We finally got some good rain. The groundwater table is still below normal, but the situation is less critical, and the vegetation did get good watering. A few more rains like what we had this week, and the drought might be over. At least now I do not need to spare water even if it does not rain for a month or so again, and I have enough surplus to give my greenhouses a good soak.

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Blue grapes are starting to color, although they still have a long way to go. I do not know what causes the drying of the leaf edges on this plant. It does it every year and does not seem to be weather-related. These grapes are delicious, although they do have seeds. It looks promising so far.

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The white grapes do not show any meaningful damage on the leaves, and they have even more fruit. In addition to that, this vine grows so fast I have trouble keeping it confined to the greenhouse. These grapes are seedless, even more delicious, and usually I also get a bigger harvest. And since this year the vines were not damaged by late frost, I might get a really substantial amount.

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My fig trees got too big and I had to cut them back severely. I might not get any figs this summer, but I might still get some later in the autumn. The summer figs are usually better tasting, but in order to get them, the trees need to be left unpruned in the spring. We shall see if some of the bigger ones start ripening in about a week.

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I am trying to grow ginger this year again. I had not much success so far, and I learned that my mistake might have been putting it in direct sunlight. Ginger allegedly likes it warm but shady. So this year I put it under the grapevine in slight shade, but it does not look very promising so far. The weather is apparently not warm enough for ginger, although it is plenty warm for everything else. The gingers are barely starting to poke out of the ground just now.

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Tomatoes thrive, both inside and outside the greenhouse. And at both locations, they began to bear fruit, with more in the greenhouse. The plants are so far healthy, so I won’t spray them in the greenhouse with fungicide anymore. I might spray those outside once more, though. They are shielded from rain, but not from fog and dew, so they are still more susceptible to blight. The fruits are still reasonably far from ripening for one more round of fungicide to be safe.

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And outside the greenhouse, I counted 12 potential Hokkaido squash. The first one is now fist-sized.

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The main Three Sisters patch is now alight with bright red bean and bright yellow pumpkin blossoms. It does look kinda pretty and promising. First corn plants started to show female blossoms too, so that might not be a complete waste of resources in the end. And I am still impatiently waiting for the butternut pumpkins to take off. So far, they still grow very slowly and show no sign of blooming. But as long as the plants grow, there is hope I will get some use out of them, and we still have about 50 days before first frost. When I was a kid, it was not unusual to get the first frost in the second half of September. In later years, though, it usually comes in the second half of October or even later. We shall see how the weather turns out – it is a factor I cannot influence, yet it has a huge impact on the outcome of my labor.

The pumpkins started to grow and appear to be accelerating now.

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The butternut squashes are the least advanced since they are the last that were planted. Funnily enough, one of those surplus ones that I planted with red beets is the biggest, and I had to start teasing it onto the aluminium trellis. I think that these grow faster than those planted in the lawn because the soil is more porous here.

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The first female flower of the Hokkaido pumpkin showed up. It was probably pollinated and is starting to convert into the fruit now.

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Some Hokkaido plants are getting bigger and they started to crawl out of the 50×50 cm squares onto the grass. I probably won’t be able to mow the grass between and around the poles again, which is OK, this was always the plan. I will be chuffed if I get two fruits per plant by the end of the season. If I get more, I’d be thrilled.

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I started to harvest the marrow squash already. When harvested this small, they do not need to be peeled, although they do have prickly hairs that need to be rubbed off. They are sweeter than zucchini and are really juicy and tender.

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That is why this first harvest was simply chopped into slices, covered wth spice and tossed in a baking tray with a duck for the last 20 minutes of baking.

If things go well, they should now accelerate in growth until we are no longer able to eat them fast enough, and they get bigger and with harder skin. I will write about the use of the bigger fruits in due course, with recipes.

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And lastly a picture of a longhorn beetle that I captured in my coppice with my phone. It was a fast moving critter, I would not be able to go inside for proper camera in time. But I think this pic is worth publishing anyway. I am not an entomologist, but it was found on a willow, so I think it is a musk beetle, Aromia moschata. It is beautiful, although its larvae might destroy some trees in my coppice in due course. Which is not a big problem, the trees need to be replaced each decade or two anyway.

I mentioned the raspberry growth behind my garden already, there is even a picture in one of the older posts. Here is a new one.

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It is just outside my garden, on the east side of the fence. It is an ideal spot for raspberries – they get full morning sun, but as the day gets hotter in the afternoon, they become shielded by my copicce poplars.

