Intense Heat Abates

Those intensely hot days when the heat stayed oppressive throughout the daylight hours may have gone.  We're getting slighly cooler weather now...still hot, but not like it was.  Each day the intensity of the sunlight wanes a little bit as we move toward equinox.

The peas continue to grow.  They're sprawling over half the garden now, with no signs of slowing down.  I've been picking enough peas for a meal every few days and they are outstanding...never tasted better.  It makes me feel sorry for the people who have to rely solely on supermarket produce.  You have to have your own garden, or know someone who does, in order to develop an appreciation for food.

I pulled out the eggplant. I kept getting sick from the fruit, I think the variety I was growing had too much solanine.  Seems I have a sensitivity to solanine.  I'm laying off Solanum tuberosum for a while, they have solanine too.  That's the common white potato for those who have a phobia about scientific names.  There must be a name for that...people who fear dictionaries, books, and online search engines.  They seem to rely totally on "what people say".

Also I'm going back to a method of composting I used decades ago at a different house.  It's called sheet composting.  Instead of a bin or pile, you lay the plant debris and other biodegradable trash in a layer on your planting beds and cover thickly with mulch.  The soil beneath improves as the material breaks down, and the plants can often extract nutrients directly from the trash with the help of micorrhiza which grow in association with the plant roots.  I'm just trying it for a while, until I can get back to making compost in bins.  I just haven't kept up with things lately, and sheet composting is much less labor-intensive.

The mulch is coming from a sunny spot on my property where a variety of weeds, sedges, and native plants grow in a little meadow. I just go out there with my sickle and harvest a cartload of hay now and then for mulch.  After the grass stops growing, I'll probably get back to making compost the usual way.  This time of year I have to spend too much time mowing to keep up with the gardening...I don't have a big rider-mower.  Lately I get out of breath just doing light work around here.

The okra and the other hot-weather crops like Basella are doing well. I do love my okra.  Tonight I made a nice stir fry with Basella, okra, Jwala peppers, pinto beans, and rice.  Some of the okra plants are so tall I have to bend them over to reach the pods.  Okra is a tropical plant, and when the cool weather comes I'll switch to other crops like mustard and string beans.  But even though the heat is hard to deal with, I'll miss my okra.  It's my favorite of all the vegetables, but I've learned to change with the seasons, just like the plants in the surrounding woodlands do.  September is a good month to plant onions here, and who doesn't like onions?  I'm going in big with White Lisbon this year if all goes well...can't have too many onions.