The End of Summer
Summer is leaving with a trail of rain… and about time too. Summer raged – hot dry – into April and never lightened up until just now when we can finally say “good by”! I’ll be glad to see you again next year. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the rain and the cooler temperatures.
The fall raspberries certainly like it too. And we like fall raspberries.
It’s also time to dig the sweet potatoes – an official harbinger of the end of summer. Actually it’s later than I want to dig the sweet potatoes: the second week of September is better, as we need to give them time to cure to ensure they keep in storage. But the ground was so dry, it was just about impossible to unearth them. And one has to be fairly gentle or ends up with sliced sweet potatoes. Sure, they callus pretty easily, but why compromise their keeping quality?
So after Monday’s rain which soften the ground, and before Wednesday and Thursday’s rain which is dumping more water than we’ve seen in the last 6 months, I dug about 1/4 of the bed, or about 1/3 of a wheelbarrow. That’s promising. We love sweet potatoes: in the garden they have been – so far – trouble free, and in the kitchen they lend themselves to all kinds of preparations savory and sweet.
Another sign that summer’s is over is that we are eating fresh cilantro again. I encourage cilantro to reseed – really it needs no encouragement, if you let it go to seed and let the seed try, you’ll have cilantro from September through June. And with the help of a cold frame plop over the bed, you’ll have fresh cilantro in the colder months too.
With all this rain, mache ought to germinate soon and I’ll be anxiously looking for it. And maybe this year I’ll get around to thin it (in my free time).
And soon enough it’ll be time to put the cover back on the hoophouse and move all the fragile plants in the green house…
Gorgeous berries!! It’s the season for them here too and I was able to make 7 quarts of jam with/for the school. None for me though, which I think I will need to fix this weekend…
And sweet potatoes. What a lovely harvest. I grew them this year too and it will be interesting to see which grew better, the ones in the greenhouse or the ones outdoors. (Greenhouse soil is a lot less clay-ey so my bet’s on the greenhouse ones.) All signs point to a good harvest there too, yay…
happy fall Sylvie
magnifique récolte de patate douce (ici aussi)
et nous les faisons en soupe
(encore pas de pluie mais l’été s’en va comme partout…)
Nice raspberries and sweet potatoes. I grew sweet potatoes one year with fair results and would like to try them again, I do have one plant growing in the greenhouse but don’t really expect to get any potatoes off it this year. Yours are very large, much larger than the ones I grew turned out to be. It sounds like you will have a pretty nice crop of them this year.
Thank you for sharing the lovely photos of your harvest. It is such a pleasure to read your blog. It is a visual feast!
Melanie