From commentor TheOtherWA:
This spring was so cold and wet in the northwest, I just couldn’t get into gardening mode. Never planted the usual tomatoes and herbs. The raspberries did pretty well, they like cool weather (& were eaten before any photos were taken), but the grapevine is pathetic.
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The photo is a bunch of black table grapes in mid August. I should be munching a few of these by now, waiting for most of them to get nice and dark. It’s weird, we basically didn’t have a summer this year. Most of the country was sweltering in extreme heat and drought, we’ve hardly had enough. Only people with greenhouses are getting good produce.
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I’m not whining about our weather, really. Just explaining the situation.
There’s a feel of fall in the air here, and it’s not just the torn leaves & downed branches. The immediate microclime was very, very lucky with Hurricane Irene… and when I see video from places like Vermont, upstate NY, northern New Jersey or the Carolinas, I’m hardly gonna complain about my tomato towers leaning askew. (We didn’t even lose power, despite the half-splintered oak branch hanging over the powerline that Northern Grid has been refusing to remove for the past 18 months.)
What’s it like in your gardens, this week? Anybody have hurricane / wildfire / drought / plague-of-locusts stories to share?
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
We have entered an extreme drought here and it sucks big time.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
This painting of our house is nice.
Sam Houston
A few cicadas which the dogs eat. Blegh :P
I’m lucky now to be in the ‘burbs. I didn’t think Hummingbirds would be found this close to the city but there they are. I see about three a day. My SO’s garden brings them back time and again and it makes me happy to see them.
I want to fly away with them; away from this vale of tears.
SteveinSC
It was oppressively hot this June and July, and moderated in August. Consequently, I was late planting okra (seeds.) The plants have just started producing in earnest. Boiled okra, fried okra, okra and tomatoes over rice. Okra gumbo. Pickled okra. Yum.
Kelly
Lots’a Wild Blackberries ripened this week here in the Willamette Valley. Cobbler and vanilla ice cream!
TheOtherWA
Is it geeky of me to be excited that Anne Laurie posted my photo? Cuz I am.
RoonieRoo
It only got to 102 today. Downright balmy. My current round of summer squash is reasonably happy but I don’t know when I’m going to be able to plant out the fall round of cole crops if this heat doesn’t let up soon enough.
TheOtherWA
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Nice painting. Very Van Gogh-ish.
(thought I submitted this already, sorry if it turns out to be a duplicate post.)
Violet
Dry. Hot. Dry. Hot. Very hot. Very dry. Extremely hot. Parched earth dry. People collapsing hot. Trees and critters dying dry. Miserable fucking summer. Hate summer. Hate.
And I’m beyond grouchy because this nice tropical moisture we were promised is now going to stay east of us and we’ll remain hot and dry, and worse yet, the wind from the top of the tropical system will ignite fires and make it hotter and drier.
Hate summer with the fire of 10,000 fiery hot suns. Or the heat of a Texas summer when Rick Perry has prayed for rain.
BruceFromOhio
Irene sent a blast of cool, dry air for five days straight, made it feel like the last days of September instead of August. A/C off, windows open all the time, great sleeping weather. Now its summer again, the basil, tomatoes and peppers in the garden continue exceeding our capacity for consumption, and tonight the air goes back on.
Whether the wet spring, dry hot summer with occasional blasts of rain, or something else, one thing is beyond the pale: the local peach crop is heavenly. Trees fat with gorgeous fruit, and every one a jewel. The local corn is killer.
I see the pics of dead, dry fields the states in the south, and am thankful for the blessings on our bountiful lands. Its almost … eerie, as though the lush, full fields in northern Ohio are priced in dust somewhere else.
ETA: We netted the grapevine this year, and though it is also running late, there’s going to be jelly to spare this fall. Where there was almost nothing two years ago, now its visibly pulling down the vine.
SteveinSC
@Violet: Watching the storm RADAR on Weather.com. We could use the rain here in SC but Texas needs it more. Strange pooling of heat over central Texas. I wonder how long the previous record heat wave lasted? I hate to say Global Warming, since it’s just a single data point, but it is/has been an odd weather artifact nonetheless.
Svensker
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
That’s beautiful. Neat!
