So, where was I?

It's early August and I'm already pulling up my tomato vines. That pretty much tells you how my summer has been this year. The garden was doing pretty well up until late June, right about when we had a freak derecho blow through town. We were lucky in that we had no property damage and didn't lose power for a week like some people did locally. Even my garden survived intact, but the derecho marked the start of the end.

After the derecho we had weeks of dry, relentless hot weather with little rain. My sweet corn started to tassel when it was only about 4 feet tall, but the heat caused the silks to dry out prematurely before good pollination occurred. My half runner beans got tough and stringy right away. The squash bugs took all my yellow squash, patty pan, zucchini, and pumpkins in just a week.

Determined to save what was left, we set up our irrigation system and began watering regularly. We traveled to Texas in early July and I worried about the garden, but it did fine in my absence with the irrigation. The tomatoes took off and were gorgeous. Tall, full of yellow blossoms, and repeatedly needing more staking to prop up the rampant growth. The okra, peppers, and tomatillos were looking good, but by golly those were the prettiest tomato plants I'd ever seen.

Then right before we left for a week at the beach in late July, I found late blight on my tomato plants. If tomatoes develop late blight in late August or early September, you can often still get a decent harvest in before the fungus kills the plant. However, July is early for late blight in our state. My plants still had small, hard green fruit. I didn't have time to get the material and equipment to spray my plants before we left for vacation, plus sprays for late blight are most effective when applied preventively, not after the plants are already infected. Nearly in tears I realized that there wasn't much I could do about my plants and I didn't know what might be left when we returned from the beach. And recognizing that our regular watering schedule, along with me planting the tomatoes too closely together, hastened the development of this fungal disease didn't make me feel any better.

Every one of my tomato plants was infected when we returned. (To add insult to injury, the corn ears that did develop should have been picked while we were gone and had already started to turn starchy.)

Late blight will infect tomatoes at all stages of development, so now in August I'm culling as much of the green tomato fruits as I can. I tried leaving a few infected tomato fruits on the vine to see if they would ripen more, but the blight lesions simply spread too much into the fruit before it changes color and the whole thing becomes inedible. At least I can cut the lesions out of the green fruit and make pickles with the remaining good part, but it's a lot of extra work that I hadn't planned on doing.

It's incredibly disheartening to pick all those green tomatoes and then pull the vines out of the ground when I should be up to my eyeballs in red, ripe tomatoes at this time of the year. Plus, late blight smells foul. The infected plants are susceptible to secondary bacterial rot and that part of the garden just reeks of decay. Luckily the spores won't overwinter on my tomato stakes and the infested plants won't be a problem if they rot down entirely, which shouldn't be an issue in early August.

So it's been a rough season in the garden. Other gardeners I know in my area have had similar problems with drought, disease, slow plant development, and various unwanted wildlife, so I know it's not just me. On the bright side, we were able to join a CSA through Steve's workplace while at the beach, so we do have fresh local produce each week now. And thankfully I'm not trying to feed my family out of my garden through the upcoming winter, but y'all can probably expect a jar of green tomato pickles for Christmas this year.

Derechos, Zucchini, Family Dynamics, and Other Natural Disasters

It's the height of summer now and this has just been one long week that started with a little thunderstorm cell in Iowa last Friday. The thunderstorm developed into a derecho that galloped east and ultimately flattened a wide swath of the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic states. I was at my parents' house in Poquoson when the storm hit around midnight. I've never seen wind quite like that before and I'm still amazed that my daughter with the storm phobia slept through it all. Thankfully we didn't have any damage at either my parents' house or our house in Christiansburg. My in-laws in Roanoke lost power and still don't have any at their house. The current estimate is that power will return to all of Roanoke by sometime late Sunday night. That's a long time to go without power, especially when the daytime temperatures have been hovering in the mid to upper 90s. We're all out of sorts thanks to the heat, the lack of rain, and our upended schedules.

My garden is also out of sorts. We've been watering regularly for the past week and things look okay but just not quite right. The corn is lush and green, but it's only about waist high and getting ready to tassel. The tomatoes look good, but I didn't get them staked early enough and I really had to wrestle with them to tie them up. I tasted my first half runner last night and it seemed a little stringier than I expected for this early in the season. I don't think I'll have much in the way of zucchini this year, thanks to the squash bugs. They've also taken out some of the cucumbers and some of my pumpkins. I'll have to spray the rest of the vines this weekend if I want any pumpkins at all this fall. My peppers are still pretty small and I think the voles have eaten all the beets.

