Winding Down

2013 Summer garden, still hanging on

It looks like summer may be losing its grip, now that the high-90s weather has broken and the morning are cool and full of crickets singing.  I think they are as happy as I am about the changing of the seasons.  We are praying for rain - we're down about 5 inches for the year - but watching Colorado warily because we certainly don't want any of those flood waters here.  Lord knows we had enough of that mess back in '93. 

So with Fall gearing up, the garden is starting to wind down.  The hybrid tomatoes and peppers are still going gangbusters, but the heirlooms are almost done.  *sniff*

My experiment with growing the watermelons up the arch trellis was an interesting one.  As they ripened, they picked themselves by falling off (I never put any support under them).  I doubt that would work with a heavier melon, but it seemed to work well with the Sugar Baby melons because they only weigh 3 pounds at their heaviest.  And the vines made for some nice shade for the green beans.

Speaking of....I've left the last of the green beans to brown on the vine so that I can gather the beans for next year.

What I do have a bumper crop of now are those hopping fiends, the grasshoppers.  Everywhere!  Are they the cleanup crew? Not much left for them to chew on, thankfully.  But there are definitely more of them this year than there has been in the last 4 or 5 years.  Are you seeing this at your place also?

Finally, it's with a heavy heart that I mention another winding down.  Our neighbors next door had their 17-year-old dog, Sheba, pass away on Saturday.  She was a sweet puppy that had been a fixture in the back yard since we moved in.  They asked if they could borrow our post hole digger since they didn't have a decent shovel.  Our neighbor, C., has health problems and gets dizzy very easily, so he had no business out there trying to dig a hole in the rock hard ground.  I told him that we had a new Dingo that could do the work for us, and that it did.  Lickety split!  So Sheba now rests in the same yard that she inhabited all of her life. We'll miss you, old friend.

As with everything in nature, though, out of old comes new.  During this time of the year, I always feel a little impatient about getting started with the cleanup.  This year, we'll be changing things around quite a bit:  ripping out three of the raised beds in favor of an in-ground garden, and building a greenhouse from those hotel windows that I bought a month ago.  But there are still green tomatoes on the vine and I'm not going to pull those plants up just because I'm antsy.  Am I the only one that feels this way in the Fall?

Impatiently yours,

I've shared with this week's Homestead Barn Hop. There's lot of stuff going on over there - go check it out!