Violet
@BruceFromOhio:
You can’t really imagine how bad it is. Trees are dying all over the place. They’re actually a hazard. If you decide to park under or near a tree you need to check it out first or you might come back to find a limb on your car. Trees are dropping limbs like crazy as they die. It’s also a hazard if you run or walk near trees. They’re just spontaneously dropping huge limbs or falling over altogether with no warning. Scary.
As you drive around, especially in areas like along freeways where no one is watering, it’s nothing but dead trees. But even in neighborhoods there’ll be three trees that look okay followed by one of the same type and age that is dead.
It’s dead, dry, brown and awful. This has been a terrible, terrible summer.
BruceFromOhio
@Violet: I was fortunate to spend two years living in Houston. When I first arrived in late summer, driving out of Intercontinental, my first thought was, how many trees. Everything was GREEN.
Now I hear that it is as you say there as well, and that’s frightening to the core. My contacts in Dallas all claim the same: never remember it being this bad. Climate change or no, if it persists, some things are going change forever, and not for the better.
And no matter where you live, if its made with wheat or corn or cotton or soybeans, its going to cost more, starting now.
Cliff in NH
2 months now of 75-85 deg weather (sorry hot people, move up here, its gorgeous)
the tomatoes were happy to be dragged onto the porch, since we got 5-7 inches of rain(3-4 inches the week before, hence the floods) and 30-40 mph winds blowing west, then east..
flickr.com/photos/64725711@N07/6089543515/in/photostream
I was lucky, there was lots of flooding depending on location.
Violet
@BruceFromOhio:
The desert is slowly creeping east. Houston has always been lush and green and very humid. Not this year. Very hot and dry and everything dying. Louisiana is next. The desertification of the south is happening.
Kristine
After a couple weeks of pleasant weather–80s interspersed with rain every few days–the heat is back. 90s today. 90s tomorrow. Then it drops to the 70s for who knows how long.
I am hoping for a moderate September because the tomatoes are finally starting to come in. The plants in the deck pots had had it, so I took all those tomatoes and stuck them in bags under the kitchen sink to ripen. Meanwhile, the raised bed plants are doing well. The other day I picked a 2-lb Siamese triplet of an Aunt Ginny’s Purple heirloom. Thing looked like a brain. I will be picking more Siberians and Mountain Fresh over the weekend, and will either make a batch of freezer sauce or just blanch, peel, and crush the things. Not a great crop at all this year thanks to the month-long run of 90s, but I’ll take what I can get. For a while, I didn’t think I’d have anything to harvest.
The mesclun finally gave up the ghost. I may compost the remains and put in a fall planting.
I’m really not ready for the -ber months.
fleeting expletive
My first act this morning was to step out on my front porch to check the mail. I stuck my socked foot onto the threshold and felt a furious vibration on my big toe. An upturned locust was, I guess, just next to my toe, and it latched onto my sock and was throbbing to beat the band. I kicked furiously to get it off and retreated into the house, thinking “what kind of a day begins with a locust on your foot?” Fortunately the day has otherwise been uneventful. But shit, what are the odds, and even before I’d been adequately caffeinated?
It don’t feel like fall in these parts yet at all.
TheOtherWA
@fleeting expletive: A locust on your foot before any caffeine? That’s just wrong.
BruceFromOhio
@Violet: Not an expert, but I recall the El Nino and La Nina cycles were always very evident there. I’m sorry for you and your fellow citizens, and I’m really sorry for the trees. They can’t move away.
Gracie
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): I love that painting! Vibrant yet tranquil.
We kept it small this year. Not alot of rain here in the SE. But we still have tomatoes (Ozark Pink variety), 20 lbs of potatoes, tons of beans and hot peppers (jalapenos especially).
Our ornamentals are doing well, but they’re well-established and native.
My thoughts go out to anyone in a drought or other nasty weather situation right now. We were hoping to get some rain from the hurricane, but the outskirts of the Irene clouds as they passed were literally split over our property. Front yard got rain, back yard dry.
fleeting expletive
The Other WA, it does tend to concentrate the mind rather quickly. It was weird.
Cliff in NH
@Gracie:
I want to try potatoes next year, you plant those in the fall right?
fleeting expletive
“Locust on My Toe” would be kind of a great band name, no?
