Slim Pickins

This year, after relentless rain, our fruit and vegetable harvest has only yielded slim pickins’ despite countless attempts to tend to our plants with every known benefit for their enhanced growth. Some techniques that I used successfully in the past, couldn’t compete with the rotten weather that drowned them, froze them, broke them in half or provided a good base for fungi to attach to them. So many lovely varieties of our best fruit trees fared rather poorly this year. Our many plum trees hardly produced enough to fill a small bowl. There had been others, but they were devoured by unknown birds before they were even close to being ripe. Our tall grapevine in front that’s on the outside of our barn was another victim of the weird storms that repeated in every season for most of each season. The outlay of grapes that we can see is dismal. Usually, we must try to put some sort of netting on them to keep them protected from the birdlife around here. But that doesn’t seem necessary this year.
Our yellow zucchini plant seemed to be doing well and eventually I saw that a nicely shaped courgette was ripe for the picking. Although it wasn’t exactly large, it was tasty, but since then I’ve been waiting for others to appear to no avail. Now, it’s a few days from autumn and we’re currently having another few days of rain and cold. Then there’s my cabbages. They started out like gangbusters and got really tall fast. I was ecstatic. They’re so pricey in the markets. I had scads of them growing. But one day, one white moth appeared and brought his relatives back with him soon after. My chooks enjoyed eating the very holy scraps that were left by the larvae of the moths that were chewing through my cruciferous giants. And I should have had some indication
when I noticed that neither apricot tree I planted years ago, had any apricots growing on them. I wasn’t all that surprised though, since neither had done well since their inception into our front yard. Even though I purchased them from the loveliest man who grew organically on his extensive paddocks, these apricots have been a sort of a joke when it comes to production trees. Maybe this variety requires a pollinator, or maybe I have two males or two females. Who knows? Not me.
But on the other hand, our corn, which we planted very late in the summer, is thriving and has quadrupled in size. Though there’s not a hint yet of any cobs and with the fall so near, perhaps there never will be. And lo and behold the nectarine tree is having its best year ever, despite the fact that it was split in half by a tree falling on it and has two distinct limbs far from each other laden with glossy red fruit. I must also add that we planted scarlet runner beans and some sort of broad beans in two new sites that we created for them since our teepee support is now in shadow most of every day, shaded by the surrounding tall trees. That whole plot is rather useless now, though John has cleared most of the smothering lemon balm from the blackberries. It wasn’t fun but truly necessary to make room again for other growth to appear, like the sea of daisies we had there one year that were up to my waist. Or even the giant pinky orange poppies that grew on their own that suddenly popped up and up and opened to perfection. Sublime.
Of course, I can’t end this little report without a word about the happy tomatoes that seem to be doing very well in front and in the back, although the front ones have really produced already and the back ones have really produced quite a few for the birds. And it’s getting a bit late to enjoy the last of the basil salads (though we’re still eating them), called caprese, with sliced tomatoes and olive oil and balsamic vinegar and a touch of flaky salt. With the weather like a yoyo of hot and cold, too dry then too wet, the leaves are getting a little leathery and with the plants setting seeds they’re starting to taste bitter. Sort of like me when I ruminate about all this rain that has disturbed the bounty we usually get from these very same plants and trees and vines. But perhaps there is some good news on its way along with the cooler weather. Our walnut trees have an abundance of gigantic lime green husks hanging from the branches everywhere and we’re hardly getting through the last couple of years of nuts produced here. Like us, two nuts, produced elsewhere but ending up here.
Such is life at the House of Cluck-Cluck today, at the end of February.