September is here.

I can't believe September is here and summer as we knew it in Sonoma is over. We're only able to come up again on weekends. I'll miss our long stays in the heat and sun.

There is a lot of canning happening this month. Sometimes in Sonoma and sometimes back in San Francisco. It's easier in Sonoma with the fantastic new range but the cold fog in the city sure makes it easier to stand over a hot stove for hours.

Grape jelly happened last week in Sonoma. We had about 12 pounds of grapes that ripened all at once. Tasty as is, I knew we couldn't consume that much in a week!

We also have plenty of cherry tomatoes to harvest. I've taken to freezing them. They look great in quart jars in the freezer.

And now the larger tomatoes are ripening. The gophers ate all but one of my canning tomatoes so I hastily bought more to replace them without thinking what varieties I was buying.

Let's hope our stomachs can handle tomatoes with every meal for the next few weeks. And of course the apples are ready too. It came so fast this year, I didn't believe my daughter when she told me they were ripe. We'll see how these pears do. There are a lot on the pear tree but not sure when they'll be ripe enough to eat. Last year we had one pear when we moved in.

And of course, the harvest is accumulating on the kitchen counter, including a second flush of green beans.

Tomorrow I will plant more seeds for the fall and winter crops, including parsnips. We'll see how those do as I hear they have a hard time germinating. I think I'm looking more forward to the winter crops this year.

August - the peak

Summer has officially kicked in. Two weeks straight of 90+ degree weather has made some plants go crazy and others wilt away. I don't even want to think about the water bill for this month and last. I finally have chairs in the garden although it's been too hot to sit out there until late evening.

Charantais melon and amaranth in foreground with kale beyond.

The upside is I'm gearing up for fall planting already. I couldn't wait to get some winter radishes started to see how they would do. Remember this picture? This was on July 14th.

Daikon, black and china rose radishes, carrots, onions and celery.

Here's what the bed looks like on August 16th below. Amazingly, some of the radishes are ready for harvesting one month after planting the seeds. Winter radishes usually take three months to grow to maturity. I was finally able to put in a proper shade cover structure that I'm using elsewhere as well.

Radishes take over.

The tomatoes are picking up speed too. The cherries are going full guns right now and the larger varieties are just starting to ripen. They all taste SO good. That's one tomato plant behind all of the basil below. I bought it to replace one a gopher ate, it's called Anna Banana. The fruit is awesome and makes a salad so beautiful with it's bright yellow fruit.

I was able to plant seeds in one of my new beds and we'll see how they come up. The mushroom compost I bought this season looks disappointing so far. I bought from a different supplier. It wasn't as broken down as much as last year's so I worry the drainage and acidity might be an issue. Time will tell. At least I can use most of it on the lawn.

Kale, radishes, carrots, beets and broccoli grow along with
some charming flowers at the corners.

The rest of the garden beds have survived another year. We will likely replace a few more beds this fall before the rains hit.

And sooner than I expected, it's apple season! I just realized that the Gravenstein apple fair was last weekend and I thought that's way too soon. Then I realized my own apples had almost grown overnight. They're sweet and tasty.

Time for applesauce making!

And almost time for pumpkins too. It all goes by too fast it seems.

Almost a year

It was almost one year ago that I first walked through our cottage garden. We looked, we drooled and dreamed before walking out and thinking this couldn't be ours. It was the first home we toured on our house hunt in Sonoma.

Bed D : chard, calendula, peppers, red shiso, beets, bachelor buttons and corepsis.

Little did we know months later the cottage was still on the market. It seemed to be waiting for us. This is what the garden looked like on one of those first walk throughs. In need of some love but the bones were there.

Cottage garden in summer 2011

And here's how it looks now. The paths have been mulched, the beds have been planted and we're working on a seating area in the middle of the garden.

It doesn't look like much of a difference but tilling and adding compost to sixteen beds was  a slow task. And we finally reap the rewards. This was just a smidgen of last week's harvest: plums, strawberries, tomatoes, beets and basil.

And now comes phase two, the rebuilding of the sixteen raised beds. It will likely take a few years as some beds are still holding together well. Next weekend these four small beds will be pulled out and replaced with two 4'x6' beds that will be lined with gopher wire.

This weekend I pulled up all the remaining beets to make way for the first of the new beds. All of these grew in the space of two square feet. How's that for square foot gardening success? I canned two pounds (which wasn't much of this pile) and passed along the rest to friends.

There's always planting to do. I'm gearing up for the fall harvest by sowing radishes, daikons and carrot seeds. I'm now sold on 'cloud cover', the miracle cloth.

Daikon radish seedlings with carrots and onions surrounding.

Hopefully come winter, I'll have lots of our own daikon to use in the Japanese soups we make during the cold months.

First weekend in July

There are plenty of flowers in the garden finally. I still wish I had planted more among the vegetables. Next year, I'll add more, including more flowers for cutting. The sunflower seeds I planted were gobbled up quickly so I had to resort this year to seedlings from the nursery.

I planted them next to the beans and they've become friends. Those are purple podded bean flowers below.

The calendulas I planted from seed are doing well at least. I need to harvest them more quickly but so far the plants seem to be going strong.

The red flowers below are coreopsis tinctoria. Any plant with tinctoria in its latin name means it will be excellent for natural dyeing.

And you can't go wrong with marigolds growing next to tomatoes. These have all but been engulfed by the monster tomato plants surrounding it.

A lot of those early spring flowers have rapidly turned into ripe, luscious fruit. We have about two dozen santa rosa plums that are ripe. They taste beyond divine! We can only eat them outside leaning over because the juice content is so high.

We also have strawberries and blackberries ripening daily. I'd forgotten what those fruits tasted like right out of the garden.

