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.
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