My strong suit has always been in the planning and starting of projects, not so much the completion bit. And so August is usually the month when my season kind of falls apart in the garden. It was the same this year, except I have done enough work that the falling apart meant there’s still some produce produced in the garden this year despite my neglect, which is nice.
The rundown on how it went:
Porch roof: well, the porch roof became complicated in late August by my moving away from my house with the porch roof. I moved 5 doors up the street, which was a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that I could take my time moving my stuff, including my vast collection of gardening equipment and supplies. I think I had just as many belongings outside the house as I did inside. I pushed everything I own up the street (uphill, of course) on a little four-wheeled hand cart, which at times felt like the legend of Sisyphus, at times like being a monk walking barefoot through the Himalayas on some kind of spiritual journey, at times like an ant carrying pieces of food three times my size home to my little maggots to eat. It seemed like every time I decided to move some stuff, it was over 90 degrees out. I guess it was that part that was the curse. In terms of gardening, that meant I could only take those rooftop plants with me that would fit back through the bathroom window and down the stairs, meaning the peppers. I left the eggplants and tomatoes behind. But I still have access to the porch roof and have been going back to water them and harvest what’s left there. So! The peppers have done pretty great - I’ve got a great harvest of cayenne peppers, 
and a more modest but still exciting harvest of paprikas. My two rosa bianca eggplants have been weirdly different - one is giving fruits that stay green, while the other gives fruits that look like the pictures in the catalogs. I’m roasting both kinds tonight to see if there’s a difference in taste. I kept one fruit from the green plant out on the counter for a while, thinking it just needed more time to ripen, but it didn’t. Then I thought it needed sunshine to ripen, so I put it outside in the sun for a while, and it promptly turned bright yellow, not the white and lavender it’s supposed to be. The other fruits on that plant are also not turning white, only green. I thought the plant just needed more sun so moved it out from under the shadow of the tomatoes, no dice. The plant just makes green eggplants. Anyway, here are some of the good-looking rosa bianca’s: I have been roasting these and blending them together with roasted garlic for a really awesome spread on toast… Aren’t they cute?
The run down on the tomatoes goes:
Black Krim, the ones I was most excited about, were a little bit of a flop. I had two plants, and both didn’t stand up very well to the neglect they suffered. I didn’t get any really great tomatoes out of these, but might try them again anyway.
Blondkopfchen - I really underestimated these early on. I was complaining that hardly any of them got pollinated (I was paranoid about the bees) but it turns out that they just ripen gradually over the course of the season, which is probably even better in the end. I don’t think a single fruit of this plant even made it inside off the roof - I mostly just ate them while I was watering the others. I will definitely grow these again, the plants were very healthy and are still making fruit, even after a frost or two.
Yellow zebra - these also did well, and were plenty delicious. Seemed to produce good fruit even when suffering from wilt. Especially delicious with dukkah, to which Andrea will attest.
Brandywine - I can’t seem to grow good brandywines, which is sad. I did get some decent looking fruit, but inside they were hard and ribby, not delicious. They seem to have suffered from my neglect as well…
Hillbilly - I actually wouldn’t know because apparently I mislabeled my seeds, and grew a great big Rose tomato plant that I thought was a hillbilly, right up until it made pinky red smooth fruits instead of bright yellow ribbed ones. Too bad, because I was excited about the hillbilly. The rose tomatoes stood up better to my neglect than the brandywine or the black krim, but were otherwise unremarkable, in my opinion, which is probably why I got them as a freebie in my seed order.
The basil I grew never made it out of its three inch pots. But those two big plants from last year have come with me to the new house. I’m letting them flower and plan to save their seeds for next year. The thai basil died a long time ago, just like every year.
My herb garden recovered really well from the great landscaper’s massacre of 2007. Sage, thyme, and oregano plants are looking great. Chives aren’t looking so good at the moment, but maybe it’s just the time of the season. They’ll be back next year. The tarragon I’m not so sure about… it was looking great for a while but now’s a little scraggly. I tried to take cuttings of everything but chives to take with me to the new place… I took parts of the thyme and oregano plants that had sprawled and rooted again, and those are potted up happily in my living room window awaiting planting in the spring. I also took cuttings of the tarragon and sage which I have been trying to root in water in my kitchen window with not much luck. The chives I’ll come back for in the spring. I never got around to growing any cilantro (which is dumb because that’s the herb I buy the most of). The parsley I planted has been long-suffering in a window box on the ground, wilting in the heat and drought, perking back up again when I turn up to water it, and wilting again the moment my back has turned. Right now it looks pretty good and I might even harvest some of it.
