We’re now entering final harvest. Maybe a little good news.
But bad news first.
I didn’t do well with the squash. Part of it was a series of
health issues. Part of it has been the continuing difficulties. I’ve spoken
about the rain in the early summer and the rodents. We also had (and are still
having) a drought. This means, of course, more issues with the garden. The squash
was one of the casualties.
Ditto the cold crops—Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and the
like. There are always bugs waiting to eat anything in the cabbage family and
this year was even worse than usual. Lost a lot of that. We had some kind of disease
hit the cucumbers. The melons were doing all right but they wouldn’t set fruit.
When they finally did, the drought hit and we lost them as well. I wasn’t too
broken up with the melons. They’re always hard to grow up here.
No grapes this year. The vines have developed a fungus. I
have to cut everything back to the main leaders and spray them over the winter
and see if that helps.
The sugar beets were a failure. We planted them in cocoanut
fiber cups but they were never able to properly penetrate the fiber and didn’t
thrive. We’ll try again next year.
The sorghum did do fairly well but we don’t think it was
properly sited. That’s going to take some thinking.
But we did have good zucchini.
We had a good potato harvest. Not quite as good as last year
but respectable. Good peppers. Adequate tomatoes.
Even with several false starts, the beans have been coming
in. I’m a little surprised they took so long to set fruit. It wasn’t that hot
and they were watered during the drought but the flowers just didn’t set until
a few weeks ago. Now, the harvest is coming in. We did five varieties: Black
Turtle, King of the Earlies, Pinto, white, and brown. (I’m frankly not sure
what varieties the white and brown were but they were different.) King didn’t
do well and we harvested what we could and scrapped the rest. I planted a fall
radish in its place.
Both Black Turtle and Pinto did well but suffered for lack
of a trellis. We harvested them for next year’s seed, separating the beans from
those plants that seemed most eager to climb. The brown beans didn’t do as well
as the white beans. We saved some brown for seed but we’re not sure if we’ll
really use it yet. We saved the early ripening beans for next year's seeds and
are harvesting the rest for eating. We won’t know the size of the harvest until
everything is harvested, dried, and weighed.
We grew three varieties of large radish and have decided to
dry what we don’t eat in salads. Tasty in soups and stews.
We tried peanuts this year and they did quite well. We’re in
the process of handling the nuts and will know more in a week or so. Peanuts
are interesting for a few reasons. For one, they are good eating. For another,
they’re a good source of oil and don’t require a lot of processing to use.
(We’re not serious about true self-sufficiency but it’s
interesting to find out what we can actually do versus what we might think we
can do.)
We’re going to harvest everything (except maybe the fall
radishes) in the next couple of weeks. Then, we’ll strip the ground of any
weeds or other growth and cover it with horse manure. We’ll cover the horse
manure with thatch. The plan next year is to tear holes in the thatch and plant
there.
Most of the fruit is gone by now. Our apples are earlier
varieties—though that may change. We’ve been having some difficulty with cedar
apple rust and are investigating what varieties we can plant that are
resistant. But there are some remaining tree products we’re beginning to
harvest.
First are persimmons. This year we had such a good crop that
it weighed down a couple of branches and broke them off the tree. The tree is
still in good shape but we’re discussing how to prune it to its best advantage.
Usually, we just make wine and persimmon pudding but this year’s crop is so
abundant we’re investigating other ways to use it. That’s probably going to be
an entry of its own.
The medlar went yellow
this year. We’re hoping it survives but there is fruit on the tree. Medlars
need to rot (“blet”) a little to be edible. But they are a late fall treat.
The two big winners this year are the paw paws and the
chestnuts.
The paw paws started to ripen a couple of weeks ago. They
are essentially a fresh fruit-to-be-eaten kind of tree. You can’t really cook
them. The best you can do is pull out the pulp (which is like a wonderful
custard) and freeze it. Since we’re devouring them whole, that’s not an option.
We have gotten about ten pounds of fruit so far and there is still fruit
coming.
And finally, the chestnuts.
Since we lost the hickory, we haven’t had as many squirrels.
However, it’s not at all clear if that’s the sole reason for the reduction. They’re
there—I see the chewed acorns and chestnuts to prove it. But there are not as
many of them. Did they get hit with a disease? Without the hickory, is our yard
just not as attractive? (Hard to believe with all of the chestnuts.) Is there a
new predator or competitor entering the neighborhood? We’ve never had rats like
this before and I wonder if there’s some kind of interaction.
Regardless, I know they’re not eating the chestnuts
like they used to. This year’s harvest is one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. In
the picture above, the left side is an image of the chestnuts in the burr. On the
right is a picture of part of one of our trees. Every one of
those spikey things is a burr and in almost every burr is between one and three
chestnuts.
The chestnuts come down in different ways depending on the
variety of the tree. One tree tends to open the burr and then the burr comes
down. That tree also expels the nuts as well so there’s a mix. Another tree
never drops a full burr but expels the nut first and then drops the empty burr.
The third tree does both. Call them Grandfather, Grandmother, and Jumbo.
Grandfather is a hybrid American and Chinese. Grandmother is a Chinese. Jumbo
is an American that produces jumbo-sized nuts.
Grandfather and Grandmother are fully mature trees. They now
often produce burrs with two or three fat nuts. Jumbo is still growing. It’s
only produced in quantity for the last couple of years.
If all things work out, we might get as much as twenty
pounds of nuts. Which we turn into flour or meal. Or we just eat the damned
things roasted.
Not a great year but not a disaster, either. If we were
trying to survive on our produce, we’d have a thin winter and an even thinner
spring but we wouldn’t die.
I’m going to call that a win.
