September = Autumn in our neck of the woods. Not full-on, fire up the wood stove and pull out your sweaters and wool socks autumn, but autumn, nonetheless. Sigh. Summer has come and gone, though we still get glimpses of her here and there in splashes of sunlight and afternoons that are still warm enough to make you sweat with a little exertion. I miss her already and can feel the steady approach of winter in my bones. We are starting to clean up and clean out the gardens, with what time we can patch together to accomplish these chores. It's been a very busy summer that has been tough in many ways but there have been many lessons learned along the way. Particularly garden lessons. Lesson #1 (number one is most important, right?) - don't take classes or make any extra commitments over the summer months if you expect to keep up with the garden and its needs. Ouch! I have a long-standing habit of thinking I can do
everything and adding to my plate until I really can't take on any more. Well, folks, this summer the garden taught me that I really can't. Between the Permaculture Design Class and the part time job, the garden suffered. Lesson # 2 - MULCH!! Mulch early, mulch often, and mulch heavily. Nuff said. Lesson # 3 - Keep up with the weeds (see lessons #1 & #2). Overall, it's been mostly ok. Ha! How's that for wishy-washy?! We tried a lot of things that were new to both of us.... some of them were successes (companion planting!), some were not (radishes under the beans, squashes in the rows of corn). We tried a lot of new (to us) varieties.... some that we will plant again (bouquet dill, borage, Detroit Dark Red beets, among others) and some we will not (eggplant & cauliflower, to name just two).
"Real" school has started for me again and I have a more-than-full-time schedule so things are even busier right now, when we need to be putting up the harvest for winter eating. We cut down the corn and cleaned that out today, and got most of the (extremely ! prolific) pear tomatoes tied up to their nifty new stakes. Until we ran out of ties and stakes, that is.
My undying gratitude to Country Boy, who spent a great deal of time on his knees in the dirt, pulling weeds to reclaim a whole row of tomatoes and green peppers from the weeds. What a fight that has been! Oh, and I forgot to tell you about the corn....
If you're wondering, "what happened?!", so were we. It took us a while to figure it out but we ultimately decided that the local deer family had decided to bed down in it after the hay field that abuts our property (their previous 'bedroom') was cut. We were able to salvage some of the corn
and, of that, about half of it was good enough to freeze. Very disappointing, after all the work invested. We will fence the gardens next year to protect them from deer (and the neighbors' wandering animals). I guess that qualifies as lesson #4.