So it's not quite the garden I had planned, nor is this quite the summer I had envisioned. I was hoping for a little more fun and fewer worries. Such is life: you make your plans and work to bring them to life, but then the universe smacks you on the head and now you have to change your plans. Or in my case, a rock hits your windshield and you suddenly have a meandering 18 inch crack right in front of the driver's side that will require a replacement. Actually I'm not sure what's the better metaphor for my life right now: a bug-ridden garden or a cracked windshield. Neither are truly disasters and certainly they are fixable to a certain extent, but they're still beginning to sap my energy and enthusiasm.

Early Summer, 2012

A few snippets of early summer for you...

The Dog Days of Summer

It's almost the end of August and I cannot wait for the calendar to turn to September just for the psychological fresh start a new month brings. Yeah, the house will still need cleaning, the gardens will still be a mess, and my to-do list will be a mile long, but these will be "start of the month" things to deal with and therefore not so bad. As opposed to the rather depressing "things I didn't get around to doing the entire month" things they are right now.


After an uncomfortably hot July, the temperatures have become much more pleasant in August but it's still bone dry. Thunderstorms rise up and dance all around us before evaporating without any rain. Things are brown and crunchy, a dreary burnt landscape that makes you think more "nuclear holocaust" than "bountiful late summer." I'm about to yank out the struggling annuals and toss them all on the compost rather spend another moment hoping they might recover before cool night temperatures do them in for good. At least the compost pile would look good.


The last half of August has been more than a little stressful. Just in the past week we've dealt with an earthquake, a hurricane, a faulty sensor in the braking system of my car, and now my beloved dog has a suspicious growth on her muzzle. I'm off to the vet's office in just a few minutes to have it checked out. Most likely it's a benign growth and nothing to worry about, but this comes on top of having my house shake inexplicably, wondering if my parents will evacuate before the arrival of Hurricane Irene, and worrying if my car will actually stop when I try to brake down our monstrously steep driveway. I could use a pleasant change, a fresh start, a new month.


Come on, September.


Update, 9:40 am  Official diagnosis: Oscar has an old dog wart and a bad scrape on her head, probably from where she's been trying to extirpate the voles in the flower beds out front. Whew..I can live with that.

The Compost Pile is Half Full

I see a big pile of stinky composting grass clippings cooking in the sun.

Oscar sees a thing of wonderous beauty.


Something to be savored and enjoyed to its fullest, all the way down to the dregs.


I see a dog who's overdue for a bath.

Hiking the Cascades, July 2011

We hiked up to the Cascades over the Fourth of July weekend this year. Ally was a little trooper and walked the whole 4 miles. It's a beautiful place to visit and a popular hiking trail.







The rhododendrons were still in bloom.



There are lots of ferns along the trail. I like the ones that take root and grow out of the big boulders and rocks.



Ferns usually look lush and green, but they're actually very tough plants with leathery fronds.



Nope, there's very little soft and gentle about a fern. They make an awful substitute for toilet paper and you should always go for the moss instead, but that's another story that I'm not going to discuss today.

Sometimes you can even find a rhody sapling growing in the cracks of the big rocks.



Luna moth. This picture is a little out of focus. I really should have taken the time to get up close and take several pictures of it. That'll teach me.



We also so several of these guys, which I think are caterpillars of the pipevine swallowtail.



The falls had plenty of water in early July.





The water is usually very cold, but there's a swimming hole in the front of the falls where people jump in to cool off. We were content with walking around in the shallower part of the Little Stony Creek, which has a surprisingly forceful flow as it's channeled through a rock slot below the falls.



We took the fire road back down to the parking lot. There's a big outcropping of rock along the way with an eroded cave underneath it. The cave is very shallow, but it's cool and wet under there.



Shallow cave.



REALLY BIG ROCK.

Milkweed Patch, July 2011

Milkweed is a beautiful plant. The flowers are pretty and smell wonderful, plus you never know what you might find among the blooms.



