It was August
When I was a kid in Hawaii we learned about the four seasons in school, but I remember being confused because it was warm every day so I couldn’t tell the difference. For me, and probably most kids, there were only two things in life: school and no school. (Well, and maybe Christmas.) So for my childhood, summer wasn’t about being warm, it was about being out of school. And August was that last chance for real fun when we would take full advantage of those fleeting moments of freedom.
I have fond memories of sitting on the cool concrete of the front step every morning playing jacks with the neighbor kids until our butts went numb. And spending afternoons wandering about the creek (actually a storm channel runoff) catching small fish that we brought home, plopped into bowls, and witnessed the little guppies shorten their lives by jumping out of captivity and onto the shag carpet where my mom found them with her bare feet. And playing “Marco, Polo” in the pool every afternoon until my mom pleaded for us to stop. And with pruned up fingers we finally lifted ourselves out of the water and dried off in the sun on towels warmed by the hot concrete.
And now I am all grown up living in the mountains with four truly distinct seasons, including snow. My mother has since passed and the weather now tells me what to do. Although August is still in the heat of summer, it is a good time to start think about fall. It’s also a time where farming tasks collide. Every day is a mashup of weeding, harvesting, processing, cooking and canning. In this final push of summer where the humidity weighs heavy on my skin, my task list demands the highest level of focus, and remembering every disparate detail that needs my attention is increasingly a challenge due to the wear and tear a constant flurry of activity produces.
Behind me I know the strawberries have sent out a tangled web of runners that have turned into a very big job to wrangle. Hopes of any late summer fruit are all but gone since I am so behind, but realistically, there is just no time, only questions.
When will the tomatoes be done fruiting? When can I pull the squash plants? Will I be able to start any seeds in this heat? The tension between the present moment and the future is building, but planning ahead is so important because although farming happens on a much longer timeline things do have a way of creeping up sooner than you may be ready.
I watch the weather and train my mind to observe and I take good notes. My bed flips are timed to correspond with the rain forecast in the hopes of taking care of germination. I find that I am usually a bit antsy until the seeds are up so if the forecast is wrong, I head out after supper to water the newly seeded beds. (Yes, I call dinner “supper” now. This is the South, after all.)
Harvest season is now in full swing and the porch is full of harvest totes full of the last tomatoes, peppers, and a few cucumbers. On a makeshift table topped with an old screen door, rotating batches of potatoes, oats, and buckwheat are drying and curing. The chickens are getting very curious.
Since July the summer squash has been blooming and fruiting in such a hurry that we ate some nearly every night. John has taken this as an opportunity to perfect his squash cooking technique.
I would ask, “what’s for dinner?” and he always says “squash”.
But by the middle of August the heat and humidity made have made fruiting more of a challenge, and the bugs have taken care of the rest of the squash plants. Wanting a few more zucchini for the freezer, I started another twelve plants, and oops I put these plants right in the same bed. You know, right into a bed full of predators. It took just one night for my transplants to be devoured right down to the nub. And that was the end of that.
Meanwhile, the pandemic was ramping up and so too were my feelings of financial uncertainty. I had hoped my catering job would help finance the farm, but that was still on hold. Restaurants, my potential customers, were basically closed. So without finances and without a clear plan, I had simply kept planting because at the very least, I would feed my family and learn something. But when I lost that crop of zucchini plants, I realized that my pace was definitely beyond my skillset, and I paused for a moment to reflect on the scope of what I am trying to accomplish, and remembered a good story always includes a good struggle.
The tomatoes were trying their best to keep fruiting and ripening, but the larger fruits (Hillbilly, Cherokee Purple, Brandywine) were bursting in the sun green, and the flowers were dropping off before they could become fruits. Not to mention the humidity, damp and persistent, kept the leaves covered with a layer of mist which caused them to spot, wilt, and drop off the vine nearly abandoning the large fruits hanging by a single thread.
It wasn’t a total failure, I did make a solid effort to keep up with the pruning my tomatoes, and I did sanitize my pruners between each cut to prevent the disease from spreading. But by the end of the month, all of the plants were struck with blight. Flowers were few and far between, and I knew the plants were coming to their eventual end.
The cucumbers also had a tough go of it this year and we lost a lot of plants due to a type of bacterial wilt that’s carried by the cucumber beetle. After the bite, the bacterium (Erwinia tracheiphila) causes a circulatory disease in the plant that spreads through the entire vine causing it to wilt and drop. The disease is extremely contagious so it’s important to remove the infected plant promptly. Early on, we lost 40 of our 50 gherkin plants, which was a disappointment because I was very excited about that crop, but with 10 plants left, we would have plenty.
This year, we experimented with a different trellising method this year called “lower and lean” which is supposed to help increase yields and improve disease resistance. The basic concept is to strip off all of the side shoots and let a single shoot (the leader) grow vertically up a string of twine. When the vine reaches the top, it’s lowered and leaned onto the ground where it will re-root and continue growing upward. I know this is probably a great technique that would help us harvest faster, but with everything I had going on, lowering and leaning just became something that never got done, and because of that, my dense mat of cucumber vines stayed far too damp and easily succumbed to disease.
Eventually, I did get around to pruning my strawberry plants, well, at least a small bit of them. What I didn’t know is how prolific they are because after only cutting back about 1/10th of the tiny patch, I ended up with almost 150 new plants, (potentially 750 when I am done). Phenomenal, considering I started with only 30 plants. Hopefully I can get this patch more under control next spring so I can enjoy a greater and longer harvest of strawberries next season.
I also did some work on the area I call the “triangle” which is in the process of being developed. I set it up using a technique known as hugelkulture, where a log is buried along the bed and covered with a layer of compost. As time progresses, the log degrades and inoculates the soil with active biology which in turn creates a relationship with the plants that grow there. The technique also helps with water management which is important in this location because this plot is a touch farther from the water supply.
In the spring we planted the triangle with white clover and because this fell off my radar, our intended crop was quickly overtaken by weeds. There was no time to pull them so we just periodically mowed the weeds down before they set seed. Because the area was a little too big to manually bring the plot back into order, we decided to cover the beds with a silage tarp for the month and let the heat of the sun quickly convert the weeds into soil ready for the cover crop we’ll plant over the winter.
I must say that the fast pace of this season and its tremendous learning opportunity has been a great distraction from the instability of our financial situation. Ignoring the weeds of course, it’s truly been a pleasure to look back on the year so far and see all that I have done. Still, the air is heavy with exhaustion from heat and sweat and it’s rare that my mind slows and allows me to rest.
However, it has been a strange and fruitful season. I have been literally stuck in this work, and literally stuck in my own thoughts, and this has forced to explore the me in meaning (is that a pun?). True, it’s been strange living a mostly isolated life in the mountains, but I do believe this investment will pay off. For now, I’m tired and anxiously awaiting things to cool down.
