TAPPING OUT

Here we are in the waning days of August.  The swathers and combines are chewing through the acres and municipal roads that don’t see traffic for months on end are major trucking routes.  My grass needs cut again but 30 degrees is just too brutal for this girl – it will have to wait.  Sometimes a person has to know when to tap out.

Some crazy lady (who looks a lot like me) planted her usual too-big-for-two-people garden in May and I have been dealing with the consequences of that rash act all summer.  Germination was pretty fair except the yellow beans which were a complete failure.  My cucumbers also struggled to give me a measly four plants.  It’s funny, in June this concerned me greatly because that didn’t seem to be enough.  Then one of them died and I was down to three.  We like our cucumbers so this was very concerning.  It is now the end of August and I have been giving them away by the bag full only to have another twenty ready to eat the next time I walk past the pickle patch.  Obviously poor germination has no bearing on productivity if the rain and heat come at the right time.  It’s getting to the point where they need to tap out.

The strawberries started out the year producing very well and have moved on to spectacular.  They seem to be taking the name ‘ever bearing’ very seriously.  I was still picking asparagus until the end of June, and the raspberry crop was phenomenal.  I had to discourage my peas from further productivity by yanking them out of the ground.  I’ve never had better success with corn, and I even got most of it into my freezer before a few very rude and greedy raccoons wreaked havoc one night.  Let’s just say they won’t be back next year.

Zucchini are playing their usual trick of being eight inches long at 10:00 in the morning and two feet long and weighing 20 pounds by suppertime.  Any beets I have left out there are the size of soccer balls.  The dill has all gone to seed.  Luckily the pigs love Swiss Chard … and any portulaca, redroot pigweed, and sow thistle that happens to be growing where it’s not supposed to be.

The onions don’t have root rot.  The potatoes are prolific and not rotting from the inside like on some years.  We have been eating, pickling, and giving away carrots for a month now and I still have two twelve-foot rows to harvest.  What was that lady who looks a lot like me thinking in May?  Oh yeah, I know what she was thinking … She was thinking “There’s only half a package of seed left, I’ll make another row.”  That’s what she was thinking.  Somebody needs to tap her out.

It's the pumpkins that are the winners this year though.  Remember that hail storm with the hardball -sized ice bombs from the sky on July 4?  Not sure that I’ll ever forget what that sounds like under meatal roofing or the way the yard looked like the inside of a popcorn machine or the ground being covered in deep pock marks for weeks afterward.  It was a doozy.  Luckily our yard was at the edge of the worst action; no windows were broken and most of the garden dodged the damage. 

The pumpkins took the brunt of it with their huge leaves out there like catcher’s mitts, and yet they came back swinging!  Those plants must cover one quarter of my garden space and are spreading another ten feet daily.  There is fruit of all sizes under those huge leaves and the canopy is so tall you could lose small children in there.  If we have a late frost there should be enough jack-o-lanterns to supply southeast Saskatchewan.  No need for them to tap out – I’m curious to see how big we can go!

And, the pinnacle of garden satisfaction?  What we’ve been waiting for since I picked those baby tomato plants up at the greenhouse?  The reason bacon exists?  Today, finally, there were tomatoes ripe enough for toasted bacon and tomato sandwiches for lunch. 

I wish I could say “My work here is now done” but of course we are only about to start the everything-to-do-with-tomatoes soup/salsa/sauce season.  They’ve been so slow to get going it will likely be mid October before I see the end of them.  Before I can really tap out for 2025.

Meanwhile, I’m going to have a very stern talk with that lady who looks a lot like me about next spring.