The peas, I already wrote about. Next year I will plant them more and closer, and screw that window box shit.
The garlic, as you already know, went very well. As a crop, they were a pretty good size. 100% of the cloves I planted made new plants. Even so, some came out small, but some were pretty big and awesome looking. Some of the awesome ones I gave away, many I saved to plant for next year. What we’re eating is the little ones, and they’ll be gone probably by the new year. I saved 120 cloves to plant next year (this year I did 80), and also put aside some I got from the Long Island Farm for next year (hardneck, they look like the ones I got from Chris Yoder, but redder).
The beans, what a mess! Here’s what my harvest looks like: 
Which is basically a big pot of swedish brown beans, a smaller pot of black beans, and enough of soybeans and jacob’s cattle to plant next year. The scarlet runner beans were still developing in the BUG garden last time I was there (which was way too long ago). Basically, I got fewer of them, the Jacob’s Cattle, and fava beans than I planted. Soybeans were weird - I apparently have two different varieties of soybeans, one that’s green when dry, the other yellow/tan. The yellow/tan I think are the ones I got from Seeds of Change a long while ago, the green ones I think came from Chris Yoder. They yellow/tan make bigger pods and seeds and I think I like them better. I thought the green ones were just immature, but not so. I didn’t eat any of my soybeans for edamame this year, I wanted to save them for making tempeh. As you can see, there’s not really enough for that. I was hoping for 3 lb. of swedish browns, which didn’t happen. Even so, I was pretty happy with the yield. The black beans were amazingly prolific, for how many I planted. I think I got those originally from High Mowing, a long time ago. I’ve still got a bunch of beans over in the garden. I was leaving them there to mature and dry out (it’s been dry for all of August and September), but then it started raining, so they’re probably all rotting. Lessons learned about beans: if you pick them off the plants when dry, instead of pulling up the whole plants like I did, they will usually make more beans. I harvested my swedish browns in the dark one night when I was afraid of soggy weather coming, leaving any plants that seemed to have immature beans on them. Those few plants then took off and produced a lot more beans. Maybe I should have been more careful and not done my gardening in the dark. Overall, my problem with beans is I can’t commit to one variety, I still keep trying to grow 6 different kinds in less than 100 square feet.
And then there’s the onions! My pride and joy were supposed to be the clear dawn onions. But those ungrateful little bastards never got big, dammit. Fedco says they should average 9-10 oz, but my biggest ones were only about 4, and plenty were just little runts. What do I have to do to grow great big onions? I really want to know. The shallots, on the other hand, did fabulously. They were a hybrid from Fedco, Prisma. They’re bigger than my yellow onions, and real pungent. And those red onions I didn’t even mean to grow? They did great, of course. I still have a ton of them over in the garden to bring home. 
The corn, sadly, amounted to not much more than something for the scarlet runner beans to climb. They were all eaten by animals (I thoughtfully planted the corn next to a picket fence to make the corn easier for them to reach), but it probably didn’t matter much, because the ones that survived the animals weren’t even pollinated anyway.
The backyard plants - I already gave the report on the broccoli (not so good). The beets I planted ended up doing real well! The golden beets survived onslaughts of leaf miners, cold weather, hot weather, drought, neglect by me, and the move up the street, and still managed to be delicious. The ones I planted for spring waited patiently in the shade of other plants. Once given a chance (when I pulled up the broccoli and the larger, earlier beets), they’ve all grown big and beautiful. I also have one little bok choi plant I missed in my spring harvest that survived in the shade of other plants through the hot weather, and is now looking all delicious and ready to eat. I never got around to planting fall brassicas, again. I also never did anything with the wildflower seeds (ostrich ferns, ramps, flowers), but will give them a belated try anyway once I’ve got my shit a little more together.
In the front yard of my old house is a tub of sweet potatoes that hopefully have sweet potatoes growing in the bottom. I guess I should turn it over soon and see. And my Oakdale garden is pretty over-run with Sunchokes, so maybe I’ll get around to digging them up, too. And I think that will be about it for the garden…
Late-season news from the orchard - Oakdale raspberries kept going well into fall, thornless blackberries were ripening through September, (white) champagne raspberries in the secret garden also…
Stay tuned for prospects for gardening at my new house (which are awesome!)
