Gardening Report September 17, 2021

It was only a middling summer.

The new enclosure worked insofar as we kept rats and gophers out.

We saw signs of coyotes around our enclosure; scat and what I thought was a grey mouse.

Turned out to be a house cat’s tail…

We still had a problem with aphids and grasshoppers…and the aphids attracted hordes of ants.

The tomatoes did only so-so despite us spending a lot of time and energy on them, using Texas tomato towers and out own framework from feed fencing.

We lost about half of what we planted.  The surviving plants did okay and their fruits were quite tasty, but for the time and effort shown them we felt we should have gotten the same yield we did at our previous plot.

The eggplants and zucchini flourished nicely, and we enjoyed fresh harvests all summer long.  The basil and small peppers did well; we were disappointed with the bell peppers’ yield.

The cucumbers gave us a few fruits, not enough to justify keeping them all summer.

A grand total of five strawberries despite constructing a tower for them.  There’s a crop off our list.

The plastic zip ties holding the chicken wire around the enclosure are growing brittle with exposure to the sun so I’m replacing them by weaving thing steel wire through the fencing.  Not an arduous task but a time consuming one since the wire needs to be woven through at a height higher than Soon-ok can reach comfortably so I have to go in and out and in and out and in and out of the enclosure to do it.

Soon-ok is fretting over the soil.  Recent tests show it’s too alkaline so we’re laying in a cover crop for the winter than we’ll turn over with new compost come spring.

We are plating a few winter crops like cabbage and lettuce but aren’t focusing on winter planting this year, rather prepping the soil for next spring.

The soil needs to be loosened so we’ve bought a 15-lb bag of worm castings and scattered some of that about, hoping they’ll stir the packed dirt up for us.

Oh, and we need to take out all the drip tapes and replace them with tubing as the much vaunted drip irrigation system failed to deliver.

Other than that, how was your summer?

© Buzz Dixon