(Host) In answer to the perennial question “So how DID the garden grow?” commentator Edith Hunter says that, despite tropical weather in late July and early August, growing conditions were generally great.
(Hunter) It was a wonderful garden year, for me at least in Weathersfield. The first crop that I harvested for winter keeping was garlic. As I recall I had to brush aside the early October snowfall to do the planting.
The onion crop was spectacular. I used to plant my row, and then my daughter-in-law, Susan, planted her row beside it. But her onions were always twice as big as mine. So a few years ago I offered to buy all the onion sets if she would plant all the onions. Since then they have flourished.
I paid nine year old grandson Sammy $5 to harvest the whole crop. He did a great job and now 420 onions – 20 braids with 21 in each braid – hang from the beams of the sunny porch.
I have only planted leeks in the last few years, but they are a great addition. After the first of September, I pull up six or eight, steal a few potatoes from under the potato vines, and with a couple of those wonderful onions make two quarts of vichysoisse soup for the freezer.
Although the peaches were larger and juicier this year than last, thanks to all that rain, there were not as many of them. But I had no apple crop at all. If that was because the cold rain in May hindered pollination, why did I get peaches, and why did a nearby commercial apple orchard have a banner apple crop?
No one needs 52 tomato plants. I grew 48 plants from seeds and gave a dozen to William. Then I bought four cherry tomato plants so I would have a few of those (there is no such thing as a few cherry tomatoes). I bought a dozen heritage variety at church one Sunday from someone who was raising them for a good cause. Not a single tomato plant died.
Many of my friends had a problem with tomato horn worms this year. These rather terrifying caterpillars grow up to be the large sphinx moth that many people mistake for humming birds. Often the worms appear with what look like small white eggs on their backs. These are not eggs, but cocoons of the braconid wasp. The mother wasp lays her eggs inside the body of the tomato worm where they hatch out and eat the insides of the worm. When ready the tiny worms emerge through the caterpillar’s skin, attach themselves to the caterpillar’s back, and spin their cocoons. Tomato horn worms thus parasitized are doomed.
The garden has indeed been prolific. The freezers are stuffed. And the tomatoes? Rows of glowing red jars of stewed tomatoes, tomato juice and spiced tomato jam tell the story.
This is Edith Hunter on the Center Road.
Writer and historian Edith Hunter lives in Weathersfield Center, Vermont.