August Garden Report

This is a new garden I opened this year.

A hint of fall now is the air is changing. We seem to be getting rid of the humidity (fine with me). Also, I am noticing a few trees beginning to turn. It is just a few, but they are signaling a change coming. The days are noticeably shorter. I can close up the chicken coop earlier now and not have to herd the reluctant hens into the coop or tease them with some treats if they settle down for the night.

Our gardens have had mixed results this year. We lost most of our raspberries in the constant rains of late June and July. Such a shame, and we will miss the jam this year. We still have some frozen berries from last year which was a bumper crop and I am going to try and make some jam with them – we’ll see how this comes out. I think we are down to our last 8 jars of raspberry jam left from last year – not desperate yet.

The blueberry crop has been better. Last summer was so dry – I should have lugged water more as the blueberry plants set their fruit buds for the next year in the current year. The lack of water last year made for a light year this year. Our blueberries are showing great new growth this year with all the rain so I am expecting next year to be promising. I sound like an ever-optimistic farmer here – probably my real purpose in life, I have just come to it late. I am happiest trying to produce our food and get by as much as possible with what we can raise here.

We have been busy canning now, first green beans we pickle to make dilly beans, and now bread and butter pickles with our cucumbers. We have made about 23 pints of dilly beans and 9 pints of bread and butter pickles. We have about half the green bean crop picked and are just starting with the cukes. I think we will be canning more cukes today. It looks like a good year for the cukes, just late like most of the garden. We need more sun.

What’s still coming in the garden? Well, lots of squash, all kinds, zucchini, summer squash, acorn squash, and butternut squash. Again, a good year with the squash, but it will be into September for much of this. A few pumpkins are coming too.

Lots of greens still out there, some radishes, some dill, and some peppers. The peppers will be at least a couple of weeks away yet – much depends on the weather.

Lastly, a report from the tomatoes – again, much depends on the weather. I see many green tomatoes and not much ripening. I have picked a few small cherry tomatoes that have been ready, but the bigger tomatoes are all green. They need more sun too. June and July were so wet and short of sunny days and August has not been much of an improvement. This last week it rained every day Monday through Saturday. We got about 3″ of rain just last week – kind of adding insult to injury for this summer in the rain department. I measured over 12″ of rain here in June and a whopping 18″+ in July – so we had over 30″ of rain before August got going. For the month of August, we have had over 7″ of rain through the 19th, again staggering amounts of rainfall. The ground is just saturated. When it rains that much, there are not many days left in the summer for sunshine – what my garden needs now.

On a positive note, I am sitting on about 10+ cords of firewood, 5 cords cut and stacked last year, and at least 5 cords from prior years. My new woodstove, a Vermont Castings Defiant does not burn as much wood as my old stove so I have a good 2-3 years of dry firewood or maybe more on hand. I like this feeling, it is like money in the bank with the way the price of heating oil is going.

I will have more garden reporting to share in a few weeks. I start back to work at the high school next week so my time will be more spoken for going into the fall. Oh well, no rest for the wicked.

Take care,

Ed Pirie

West Topsham, Vermont