I'm always happy to see honeybees.



A honeybee covered with pollen and coming in for a landing.



Bright yellow oleander aphids.



Big, fat, hairy tachinid fly.

Milkweed longhorn beetle, one of my favorite critters.

They play dead when startled.

Oh my....excuse me!

Garden Update, July 2011

Since I'm in denial that it's already August, I thought I'd post an update on my garden circa two weeks ago.

The garden gates.

Sweet corn.

Okra.

Green tomatoes.

Green tommy toes.

Ripening Tigerella tomatoes, a striped variety. You can see that I recycle strips of fabric and selvedge to tie up my tomatoes. 

That green twisty mess in the foreground? Those would be half runner beans. 

Funny thing about the beans...the description said that they would be mostly bushy so I thought "Perfect! Just what I need for my first attempt at growing beans!" And they are mostly bushy on the bottom. It's just that the half that's the runner part is trying to run clear over to Radford. (Note to self: You will fence the beans next year.)

One evening's harvest: patty pan squash, eight-ball zucchini, half runner beans, sungold tomatoes.

Young pumpkin vines in the pumpkin patch.

Young pumpkin vines yearning to escape the fence. (Steve took the fence down about a week after this picture was taken, and now the pumpkin vines are trying to join the bean vines over in Radford.)

The compost pile in all of its stinky, funky, ugly glory.

And now a reason to head indoors.

Blackberry Summer

It's been a banner year for blackberries. When we bought the house during the winter of 2009 I was excited to see lots of wild canes growing on our property, all along the driveway and around the edge of the woods. However, we went to Las Vegas in July 2010 and when we got home I was disappointed by the quality and quantity of berries on the canes. There had been a hot dry spell while we were gone and most of the berries were either hard and sour or dried up to mummification.

Not so this year.



The berries have been abundant to say the least. Not all of them are very sweet and some of them are seedier than others, but they're wild plants that we don't maintain other than hacking them back when they threaten to block the driveway. I'm glad to get whatever fruit they offer me. Based on the number of thorns that have pierced my skin while picking berries, clearly all the plants want in return is a blood sacrifice from me.



But I'm not going to complain about a few thorns. Not when I've been able to pick a few handfuls like this from my car window while driving down the driveway. That sounds like the ultimate in pick-your-own, but my friend Kathy simply drives her golf cart into her blackberry patch and picks them that way. Now that's the way to do it.

We also have wineberries that have done well this summer, too.



I think the little nipples left when the fruits are picked look funny.



Ally likes the wineberries best. She prefers to hold the bowl while standing in the grass while I pick them for her in the middle of the patch. (I suppose having someone pick the berries for you is even better than getting to drive a golf cart into the patch.) Ally will help me pick blackberries from the driveway and she might eat a few of them, but mostly she'll put them in the bowl. The wineberries are sweeter, so she eats most of the ones I give her. However, she'll even leave some of the wineberries in the bowl if she knows I'm going to make a dessert with them. I don't know where Ally gets this self restraint as I would have gleefully eaten the whole bowl by myself at her age if my mother wasn't looking.

Last week we picked blackberries and wineberries for a birthday cake for my paternal grandmother, who turned 90 last Sunday. My parents came in on Friday and helped pick, too.





I made my favorite yellow cake recipe and added two heaping cups of blackberries to the batter. When it came out of the oven I spread melted blackberry jelly over the top, then frosted it with caramel icing when it cooled. When I make it again (and oh yes, this will be made many, many times as long as there are blackberries in the freezer), I'll skip the jelly and just use the icing. The jelly make the icing slide off and it's really just gilding the lily.

I should have taken a picture of the cake but you'll just have to take my word that it's good. Really good. And it's even better after a day in the fridge. At least try this yellow cake and that caramel icing even if you don't have any blackberries. I make the icing with buttermilk so it has more of a praline flavor. (FYI, I don't care for the chocolate frosting included with the yellow cake recipe and I haven't made the spice cake with the caramel icing recipe. No need to when you can have this yellow cake and that caramel icing together.)

So instead of a picture of a cake, I leave you with a picture of four generations of Dellingers together. My grandmother did like the cake, but not so much as the idea that her son, grand daughter, and great grand daughter all picked the berries together just for her cake.