Dear Garden Diary

Dear Diary,

I can’t believe it has been three months since my last garden blog post. I really can’t believe it. After spending May watering every other day to keep the new plants alive in the dry, windy, 90+ degree heat, the annual Japanese beetle invasion, and the weeds, it’s time now to take a breath.

Not that much of a breath, of course. Any vegetable gardener knows that the harvest mostly starts in August around here in Southern Wisconsin, and it’s far from done now. One thing we learned about not cleaning things up right away after harvesting is that some plants – cabbage being one – will give you post-harvest gifts. Little cabbages (the inspiration for the French term of endearment, “Mon petit chou”) arise from the place where the original cabbage was cut. They are tender and mild.

Surprisingly, we got to harvest all of our sweet corn, despite nightly visits by various deer. At least one of the deer developed a taste for moss roses and pulled most of them out of the ground. They also keep our sedum plants well pruned and reduce the population of the wild black-eyed Susan-type flowers. They also do a pretty good job of picking up the apples that fall, though there is room for improvement.

Speaking of apples, we have been overrun by them. Our Cortland tree, which is old and looks ne uhar death, produced more apples than we could use. We dried a ton of them. Our Bonnie Best tree, which grows huge apples, went from a half-dozen apples last year to over a hundred this year. And our delicious apple tree is laden with late-maturing fruit. It sounds like our dinners this winter will be apple pie with apple sauce and dried apples with apple crisp for dessert. It could be worse.

Don’t even get me started on tomatoes. We’ve cooked down and canned 12 gallons or so of tomatoes to Italian sauce. There are more tomatoes. I need to make a mental note to plant fewer next year.

Peppers are a mixed bag. Poblanos are doing well, but the bell peppers suffered too much during the heat and drought. I think bunnies ate the beets, which sounds like a children’s book. The chard did well until a deer discovered it. The lettuce mix bolted almost immediately when the temperature neared 100 degrees.

I’ve gone on long enough. Every garden has good and bad outcomes each year. We all try to learn from both, but of course we can’t control the weather. The small number of bugs and almost daily winds to keep those few bugs away from us made working in the garden more pleasant, even though it was hot.

Next year the weather might be perfect and the mosquitoes overwhelming. It’s best to just go with the flow.

If you have a garden, I hope things went well, and that you enjoy the fruits (and vegetables) of your labors between now and spring.