It is a mixed growth of probably domesticated, wild, and hybrid raspberries. Some shoots have prickles, most do not; some have fruits consisting of a lot of small drupelets, some of just a few big ones. Technically, it does not belong to me, but I take care of it and harvest most of the fruit. And anyone who goes by can harvest that fruit as well, and nobody, not even the owner of the meadow, can object to that. The Czech Republic has roaming laws about accessibility to landscapes, so a meadow is freely walkable unless it is currently being grazed by cattle or for similar safety reasons. And wild fruits and mushrooms are a common good that anyone can take. So even when these raspberries technically grow on someone else’s property, I am neither trespassing nor stealing.

Shortly after the Iron Curtain fell, some of the new forest and meadow owners tried to restrict public access to their land. Yet others tried to collect fees from people who took wild fruit or mushrooms.  There was a very public education campaign teaching people what is and is not allowed.

I also have to mow the grass about 1 to 1,5 m adjacent to my fence. The owner uses the meadows surrounding my house mostly for hay production, and the tractor cannot mow that close. And even when they used the meadows as pastures, there was a gap between the electric fence and my property that I still had to mow. That is how the growth got established in the first place when I was a kid – my father did not mow the grass around the garden, nor did the tractors, and thus raspberries took hold.

Occasionally, I flatten and subsequently fertilize the whole growth to rejuvenate it, forgoing that year’s harvest. But this is one of those years when I have a huge harvest.

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The fruit is so aromatic that even my stunted sense of smell can enjoy it.

We have several kg of fruit already, and we should get even more in the next week or so. Luckily, we finally got some rain, and although it was not much, raspberries did benefit from it. I cannot water them; that would really be too much strain on my water resources.

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So far, most of the fruit goes into the freezer. Once the harvest is over, it will be thawed, juice pressed out of it, and cooked into jam that lasts for years. However, I did take about 1 kg and dehydrated it.

Dehydrated raspberries are not very good food. They are sour and have the consistency of coarse sand. So why make them? Because I plan to mix them with sweet dehydrated pears in the fall, put the mix into a food processor and blend them together. The resulting powder makes for a very tasty and aromatic fruit tea in the winter.

So far, I have had very little success, since most of the growth season is still in the future, and thus only time will tell. Unfortunately, I had several definitive fails already. Some anticipated, some new.

Let’s start with the radishes. In the greenhouse, they were a definitive success. I harvested over 3 kg of radishes from sowing two packets. Outdoors, they were a failure; I harvested barely over 0,5 kg from one packet. Some were woody, some bolted before bulking, and all were heavily damaged by flea beetles. The cause of all that was likely the same that led to the failure of spinach: an abnormally warm and dry spring. The season essentially started a month earlier and got a rude interruption a month later.

The basil was a complete fail. It was heavily damaged by the late frost and completely dried in the subsequent drought.

Next, the strawberries. I had some, but just enough to eat them raw for breakfast for a few days. This was expected. I essentially started them anew this year, so they did not have deep enough roots to cope with the drought and the heatwave. No amount of watering can help with that.

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All of the garlic Havel and a few plants of the other varieties got some fungal disease, and I had to harvest them prematurely in order to try and salvage something. It is still questionable whether I will have a lot of garlic or none at all. I do not know what specific fungal disease it is; it might be Botryotinia porri.

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I have no slug damage worth speaking of this year, but the vole infestation has reached unprecedented levels. My garden looks like Emmental cheese.

They dug under the onions, although they did not eat any. They also dug under and ate some of the carrots, forcing me to start harvesting them prematurely to prevent losing them completely. They ate the roots of several bean plants. And they started to try to dig their way to the roots of my newly planted trees as if they were honing in on them – holes started to appear around the wire mesh circumferences that I used to protect them.

I tried to put down traps, but the fuckers learned how to trip them and take the food out afterwards. In the end, I had to resort to poison to at least reduce the pests before they completely overrun my garden. To reduce the risk to cats, hedgehogs, and other mammals, I am putting it directly into the burrow entrances and covering it with a bucket. I did not have to do this for decades, and I hope I won’t need to do it again.

If not for the voles, planting carrots in the egg trays would be a success, although I did not water them all quite enough. Some got big, some remained tiny.

So the lessons:

I won’t grow radishes outdoors anymore, only in the greenhouse as a pre-crop. The weather is too strange now, and older wisdoms and pranostics no longer apply. I can no longer rely on my books, Google,  or even the seed packets for proper planting/sowing times.

