Category: Gardening

This gardening season has been… strange. You may recall I started the season with sixteen eggplant seedlings. We have no eggplants. Early summer saw an unusually high number of rabbits in our garden; I’m guessing they enjoyed the seedlings. That or the burst of exceedingly warm weather around the same time, followed by a temperature drop, and fairly sparse rain throughout the season killed them off. Given those choices, I’d prefer if the rabbits ate them.

Fortunately, some of our other plants thrived. Not surprisingly, we have tomatoes again – all volunteers from seeds dropped in previous years – along with small pumpkins (a volunteer from the composter in the keyhole bed), and three varieties of cucumbers that I planted. The strangest of those are the lemon cucumbers, a round yellow variety that have a delightful crunch to them.

This was our first sizable harvest, a few days before we left on a trip to England and Scotland. Cucumbers, like other plants in the squash family, have a tendency to spread their vines under (or over!) other plants, resulting in what I refer to as stealth fruit, which are ones I don’t find until they’re either larger than usual or otherwise overripe. The two cucumbers pictured above with yellowing (orange-ing?) skin are examples of stealth fruit. We made an effort to finish our early harvest before leaving on vacation, knowing that we would likely be coming home to more ripened fruit.

We were not wrong. There are a handful of green, of varying shades, cucumbers on the vine; we picked every one that looked ripe or overripe, including a couple lemon cucumbers that had been partially eaten. The eaten ones were left in a garden bed, so someone can finish eating them or the seeds can have a chance of germinating next year. We did find that the skin becomes less edible at this stage, so the lemon cucumbers will likely be peeled before eating. Unfortunately, it didn’t rain much while we were away, so many of the cucumber vines have dried out, which means they’re not likely to produce more flowers or fruit.

Of course, we also have an abundance of tomatoes! Amongst the traditional red cherry and yellow pear tomatoes, I found the occasional batch of yellow cherry and red pear, a consequence of growing the two varieties side by side for so many years. We have the usual sprawl of tomato plants, refusing to be contained in their beds and cages, so I expect we’ll miss some during the harvest process and have volunteers again next year. Fortunately, the rain has arrived, which should keep the tomato plants happy for the next few weeks. At some break in the rain, we need to harvest raspberries and strawberries too.

It’s been a busy week and my brain is working through a plethora of stuff, so this is a short post. I was super excited to notice flowers on the strawberry plants this week!

Or as I prefer to refer to them… future strawberries.

Great, now I’m hungry. And we don’t have any strawberries in the house. I suppose that’s OK, I know storebought won’t taste as good as homegrown ones.

Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona Aurora, where we lay our scene….

More alike than different, these plants are currently segregated: whites on one side, purple on the other. I know, nothing looks white or purple right now… that doesn’t happen until much later in the season, when the fruit ripens. They won’t even go into the ground for another month, at which point we’ll have to decide whether we really need sixteen plants worth of eggplants, or if I should hand some off to friends.

Oddly, I hadn’t intended to start plants indoors this year. I was taking a cavalier attitude of only using last year’s leftover seeds and free seeds from the library. (Yes, our public library has a seed library!) That worked until I found out about a free seed event near me – the selection was lovely – and I was halfway home before I remembered that eggplants require starting indoors for our climate.

If you’re wondering why there’s loose dirt in the box, that’s because a cat sat in it and knocked some of the starter pots over.

On a recent morning, after feeding the cats, I noticed how dark it was outside, a combination of the early hour and the overcast sky. I turned off the kitchen light and stepped outside, standing just in the entryway – calling the area a “porch” would be too generous – listening to the pitter patter of the much-needed rain.

There’s a lot of green in our yard now, more so with the recent rain that has revived the lawn. Amidst that green is this small patch of brown and a growing patch of yellow – a recently cleared flower bed and a single mum. There are multiple little things to appreciate here:

The grass was cleared using my neighbor’s sod remover, which made the task far shorter than if I had been working with just a shovel.

The sod I removed ended up near our back compost pile, mostly yard waste, helping suppress weeds.

The mum itself was a gift from a different neighbor, delivered a couple days after I had cleared the sod. Our front yard is visible from their front window, so hopefully she’s enjoying its growth as much as I am.

