This year, small snails everywhere! My best effort at identifying them (posting pics to the iNaturalist app on my phone) suggests they’re in the amber snail family (Succineidae). Wherever the ground is sheltered and moist, like under rocks or piles of uprooted weeds, and on some veggie leaves and stems, you’ll find a bunch. Here, they’re on the garlic. Voracious leaf munching doesn’t seem to be what they’re up to, so that’s good (and I read that they aren’t likely to be a veggie problem). For better or for worse, no damage, no problem is my motto, and that usually works out!
Summer
Scratching the zuke
Groundhogs are back again, and they seem to be more active than last year. I’m checking everything out every day to see how far they might go. It comes down to what they turn their beady little eyes and big sharp teeth to next. My garden ravager experience has been for the most part with deer. When a veg garden is new to them, they tend to explore crop by crop. A night or two of nibbling on a new one, then, full-on devouring, and off to the next. So far, the over-sized rodents have focused on lettuce and brassicas. Today, I noticed what look like scratch marks on a single zucchini. I’m no wildlife biologist trained in animal feeding behavior. Still, I suspect some fair-sized beast, like a groundhog, tried to scratch their way into the zuke. And failed. That’s kinda weird, doesn’t look like an A-game effort. Have they given up for good? Or was it a much smaller veg-eating creature? Or something else entirely? The big question is, will the zukes be next?
Summer ends!
For the last day of summer, a rainbow! The field is looking a bit bedraggled, with some things naturally dying out, some touched by near-freezing overnights, with tender crops row-covered against the possibility of a hard frost. Besides the rainbow, it’s not the postcard look of mid-summer, but what matters most, everything is still producing well!
Mid-September harvest
The weather’s been fine, no big frost worries, and the harvest is nice. For the sake of a list, in no particular order, we have: spinach, onion, garlic, carrots, bok choi, broccoli, lettuce, cabbage, kale, hot and sweet peppers, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, green beans, beets, and…eggplant! I think I got ’em all. The set-up on a strip of canvas is for a newsletter photo–the lighting is an overcast sun, the studio is the field!
Summer spinach
Spinach in August is never a sure thing. Germination in the summer’s heat is a roll of the dice. Keep seeding, over and over, every few days, and the odds of catching the right conditions go up. When a seeding does take, the going gets easy! Here, a sprig of volunteer purslane has pushed through to share the sun.
Cherry toms and pandemic
It’s mid-August, the heights of summer, and the cherry tomatoes are doing their thing. I wonder if there’s an endless interconnectedness between all plants, a real, tangible networking, as with cellphones or the internet, and if there is (seems to me as likely as not), what these cherry toms might be hearing about our great pandemic… Here in the field, it all feels to me quite distant, nothing has changed except in my thoughts. I can only imagine cities. Empty stores and restaurants. Few cars. A scattering of people, masked and hurrying away.
When to cover
Some crops need to be covered and some crops don’t. It would be excellent if all the vegetables in the garden could bask in the sun together, like a picture-perfect postcard. Which would be possible if it weren’t for pests, and the special conditions some need to germinate. Trusty floating row cover is used here to keep flea beetles chewing holes in the brassica mix—flat-leaf kale, mizuna, mustard, bok choi, and their close cousin arugula, to be harvested as baby leaves for salad. Wee tiny carrot seeds need cover to retain the constant moisture in the ground they need to germinate—I’ve been using black landscape fabric, watering through it as need, for about a week. And some veggies, like green beans and beets, haven’t had insect problems, so they don’t need cover. It all depends!