Triassic Sands
I live in the Northwest and this year has been a disaster from a fruit and vegetable standpoint. (Politically too.)
I’m glad your raspberries did well, mine were neither as plentiful, nor as delicious as usual. NO plums — zero. No apricots. The tomatoes are pathetic — small and not very good. The apple trees look sadly unburdened by fruit and I heard a report to expect them to be smaller and less sweet than usual. I don’t think anything met expectations/hopes this year.
srv
Blackberries. Not my garden, but I don’t think SF Parks cares. How come birds don’t eat them?
TheOtherWA
@Triassic Sands: The raspberries didn’t produce as much as previous years, but the flavor was fine. My co-workers didn’t any freebies this year.
Come to think of it, lots of people usually bring in extras from their gardens, but only a couple have, and they didn’t bring in much. Crappy summer.
Violet
Any of you with the cold and wet summers want to trade? I’ll offer you 47 days over 100, with highs around 109, and no rain and hardly any clouds. Deal?
NineJean
@TheOtherWA: Don’t give up hope, quite yet. I don’t know where you are in WA, but here in PDX it looks like we’re going to get summer — finally! — for a week at least, temps in the 80’s… My coupla grape-loving friends think that they might just get a crop after all.
It’s been a tough summer, talking to friends & family in other parts of the country about how they were all too hot, too dry. While I was sitting in my fleece sweatshirt and fuzzy slippers and trying not to shiver.
Cold and wet can be as bad as hot and dry when it comes to the local fruit crops. Food is going to be really expensive this year, wherever it comes from.
Dollared
@TheOtherWA: Yeah, this is the summer where you learn which plants really, really must have heat. The immediate Elliot Bay microclime went from late June partial sun directly to fall’s fog-until-noon routine. I’ve gotten two small zucchini, about two dozen blueberries, five padron peppers, and no tomatoes. None – not even the Failsafe Sweet 100s. The upside? Fabulous year for peonies – just amazing how many blossoms we had. Bush beans have been very productive. And the pea pods produced from late June to last week – I’ve never, ever picked a pea pod in August, and we had them all month.
Gracie
@Cliff in NH: I plant them (already greensprouted) in early-mid April. I live in the southeast. In more northern areas, it might need to be a little later than that.
I think I might be at the southern edge for growing potatoes, so anyone growing north of here might have excellent yields because there isn’t so much heat stress.
Wood prairie farm has an excellent website. Their seed potatoes are high quality.
NineJean
@Dollared: Well, I skipped the food garden this year — not because of the weather, but nevertheless…
But as far as the flowering things go — peonies went wild. Hardy fuchias are the biggest and bloomingiest that they’ve ever been.
Everything else? Bleah.
TheOtherWA
@srv: I’m in SW Washington, and the birds here do eat berries, trust me. One of them nailed my windshield last week with a big splat of purple poop. You could see the seeds in it too.
Sure, go ahead and laugh. You didn’t have to scrape it off.
NineJean
@srv: @TheOtherWA: …giggle…
In this part of the country, you don’t grow blackberries for fun – you put a lot of energy into trying to get rid of them, and lose. When you lose, you enjoy the berries because you can’t do anything else . As do the birds…
Dennis SGMM
It’s still in the nineties in my corner of Southern California. I’m seriously considering planting edible cactus.
Cliff in NH
@Gracie:
Thanks, they should grow well here (if they get sun), I’ve seen Maine potatoes in the store, so they can’t be that bad a fit for my climate.
I don’t think heat stress should be a problem here.
A quick look says plant em early, I’m gonna try for a vertical planting I think, will see in the spring!
Anne Laurie
@Gracie:
I second this! Wood Prairie Farm really does an excellent job, whether you’re looking for seed potatoes or eating tubers.
Planted mine in mid-May, in gro-bags, last year (I’m not too far south of you, Cliff). Took them a good 21 days to poke sprouts out of the potting mix, but they took off just fine once the days got longer. Since I was growing them in the ‘front yard’ (driveway strip), I got compliments from the neighbors on my “pretty flowers”, too. When the plants died back, around Halloween, I upended the bags & collected my harvest while sitting down — perfect!