If you’re wondering why it’s alone in the flower bed, it’s because we had already purchased bulbs to plant there, which should emerge in the spring. If our timing was good and the winter somewhat mild, the mum may still be there.

Somehow it’s mid-September already and, as expected, the temperatures have started dropping as we near the end of a strange growing season. It started off cold and dry, we had a couple weird heat waves (also dry), with most comfortably warm weather in the middle – warm enough to have the air-conditioning on during the day with windows open most nights. Now we’re at the point where the windows can be open during the day, with just a couple cracked open for fresh air at night.

We haven’t had a frost yet – probably won’t for another month or so – but the cooler temperatures have slowed down the garden growth. The potato plants began fading last week, so I dug them up this morning. While it’s a small crop, far smaller than the last two year’s potato harvest, the potatoes were a late planting from store-bought potatoes that had sprouted. The Red Alabama okra may be done flowering at this point, and I’m probably safe harvesting every three days instead of every two.

The tomatoes and raspberries, and even the strawberries are still ripening steadily. Our tomato supply has been smaller this year, partially because some of the plants are intertwined with pumpkin vines, which are both overwhelming the tomatoes and can be a bit scratchy when harvesting through. (No, we don’t need to discuss my catnip. Really, it’s fine, it’s a perennial and we’re never running out.)

What was your best garden crop this year?

It’s no secret that I like sunflowers, especially in my own garden. They’re one of several plants that encourage me to smile when I look out the window. The sunflowers I planted this season are taller ones, though there’s a scattering of smaller ones planted by squirrels throughout the yard.

I’d like to say they greet me every morning, but they’re actually facing away from my living room window, searching for that morning sun. That just means I have to step outside for the best vantage point, which is a prime opportunity for walking through the garden and checking on other plants, like the many pumpkins that have already formed and tomatoes that will hopefully ripen soon. I’m a bit dismayed that there are no flowers on the okra plants yet, hopefully that will change soon.

There’s a surprising amount of variety in sunflowers. This little guy, well, is little, and the petals are much narrower than their sunflower cousin in my previous photo. And it’s not just because they’re sharing space with a potato and the largest catnip plant in my garden (which has since been harvested to allow sufficient space for said potato and a couple tomato plants). What is missing, at least in my yard, is some more color variety in my sunflowers – there are some brilliant red ones, so I may look for those seeds next year. I’m sure I’ll still have yellow ones, between the leftover seeds I have and whatever volunteers and squirrel plantings I have.

This sunflower though… it’s the epitome of resilience. This sunflower was bent by a storm to the point where most of the leaves are touching the ground, still supporting multiple flowers, only one of which had opened when I took the photo. I have another sunflower with a stalk that looks like a chair, bent – but not broken – and then growing up from there as if it were undamaged. Short of having stalk gnawed off near the top (yes, I have a couple of those too), sunflowers put forth their best effort to open their blooms to the sun. It amazes me and always makes me smile.

According to historical climate data, the average high near me in October is 62; the average low is 43. The temperature has reached the low 70s every day this week, though it’s dropping to a high of 56 on Friday. This can, without a doubt, be referred to as “unseasonably warm”, as I continue to walk outside barefoot to retrieve the mail, and had to open windows in the afternoons to keep the house from overheating.

Unlike the people on the Gulf coast of Florida who have many months of recovery from Hurricane Ian, or the east coast of Canada recovering from Hurricane Fiona, here in Illinois, at least for now, I’m able to appreciate the strange weather shift as my garden lingers into the fall. One last sunflower stalk remains with a handful of blooms, and my last okra flowers appeared within the last two weeks. I’ll need to harvest those last okra before the frost hits, probably this weekend, and the tomatoes are becoming easier to find as the plants die off. Eventually – probably in a week or so – I’ll be able to harvest my sweet potatoes.

These last strawberry flowers – in October! – are destined to disappoint; they’re not likely to become fruit as the temperature drops. We should have a few more days of harvesting raspberries and golden raspberries though. And by harvesting, I really mean standing outside and eating them straight off the brambles.