Disclaimer: This blog post made a lot more sense when I wrote it two weeks ago. Then I lost half of my writing because basically I'm a moron, and due to major mental trauma from the most hellacious start to a school year ever (and I'm an expert on this topic) I gave up all hope of having any energy to rewrite it until now. So for a minute, pretend you're back on that 90 degree day in September and it hasn't rained in weeks. Forest fires are raging in the weirdest of places.Okay, are you there? Proceed.
Two weeks ago...
Crispy brown leaves are sailing around my yard, riding the thermal heat waves like sun addled buzzards. What is normally termed "fall" around here should this year be referred to as "scorch, wither and putrefy". My birches, usually a golden yellow by the end of September with heavy raindrops slowly melting off their tips are just brittle and brown. If I didn't know better I would assume they were dead. Even the cursed buttercups are crunchy and shriveled. I'm sure we've had hot and dry summers before, but this is a little crazy, and it has led to some very peculiar outcomes in my vegetable garden that I would never have predicted and in fact prove most everything I've written in this blog thus far false. I will now take this opportunity, on a 90 degree day in late September, to obliterate any helpful advice I have offered to you in the past. Also, I will prove that any advice I put forth that did hold true, is precisely the advice that I myself willfully ignored, to my own detriment.
1.
There is such a thing as too many tomatoes. I know that I have gone on at great length about my unreasonable love for buckets of ripe tomatoes and openly scoffed at anyone that said they had grown too many. I simply didn't believe it. At least not in a garden in the Pacific Northwest. Impossible! Well, I have in fact produced too many tomatoes. What I failed to realize was that people were not simply stating that they had grown too many tomatoes to
use, they were saying that they had grown too many tomatoes to
process. Picking, boiling, peeling, chopping, straining, canning and freezing tomatoes is very messy, space hogging, and time consuming; not to mention an incredible attractant for fruit flies. I have lugged in a huge wire basket brimming with tomatoes every other day for the past two months. I have fire roasted them, canned them, crockpotted them, turned them into salsa, soup, pasta sauce, and in a final act of desperation, just crammed them into Ziploc bags and frozen them, and still there are more! I know that I will probably run out of tomatoes before next summer, but I HAVE TOO MANY TOMATOES. (I'm not complaining though. I'm just in the seven year itch of my love affair.)
2.
Slugs are not a threat. When we saw our house for the first time and I was literally twirling around the yard in delirium, exclaiming,"This is it!" there were three members of God's great creation that were in obvious abundance, even to my romantic sensibilities: blackberries, buttercups, and slugs. I am not exaggerating that there were at least three ugly, black, buffalo-backed European slugs per square foot. You couldn't twirl around the yard without stepping on them. At the start of summer I went to Coastal and bought a $15 box of slug bait, resigning myself to the fact that I was going to spend more money on slug extermination this season than supplying a 400 head wedding with champagne, for surely that box of bait was going to last three days. I dumped it out around the base of my 15 tomato plants and I haven't seen a slug since. Not one tomato has suffered a slimy, oozing hole. Unreal.
3.
Chickens are Idiots. Of course I new this, but for some reason we gave it another go. The first casualty, Hazel, just sat down in the middle of the yard one day and died. No clue what happened. The second, Ginger, was drug out of the coop late at night by a far superior intellect, namely that of a raccoon, and despite my wild, "Get the hell out of here you evil raccoon" dance, she was left maimed at the base of our maple while the raccoon slowly, and mockingly, retreated up the tree. We nursed her for a few days, but she died as well. Checkers, chicken number three, decided that the fig tree was a pretty safe place to roost for the night, much safer than her securely locked coop, and was apparently taken by a coyote. At least that is the conclusion of my forensic team (Lily and Luke) who found her feathers down by the creek and some coyote scat on the other side. Yes, they can tell you what coyote scat looks like. For those keeping track at home, that is chickens 8, eggs 0 for the Harris household. What is wrong with us?
Well, lessons have been learned, ignored, and proved wrong this year, but overall the vegetable garden project has been a great success. My neighbor's pine tree that blocked our view of his pond resort even fell down (I swear I had nothing to do with it) so now I can look out over his yard from my garden bistro table as well. Now it is on to the next project, and you all know how interesting things get over here when the rains start. Will it be a retaining wall, hugelkultur, or a massive gravel dump? Hmmm...
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