However, since I’ve got so little sunlit space, and I couldn’t taste a huge difference between my potatoes and the store-bought Yukon Golds, this year the bags got planted with tomatoes instead… now that I’ve proven to the spirits of my Irish ancestors that, if I had to, I can grow my own praties.
opie_jeanne
@TheOtherWA: Then I’m a geek too.
Beautiful grapes, too bad it’s the first of September. We called our child in Seattle to see how our garden is doing while we’re in too-sunny Southern California. She says it looks fine but the tomatoes are STILL not ripe.
opie_jeanne
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): I like very much.
Are you the artist?
opie_jeanne
@Anne Laurie: Thank you and everyone else who talked about growing potatoes. We had a very little bit of success here just East of Seattle this year. We are thinking of growing them in a trench with straw and mulch heaped over them, maybe.
I’m having to relearn everything I thought I knew about gardening, after living in the relative paradise that is Anaheim.
I’m in the mountains in SoCal right now and it’s gorgeous, about 80 during the day, light breeze, and the forest smells beautiful now that it has cooled off a bit. Last week it was too hot even here. This week we’re sleeping under a blanket.
There is a Granny Smith apple tree at the cabin that we planted about 2 years ago and it has survived having no one to water it; we did a lot of prep work and still lived nearby for the first year. It has set fruit each year but none survives to the fall. Maybe next year we’ll see some.
Yutsano
Peyton Hillis needs to stop looking so damn cute. There I said it.
Death Panel Truck
I live in eastern Washington (Pasco, to be exact), and it’s true, we had a long, cold, wet spring, and about a two-week summer. It’s already getting down into the forties at night.
Shlemizel - was Alwhite
Here in MN we have gotten all the rain you other guys are missing. Its just been the last week or two that it has dried even a little. The garden has not done all that well because it got hot early and stayed that way. If this is the new climate we are on our way to being a deciduous rain forest.
As for locust stories, I saw a cicada in the drive way the other day, belly up with a big hole in its abdomen. I kicked it into the grass & it flew away! It was about 20% eaten & it just flew off.
R-Jud
After the week I spent in the hospital, my garden is totally overgrown. I’m pretty happy about my cherry tomatoes, though: I’ve had about one and a half dozen ripe ones so far, after my father-in-law swore blind that it’s impossible for tomatoes to ripen in the UK outside of a greenhouse. It’s been sunny but not really hot or even warm this summer.
Bees are happy in the lavender. Sweet peas are coming to an end. Mr. Jud dug up the last potatoes for me. Bramley apples and damsons are ready. As soon as I can swap this cast for a brace and stand at the kitchen counter for more than five minutes, I’ll make some pies.
jnfr
Our grapevine looked bountiful until the squirrels stripped it bare.
Steaming Pile
@Gracie: Up here in central NY (similar climate to New Hampshire), we plant our potatoes as soon as the ground thaws out – usually late April. They like it relatively cool. What they didn’t particularly appreciate was the very rainy April and May, followed by a dry, hot June. Yields were down quite a bit from expectations.
So what did we get? Wild black raspberries in relative abundance, enough for a few precious eight-ounce jars of jam. Great on English muffins. Pretty decent blueberries, nice and fat. We’re still picking and freezing our bush beans. Swiss chard seems to do well this year. And the biggest red cabbage you’ve ever seen.
Tomatoes? We planted about 16 plants, and planned on making a bunch of sauce. Nope. About the same number of tomatoes as if we had three vines in a normal year, but what we did get were very, very good. The seed company we bought our tomato seeds from put a Brandywine in the packet by mistake, and it’s the most robust vine we have, and the fruit are delicious.
And my wife brought home a few flats of Hungarian yellow peppers that did very well, and all at once so we have a crisper full of them right now.
Monala
Sorry, I totally disagree. I moved to the Seattle area from Boston 3 years ago. We have had a beautiful summer. It has rained a handful of times. Most days it’s sunny, and the temperature usually hits a high between 67-77.
That may not be good enough for some crops, but for playing outside, taking walks, or just sitting in the sun, it’s fabulous. And having lived in Boston and knowing that my friends and family back there were enduring heat waves, earthquakes and hurricanes, there is no way I’m complaining.
Julie Raffety
In coastal southern California, it is once again foggy this morning. And cold! The sun usually comes out eventually and the garden is thriving.