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I love my garden, but right now I can't wait to brush hog and plow it under.
All this rain, lordy. Eight inches in August. Long stretches of days with high temperatures in the 90s. Humidity you could bathe in. Mosquitoes Cajun-thick, and me deaf on one side: my left ear can't hear the whine of one coming.
Most nights on Channel 9 weather New Cumberland led the rain totals, beating out poor flood-prone Tyler County down in Hoopie. Every angry red blip crossing the radar had Hancock County in its crosshairs, a complete reversal from the past two years, when we ended summer with long droughts and I had to irrigate from our farm pond. That was back when the pond still held water.
I worked hard to keep the weeds down, honest I did, weeding mostly by hand because you can't cultivate mud. I worked in the relatively cooler mornings and evenings, wearing long pants and shirt sleeves to discourage the mosquito squadrons, and probably shortened my life by slathering Deet repellent on face and hands. The mosquitoes still sucked a goodly portion of what the Red Cross wants me to donate.
Some garden plants liked all that heat and rain. The pumpkins for our pumpkin patch are half again bigger than normal, those that didn't rot. My wife put up 40 quarts of tomatoes, freezing and canning, mostly as sauce, from the 106 tomato plants I staked and tied, and tied, and tied, as they grew skyward. (We planned to raise 40 tomatoes but Honey starts them from seeds and can't throw away her surplus "children.")
Cucumbers have been unbelievable. Cucumber vines that should have died a month ago I'm still picking every day, beautiful cukes and no bitter ends. When the weeds began to threaten, I carefully lifted the vines and spread newspaper underneath. I think I'll use newspaper more next year. I have plenty because I still subscribe to the printed edition.
Green beans were a bust. As usual I laid carpet along both sides of the row, so my wife can walk on carpet while she picks, and trellised them on hog-wire fence so she doesn't have to bend over, but after three or four pickings they shut down. I think they drowned.
Lima bean plants grew and bloomed profusely but have yet to make a bean.
Broccoli and cauliflower plants likewise produced huge stalks and leaves, but no heads. Cabbage did well, though. So did kale, which I kept clean of dirt and weed-free by laying strips of old carpet along both sides of the row. Carpet, my personal innovation and gift to vegetable gardening practice, blocked weeds and kept paths walkable, but I couldn't carpet everything.
Sweet corn loves heat but does poorly in competition with weeds, especially when constant rain leaches nutrients out of the soil. You can see it in shorter stalks, yellow leaves, and fewer second ears. If you can keep corn rows relatively clean, which I did for the most part by dint of exhaustive weeding, you can grow a good crop to feed the deer, raccoons and blackbirds.
Actually the pests didn't get to eat much. Corn is always a war, a war I won this year by keeping deer out with a double electric fence, trapping and killing eight raccoons, and, once I got the fake owls and fine netting set up, scaring off the blackbirds. Four plantings and we are still eating corn.
I took pictures of this garden when it was young and beautiful, lush from the excess heat and rain, full of promise. That seems so long ago.
Now I stand at the kitchen sink, salt shaker in one hand and the last vine-ripened tomato in the other, to eat as a ritual end and death of this year's garden. It has been a good garden. It has been a terrible garden. Whatever it has been, it is done.
Ten months from now I will be prowling my rows of staked tomatoes, looking eagerly for that first blush of red.
(Fred Miller's books of stories are $10, available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank's Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies, and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.)