Hello Autumn

We recently had the turning of the Autumnal Equinox. It should be the Fall Harvest Festival. If I were a pagan I’d say Let’s Celebrate!

 

These haven’t been times worthy of celebration. But for today I want to forget it all and look to Indian Summer, which has always been my favorite time of year. Though, given how mild and even downright cool the summer was around here, I wonder if we’ll even have Indian Summer.

 

It looks like the acorns are falling. They seem to come in a deluge every three years or so. So more raking work for me, which is OK. I like the exercise, and I think while I work.

 

I was a beginner at gardening this year, but I think I did alright. Most of the stuff I tried to grow grew (we won’t mention my attempt at corn for now). I lost two plants to cutworms, and some of my tomatoes seem to have caught late blight (but I avoided the nasty blight pandemic which devastated a lot of people around here earlier this summer) but otherwise it went well. I think I learned a lot, and in the off season I’ll read all the gardening and farming books I got, so going into next year I should have a better sense of what my goals are.

 

And, if I really want to try to get into farming, an idea I toy with, next year I’ll really need to look for chances to learn more skills. So far my Peak Oil preps, on the practical level, are inadequate. Some beginning gardening experience, and that’s all. 

 

We’ll see. For today I don’t want to think about it much. For today I want to think of good harvests. I want to hope for a better harvest next year. I dream of someday being able to forget the bad political harvests of America’s nightmare path; that someday we’ll be able to say that was just the aberration, the bad turn of a few decades. Logic doesn’t favor that possibility, but today I’ll hope for it.

 

So to hell with politics for today. I think I’ll just talk about how my garden turned out. The harvest is winding down: only the pole beans are still producing, and while there are still lots of green tomatoes on the vines, they don’t seem to be ripening anymore, now that it’s getting downright cold in the nights.

 

My fence worked well. No major critter problems. When I first started I read a bunch of disaster stories, and even with the 6′ wire fence I was still paranoid about deer jumping over it, skunks and possums climbing over it, woodchucks and rabbits burrowing under it, bears tearing it down…. But none of that happened. (Though I did once have to bang on my door with a baseball bat to scare off a brazen bear in the vicinity.)

 

The main lesson I learned was to have in place a major support structure right from the start. I knew in theory that I’d need supports, and I set up some cages and stakes to begin with, but they proved badly inadequate. I ended up having to drive in more stakes ad hoc, and having to improvise a trellis for the bean vines. All of that was still not enough, and eventually I had to let the vines on my grape tomato just lounge on the ground because they were out of control.

 

I also let the cucumber vines get away from me, though at least those could climb all over the fence. And next time around I need to allow more room for the squash plants, because at their full extent I could barely access the corner of the plot beyond them.

 

So here’s a plant-by-plant rundown:

 

Purple Cherokee tomato: Good quantity, excellent taste, very weird looking (because I was only previously familiar with regular store-bought varieties).

 

Red Brandywine: Also good production, decent quality.

 

Cherry tomato: Very productive, good quality, and the fruits were bigger than I expected (again comparing to what I was used to).

 

Grape tomato: This was the biggest surprise. I had two plants from the same seed, one in the plot and one in a container. The container plant was my smallest tomato and moderately productive. But the plant in the plot was simply deranged; all my ad hoc caging and staking couldn’t hold it and I had to let it run wild over the ground (luckily I had some extra space where the corn failed to take). The vines grew up and over the fence and I had to rig up some supplementary chicken wire outside in order to enclose them.

This plant was the most prolific, producing bowlful after bowlful of delicious fruit. It’s still producing now, though the pace of ripening has slowed to a crawl, and I guess most of the still-green tomatoes will never ripen.

One other difference – the fruits from the smaller plant were not only much smaller themselves, but sweeter.

 

Bell peppers: These were anemic. Each of two potted plants produced one decent-sized fruit and several that stayed small and got tunnelled into. If I’m still here next year I may try to grow another plant in the plot (the one I had this year got killed by a cutworm), but I won’t try again in a container.

 

Zucchini: These were productive for awhile, including one huge squash about 1.5′ X several inches diameter, but they stopped producing early, like in early August.

 

Cukes: Very productive, though most of the fruits were fairly small. The biggest was c. 5″, with some fatter but shorter.

 

Pole beans: These started late, well into August, but have been prolific since, and are still producing.

 

I guess I’ll mention the corn; travail and failure. Four plantings, four times I had green shoots, four times they were lopped off and left there prone. Theories on what went wrong: Birds? But even after I put a chicken-wire hangar over the row, the same thing happened. Bugs? I don’t know what kind; the books offered no clue there. Mole? Maybe. Too much rain? Maybe.

(I learned later on that even if the plants had grown taller they probably wouldn’t have produced, since you can’t just grow one short row of corn. There’s not enough cross-pollination or something; I’ll learn more when I read about all this in the winter.

 

On the whole I think I did alright for my first garden. Apparently I just got lucky where it came to the blight; I read about people all over NJ getting clobbered.

 

No doubt using some storebought topsoil, potting soil, and compost helped alot. So I didn’t do this organically, but had the help of synthetic fertilizer (though no pesticides). Eventually I want to go completely organic, but this time round I was just learning the ropes. Besides, I can’t imagine trying to have used just the rocky suburban infill. That wouldn’t have grown much at all.

 

My cherry and grape were heirloom varieties, so I saved some seeds. We’ll see next year how well I did at that.

 

So that just about wraps up what I consider a successful rookie gardening season. It’s a nice transition into what I hope will be a fine Autumn.