Summer Garden Report

The elephant garlic and onions have all been harvested and are drying in the garage. The first crop of potatoes was dug a couple of weeks ago with the aid of three grandsons, Titus, Jacob, and Landon, who came over for breakfast on Friday. Soon it will be time to pick string beans and cowpeas.

Last year, I planted somewhere around 12 varieties of cowpea, but none of them tasted as good as the old standby, California pinkeye purple hull, so this year it was back to my old favorite. I have maybe six beds of them in various stages of growth. The first bed will be ready to begin picking in another week or so.

For whatever reasons, I got a slow start to planting some of the garden this year. In the case of my tomatoes, the first planting got froze out even though the wire cages were covered with old sheets. It simply got too cold for the plants to survive. In a typical year we would be eating tomatoes from the garden by now, but this year it will be a couple of weeks later … maybe the second week in July.

Linda’s cucumber plants died off or were eaten by cutworms until only one survived. This plant is doing well and producing plenty of fresh cukes for eating. She was able to get a good mess of cucumbers from our daughter-inlaw, Jessica, for canning bread and butter pickles.

We have been eating bell peppers for a while now. One of my pepper plants has been infested with aphids and is looking a little puny. I have tried a couple of nontoxic remedies but to no avail. I may have to pull the plant and get it out of the garden, but I may try Neem oil first just to see if it works.

I have one bed planted to wheat as an experiment in green manuring. I mainly wanted to see if the wheat would germinate so that later this fall I could plant a cover crop for overwintering. The seed germinated well and is holding its own in the heat. I will cut it down in late summer and replant some more this fall. This is hard red winter wheat I’m growing as that is what we grind for bread. This spring Linda began experimenting with sourdough recipes and has become quite a sourdough bread baker.

Just a thought on cover crops. I tend to think planting a variety of seeds such as legumes and grains and grasses is better than a monocrop of wheat or rye or buckwheat. In fact, when I plant my cover crops this fall, I plan to plant seven or eight different varieties of seeds together because they all bring something to the table as far as putting nutrients into the soil. And it is always better to feed the soil than it is to feed the plants in your garden. Feed the soil and the rest tends to take care of itself. And, of course, when I speak of feeding the soil, I’m talking about adding amendments such as compost, animal manures, cover crops and mulches. I am not talking about synthetic fertilizers.

So what is growing in my garden at present? We have Swiss chard, kale, cowpeas, sweet corn, potatoes, Blue Lake string beans, six varieties of heirloom tomatoes, blueberries, sweet potatoes, Henderson bush limas, four varieties of peppers, and asparagus (though its harvest is over).

In Linda’s herb garden, there are rosemary, thyme, parsley, basil, coriander and oregano.

For a fall crop, we plan to plant rutabaga, mustard greens, kale, collards, beets, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, radishes, leeks and carrots. When many people’s gardens are going to weeds, ours is just getting started in the second half of the season. Some of the fall crops will go quite a way into winter and the last harvest of potatoes will provide seed for next spring’s crop. And this is how the cycle continues.