmas trees this year… I think I’ll get a few currants and raspberries, but next time I try planting those I think I will do a more careful job with the prep work which should make things easier.

I’m also looking forward to a day where I can put a big (read: deer proof) fence around the yard and have nice spaces between my garden beds, picking the strawberries requires some interesting balancing and while that builds muscles, it doesn’t make for good motivation to go out and take care of the garden properly.

Overall though I’m doing pretty well this year. Having a careful (and rigorously followed) plan has kept things a lot more organized this year. And that’s even with the early swap out of the spring vegetables. This weekend I’m going to finish cleaning things up since I still need to do the cress that’s gone to seed and train the tiny cucumber plants and morning glories so they climb nicely. I’ll put in some more lettuce. So far the second round of cut-and-come-again lettuce looks to be getting to a good size. And the stumps of the lettuce that I cut the whole head from (it was ready to bolt) are actually putting out new leaves. Score one for an internet rumor!

I want to get everything set up real well so it can survive on it’s own for a week. We’re actually going on a vacation, for an entire week at the ocean.  It’ll be the first time we’ve done this, and I’m looking forward to it.  I have finished almost all of my seersucker sewing projects and I’m going to bring along a couple of relaxing knitting projects, so I’m really looking forward to it.

It looks like we’re really heading into summer this week. On the upside I won’t have to water the garden!  Summer is usually like that here.  It will be hot and humid and then thunderstorms will roll in during the afternoon.  I’m fine with this as long as there’s no hail or crazy wind!   And weird though it sounds I’m also ok with it being warmer.  It got cold again at the end of last week, and for whatever reason this year I’m looking forward to hot weather.  Maybe it’s because of how intense this year has been?

So far I’m pretty happy with the garden.  I picked lots of strawberries yesterday.  I think I might try making scones with the alpine strawberries, or maybe pancakes…  For the big ones they’re either going to be pie or jam, depending on how much I have.  I really look forward to being able to say I made jam from my own fruit.  It will feel like I got all the check boxes or a full score or something.  We’ll see…

I’ve also gotten to eat a whole bunch of lettuce and cress from the garden.  The cress is bolting sadly, but I plant to fill that space with more lettuce and plant more cress again in fall.  These are two more garden success stories, starting lettuce inside worked amazingly well, my Ice Queens are even making heads this year!  And my buttercrunch is huge and beautiful.  (I love buttercrunch, it’s my favorite!)  The cress was also really good.  I mostly used it in sandwiches and sometimes a little mixed into salads, but I really liked the flavor, so it’s going into regular rotation, at least whenever the weather will cooperate.

For the rest of the salad bed, the radishes are ready to harvest (and are starting to bolt…) and there are a few carrots, but as usual, carrots remain a challenge.  Maybe I’ll just plant more lettuce?  And the cucumbers have germinated (or rather 4 out of 5 have, slot 5 refuses to cooperate even after 2 tries, so I guess cucumbers aren’t meant to grow there?).  Also given the recent comprehensive demise of the chard (and I was so looking forward to trying it!!!)  I’ve planted bush cucumbers in that spot because I really love pickles, and this year I’m going to get a decent amount.

As for the rest of that bed, the broccoli is coming along nicely, though I’m really hoping it will make nice big heads before the heat gets to them.  The Pacman broccoli plants are maybe 1/3 or 1/4 bigger than the Sun King ones, but both have heads about the same size.  Unfortunately I’ve been having to make a daily squishing of cabbage loopers (my mortal enemies).  I used to pick them up and throw them, but that took extra time and there’s always the chance they’d make it back, so now I squish them and wash my hands after.  I figure 90% of what ends up on my hands is liquified broccoli leaves…  (Note to self: pick up Bt at Johnsons today, put it on the broccoli and then actually put up row covers like a responsible person).  The eggplants are still there too.  They’re holding out with the recent cold weather, and flea beetles that have covered their leaves in tiny holes.  (Second note to self: see if Johnson’s has an organic gardening solution to flea beetles and cover the eggplants like a responsible person!).  Yeah, so as is obvious my major failing with that bed was not putting up row covers like I had planned.  Also there’s whatever killed the chard, which suddenly wilted.  It couldn’t have been cold since the eggplants next to them were fine, and I don’t know of any chard diseases, and there was no insect damage…  Some morning doves did ‘decorate’ them right before they wilted so maybe morning dove droppings are deadly to chard?

I also need to do some thinning.  My bush beans are all up and growing nicely, so I need to go out and clip one for where they all came up.  Putting in two seeds was the right choice given that they were older seeds and in a lot of places only 1 came up, but now I need to thin them.  Their neighbors the slicing tomatoes are doing ok, they aren’t as happy as the cherry tomatoes in the grow bags, but I think that has to do with the extra shade from the neighbor’s oak tree and the fact that the ones in the grow bags have the best soil ever (yay gardener’s gold!).  The Early Girl in the grow bag (my back up in case of another tomato apocalypse like last year) is also doing reasonably well, but I need to get another bag of soil to finish filling up the bag.  (Note to self #3….)  The only big gardening fail here is that I broke the growing tip on the Hartman’s Yellow trying to adjust it to keep it in the cage.  It has a big offshoot right next to it, so hopefully it will be ok?  But yeah, that was a major fail, and I was trying to be really gentle!  New rule for me: don’t touch the tomatoes!  Unless it’s a major issue, leave them alone!  Or if absolutely necessary move it incredibly slowly.

Hm…who else…the garlic is doing well.  We even had scapes for breakfast yesterday.  Getting scapes is almost better than the actual garlic.  They’re so good!  And my marigolds are blooming.  They’re more a creme than a pure white, but I still think they’re pretty.  My catnip or rather the cats’ catnip also appears to be getting established, which is a good thing.  And the potatoes are huge, they also have pretty white flowers, which I think is a good sign.  The bad part is I caught a squash vine borer on them.  So Note to Self #4, cover up the squash seedlings.  Hopefully none of them are infected, especially since they’re so small right now, but we’ll see how it goes.  Worst case scenario I’m going to be replanting in July.

On the upside, it looks like most of the basil, and more peas than I expected survived the cut worms.  And the pole beans are starting to climb too.  So I have high hopes for pesto, at least 1 meal of peas, and a summer of beans.  Oh and my container corn is growing, I lost one seedling that got shadowed by the potatoes, but the rest seem to be doing well.  I really need to thin them too.

Other than that, the peppers are doing good.  It looks like they might like a little extra fertilizer, but they look happy and are producing some nice wax peppers.  The other berries are mixed.  My currants are actually doing really well, except for the fact the deer has pruned them again for me.  The raspberries are mixed.  But I didn’t do a great job planting or weeding them so that’s probably why.  I have rhubarb, but even though I thought I got a red cultivar most of the stalks are green which weirds me out.  I should just be brave and ignore that…

So I’d say so far I’ve got more successes than not!

All the plants are officially in the garden now.  Which is a nice feeling!  Actually, everything is even bigger now than in this picture which I took a little over a week ago.  The potatoes have been all hilled up and are huge.  Still no garlic scapes, hopefully soon?

Here you can see all my nice neat rows.  This will be a fond memory during the jungles of August!