The End of Summer Garden

I haven't posted for quite a while. Last week we ate the last of the fresh homegrown tomatoes and cooked the last squash for a while. The weather has been hovering around 100 degrees for a month or so. But that hasn't stopped the two little gardeners. We just get all our work done before 10am. The ritual for the last few days has been: finish the garden work, sit in the swings hanging in the pecan tree, and eat half of an ice-cold homegrown watermelon. Sadly we're also running out of watermelons.

Here's what happening in the end-of-summer, getting-ready-for-fall garden.

We've planted the slips that have been growing on the sweet potatoes sitting in the kitchen window. They are coming along nicely. The deer (who have finally figured out a way past our fishing line deer fence) seem to really enjoy sweet potato leaves. They nipped off a few one night. But a net over the two rows has prevented any further damage. It's also good for catching grasshoppers.

I have a wonderful row of great smelling basil. I'm keeping the blooms picked off so they'll last a little longer.

We planted a row of blackeyed peas (just the ones from HEB) mainly as a ground cover and green manure for the bed.

But I harvested a few this morning and had a little bowlful for lunch.

We experimented with growing peanuts. This seemed appropriate because Floresville is The Peanut Capital of Texas, although I'm not sure that very much peanut growing is going on around here these days.

The blossoms are pretty.

We have a few eggplant that are trying to make a go of it in this heat. I definitely need to give them a little mulch.

The grasshoppers had a feast on my okra plants. So I cut them back, and a few of them are growing new leaves.

I'm experimenting by cutting back the tomatoes to see if they will give it another go when the weather cools a bit. In the process I pulled up the watermelon vines that had intertwined the tomatoes and tossed them over in their own bed. They are growing new leaves and blooming! We sure could use a few more watermelons.

"Wendell, isn't it fun!"*

*This is one of our favorite quotations. It's from Wendell Berry's essay "Economy and Pleasure"—

Last December, When my granddaughter Katie, had just turned five, she stayed with me one day while the rest of the family was away from home. In the afternoon we hitched a team of horses to the wagon and hauled a load of dirt for the barn floor. It was a cold day, but the sun was shining; we hauled our load of dirt over the tree-lined gravel lane beside the creek—a way well known to her mother and to my mother when they were children. As we went along, Katie drove the team for the first time in her life. She did very well, and she was proud of herself. She said that her mother would be proud of her, and I said that I was proud of her. We completed our trip to the barn, unloaded our load of dirt, smoothed it over the barn floor, and wetted it down. By the time we started back up the creek road the sun had gone over the hill and the air had turned bitter. Katie sat close to me in the wagon, and we did not say anything for a long time. I did not say anything because I was afraid that Katie was not saying anything because she was cold and tired and miserable and perhaps homesick; it was impossible to hurry much, and I was unsure how I would comfort her.

But then, after a while, she said, “Wendell, isn’t it fun?”