Certainly I’m the first to make that allusion. As I write the rain gently falls outside, but I’ve been assured by some time tomorrow my dead bloated body will be floating down the Mill River as our town is ravaged by a category 16 hurricane.
In preparation for this event I thought it best to harvest as much of the garden as I could so that the boss and boarders will have something to eat in the event of weeks of no power. Since only certain politicians actually feed on power, I’m not sure why that’s a concern, but I am unable to resist the fickle winds of the mass media.
Today I headed out into a garden that is overflowing with both weeds and food. The weather of the last few weeks has been great, though awfully humid: everything is growing well, mold, weeds, bacteria, and my plants. Today, for the first time ever, I gave away a canteloupe — I’ve been eating one a day. Even the chickens are turning their beaks up at melon rinds.
The tomatoes, I am unhappy to say, have gotten a bit of septoria leaf spot, Septoria lycopersici. The leaves look awful, they’re covered with necrotic spots, but the fruit is unafffected. If I had been more aggressive removing leaves, I probably would have been fine, but now the leaves are almost all gone and the tomatoes are exposed to the sun. Here’s a useful tool in an unusual place for distinguishing tomato diseases. In any case, in preparation for the weather, I removed the tomatoes that looked pretty ripe.
The most prolific tomatoes thus far have been some grape shaped cherry tomatoes called Apero. Apparently apero is short for apertif, an entirely appropriate appelation as these are delightful little snacks to eat before dinner — or really any time. They are delicious and prolific, though they do have a tendency to crack very shortly after prime ripeness. They have not been affected by the septoria spot. I’m not sure if this is because they have a resistance to leaf mold (it’s a fungus), or if it’s becuase they are in the new bed I made this year using the lasagna method. In any case, they look and taste great.
I also harvested the onions. The onions didn’t do very well this year, as I’ve mentioned earlier. The onions I seeded inside failed to thrive, so I tried to compensate by planting outside. I’m afraid they went in too late (end of April). The onions we grow here in the north are “short day” onions. That is they begin to form a bulb (or corm) after the summer solstice. To get big onions you want a nice large plant by late June. That didn’t happen this year. My red onions barely produced anything (Ruby Ring F1 from Johnny’s). My yellow were Pattersons, also from Johnny’s. Storage onions do tend to be a bit smaller than the standard spanish onion, but I think these just didn’t get enough time to grow. In any case, I don’t blame the source. Next year I will be tempted to order transplants. They are much more expensive ($24.00 for 65 plants from johnny’s; probably cheaper to buy onions at the store), but they will make bigger onions if my indoor seeding goes poorly. In any case, the harvest will not keep us through the winter as it has some years.
Sure, there are a lot of onions there (keep in mind the back rows are covered by the foliage from the front rows), but the bulbs are smallish. Curses!
Hopefully the hapless people of my household will not be forced to subsist on onions and grape tomatoes during the several weeks of powerloss following Hurricane Come on Irene.
While I’m summarizing harvests, I should point out that I finished up my potato harvest recently. I dried it in the basement on some opened up cardboard boxes. Today I put it in some containers and separated out all the wee potatoes. I’ll be feeding these to the little Irish urchins who are always hanging around our stoop.
The odd barometric pressure sent some of the other denizens of hazy hectares into quite a tizzy. After spending the morning searching for bugs in the yard, they retreated to the porch where they looked at the weather disapprovingly.
Those two hens on the right are complaining about me (the old feed was so much better than this new shit. What does he take us for?), the one on the left is throwing in the towel and heading inside for a shvitz. Come to think of it, she might need that towel.
