Hello Folks! Where has the summer gone? I haven’t written since August and I think it’s due to the HEAT, drought and NO MONSOONS. I became depressed because I had to use so much water to keep everything alive. And even then everything struggled in the heat anyways with enough water including me! Plus I wonder, is this the future with climate change? I hope this was just a bad season.

STRUGGLES

It was a tough year in the garden for me. And even though the picture above looked great, there were many challenges this year. The kale got eaten by squirrels, radishes fried, the cabbage rotted or got eaten, the garbanzo beans fried, the pepper patch with 18 different peppers were attacked by mice who ate holes in them to get the seeds. Interesting enough the mice did not attack the hot peppers, only the sweet peppers. The mice and squirrels do not like hot peppers. The deer ate a lot of my grapes, A packrat ate some cucumbers but it didn’t matter because the heat made most of them bitter. Plus the packrat liked tomatoes too. The individual raspberry fruit actually fell apart with the heat so not good there either. I understand all living creatures need to survive and will go into our gardens and eat our veggies because they too struggled this year. I notice when we have a good year weatherwise, they don’t come into the garden so much.

GOOD NEWS

There was some good news-not all bad. The blackberries did well, the tomatoes did come in only later because of the heat and the cherry tomatoes did really well. We just now are finishing the tomatoes for the season and it’s November! The strawberries made fruit and were harvested in early June before the heat really came on. The carrots stalled out but came back once the heat left and now we are getting some great carrots! The lettuce was great in the spring in the greenhouse where the beds there are protected from mice and I replanted in the greenhouse in Sept and now have great lettuce with these cooler temps. The peppers actually did really good production wise except for the mice. Oh, and the flowers did really well which is food for my soul and the pollinators.

I will write more and post more pics in the coming days. May you have a restful off-season and dream of what will be for next season!

And so the cycle of life goes…