I need to wait to plant basil outdoors for later, and I need to water it a lot. It seems rather thirsty. I did not give up on it this year yet – I bought seedlings in the supermarket in the vegetable aisle. The weather is now cool and cloudy, ideal for hardening them off before planting them outdoors.

Next year, I will do minimal disruption to the strawberry growth that I planted this year. Strictly speaking, this is not a new lesson, only a reiteration of one already learned.

To grow garlic, I need at least three beds with more permeable soil that I can disinfect, and I probably should spray my garlic with some fungicide, just as I do with potatoes and tomatoes. I am also making sure that no peels or offcuts of garlic get onto the compost pile; from now on, I will burn it all.

And lastly, to grow carrots and other root vegetables, I need rodent-proof beds.

Those two last lessons coalesced in the conclusion that I need at least three separate raised garden beds that I can fill with a custom soil mix. I wanted to build them from materials I have lying around, since they were rather expensive the last time I looked. But before I started to build, I checked again and I found three very nice 322x100x36 cm raised beds at a discount price I could afford, so I ordered them. I will reinforce the bottoms with wire mesh, and fill them with a mix of soil that I am reasonably certain is healthy, sand/clinker (I have two piles over 50 years old, of coal ash, clinker, and sand in my garden, overgrown with grass, I use it to lighten the soil for bonsai already), compost, and biochar. Then I can rotate garlic, carrots, beets, and bush beans between these beds to ensure the soil is not overtaxed by just one crop planted in it repeatedly, and that species-specific pathogens do not accumulate. I will probably add sunflowers or hemp in the rotation a few times, in case there are still some bioavailable heavy metals in the old coal ash piles.

And that is that for now, I will continue to grow, and we will see what comes out of it.

I was able to mostly water the garden adequately, and most plants now appear to have deep enough roots to thrive. Except for a few fails, about which I will write another time. And when the plants get their roots deep enough, the leaves get nice dark green color and they start to bloom.

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Though the first picture today is not a bloom, it is my first bell pepper ever. It was tiny (just 70 g), but according to my father, it was delicious.

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The bell peppers continue to bear fruit, and the tomatoes just started to blossom last week when I took this picture. They are much bigger now, and the first berries are starting to show up. So far, so good. Due to the heat wave, I did put a shading net over the greenhouse, tomatoes do thrive best in temperatures up to 35°C and with direct sunlight, the greenhouse could easily overheat in this weather.

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The humble pea had lots of white blossoms everywhere I planted it. The pods are now in their flat stage, and I expect them to bulk up within two weeks or so. After that, I can harvest the peas and plant a second round of the same. Or I can try for spinach again. At least this supply of pea seeds had very good germination rate, and I should get at least my money’s worth and some of the time too.

I already harvested the first variety of pea that I planted, the one with a poor germination rate. I got just about what the packet cost out of that,too.

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The three sisters patches are doing OK-ish. The beans finally started to climb the poles. Normally, once they do that, the growth accelerates significantly.

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The purple blossoms of the runner bean are beloved by pollinators of all kinds – bees, bumblebees, and butterflies. I like them too, they ad color to the garden. Some of the other beans started to blossom too, but most did not, and there are still some that did not catch onto the support.

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The marrow pumpkins started with female flowers this year, which is unusual. Normally, pumpkins start with male flowers to attract pollinators and only later add female flowers. This way does not make much sense, because female flowers are a bigger investment, and without any male flowers around, they simply dry and fall off uselessly. But after about a week, male flowers started to show up too, so from now on, I should be getting some pumpkins.

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This week, the first Hokkaido pumpkin started to bloom, with male flowers as is proper. Pumpkins and beans are the OK part of my three sisters experiment. The -ish part is corn.

So far, most of the corn is still stunted. And those plants that looked big and healthy started to bloom now, but only male flowers. I suspect this is corn’s reaction to the wonky weather. I might still get some harvest out of some of the large number of plants that I planted, but it just appears corn is not worth the effort in my garden. It is too unreliable. Out of the four years I am trying to grow it, only the first year I had a definitive success; every following year, it was a lot of work and a lot of failure.

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Potatoes are not doing well; the weather is too dry and hot for them, even with watering. I will get some, but it won’t be spectacular. They started to bloom last week, and in about two months, they will be ready for harvest.

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And last, some weed that sprouts every year in my gladiolas. I never bothered to identify the species, and I am generally leaving it be. It does not spread, and it has nice, big white blossoms.

Next time, I will unfortunately have to write about some of the fails I had this year.