And last but not least, the vegetable harvest is starting to pick up again. We still have way too many beets (not complaining there) and chard. We also had kale, carrots, padrone peppers (which were waaaayyy too hot) and the last of the broccoli.

And anyone want some herbs? I can finally say I have enough parsley to harvest nightly now that I've gopher proofed one of the beds. I am in the process of gopher proofing the carrot and parsnip bed. What carrots I have harvested (they left me a handful) have been huge and flavorful.

Anticipation

I feel like the garden is almost, almost starting to reach it's potential. I still have a long way to go learning the quirks and little rodents that enjoy feasting here but I've managed to keep most things alive.

I've figured out with the strawberry bed that pill bugs LOVE strawberries. It took me a few weeks but now that the plants are large enough, if I carefully lay the unripe strawberries on top of their leaves, the pill bugs can't reach them.

This weekend was herb harvest central in the garden. Mint, chives, chervil, lemon balm, german chamomile, thyme, sage, oregano, basil and more basil were cut for drying and making pesto. Above is summer savory, something you don't find too often in the grocery store. Eating them with green beans is sublime. A gopher ate one of my plants but this one is already 2' in diameter and still growing. Speaking of beans ...

Here's batch one of Kentucky Wonder and Purple Podded beans. The bed is about 5' square. After planting them all and seeing the gopher destruction on my other plants, I wanted some insurance so I planted more last weekend.

This was where the english peas grew, underneath a weeping Santa Rosa plum tree. I can see beans climbing up the branches now. There's another spot that I've planted even more beans. We'll see how much is too many soon enough.

Other plants are growing quickly too. This is a Rouge Vif D'Etampes pumpkin that I planted far away from the watermelons this year. I overhead someone at the garden store mention this and took their advice. So, we won't have pumpkiny tasting watermelons this year.

And here is one of the watermelons. A little small for my liking but I'm hoping the growth spurt kicks in soon enough.

Our next big project is to rebuild and start to organize some of the raised beds. This little area as you first enter the garden from the house is screaming for some order. I plan to build 3 3''6"x6' beds to replace the four hodge podge beds  located in the back. We'll keep the strawberry bed for much longer. As soon as my beets are ready to harvest in one of the beds, we'll get started. Speaking of beets, they are the best growing thing I have. I thought they would be done but they taste great. We love the greens the best.

A mid-June weekend

Here's a peek at what's going on in the garden in mid June. We had a heat wave last week and all seems to have survived except the remaining english peas turned starchy. I learned that fall planted peas are much more worth it. Those did really well and produced for a much longer time period than the early spring planted batch. Note the hose lying off to the side, well used this weekend.

We bought an umbrella for the center of the garden so I can escape the sun every few minutes. I'm still not sure what seating to put underneath it. A table might be nice but it sure would be great to have a lounge chair out there.

These are the left beds that include my daughter's bed with broccoli, my gopher safe tomato and parsley bed and a bed that held the most productive pea plants. So productive the bamboo trellis wouldn't hold.

The bed above is the most authentic square foot garden we have with a huge variety of plants. The chard here hasn't bolted, yet. And we have tons of calendula flowers popping open every day. There are some bare bits that need succession planting but haven't been able to do anything with this heat.

This is a view of the opposite side of the garden with a weeping Santa Rosa plum on the left. Lots of plums growing. There are brussel sprouts in the center and several bush variety english peas adjacent that I will never plant again, they hardly produced.

I did manage to weed some this weekend. Oxalis is taking over this bed. I'm hoping if I just keep at it and remove all the soil along with the weed, I'll eventually knock those back. I hate oxalis. The kale didn't seem to mind but the lettuces couldn't survive.

And finally, the most important planting of the year, according to my daughter, corn! Not something I would have chosen due to the huge amount of space they take up for so little reward but I hope I'm proven wrong! They certainly look good in the bed. Next weekend I plan to mulch more of the beds. Planting in 95 degree heat wasn't fun but I did manage to finish the irrigation with some help. The beans are behind the corn and are doing well. No gopher action ... yet. And also this weekend, more cherry plum jam making. It looks like a few more weeks before the other fruits are ripe, whew.

Cherry plum jam making

Once again, I looked up this weekend and noticed another fruit was ready to be harvested. There's a cherry plum tree that hangs over our yard with plenty of fruit to share. When we first bought the house, we had an arborist come by who pointed out the 'canning' plums and sure enough, when I saw A Sonoma Garden's recent post on past Junes, there was a recipe.

I found very few other recipes for cherry plum jam online. I decided it kind of something you made up as you went along, depending on which variety of cherry plum you have. I started with 5 pounds of fruit which I threw into the pot along with 1 cup of water. I boiled and simmered those for about 15 minutes until the pits separated from the fruit. I then pushed the contents through a fine mesh sieve which left about 3 pints of juice behind.

I added 1 1/2 cups of sugar to the pot but upped it to 3 cups as it was tasting too tart for my liking. I simmered this mix for just over an hour and was left with a little over 8 - 5.4 ounce jars of jam. These should hold my friends over for a year. It's a nice sweet-tart jam with a beautiful bright red hue. Next weekend I'll be making more as only half the fruits were ready this weekend.

Speaking of plums, there are Italian plums growing rapidly in the garden this week. I love the bluish color and oval shape of these.

The green and purple podded beans are clamoring up their supports.

And lots and lots of harvesting other veggies this weekend, including the last of the English peas. We're having a heat wave this week so who knows if they'll last. My daughter set up a nice sunny spot on the kitchen floor. She probably ate half of the peas she shelled.

Here's the rest of the harvest this weekend, including just a smidgen of lavender from the one large bush we have. It's the bee's favorite spot in the yard so I'll leave the rest for them to enjoy.

English peas, beets (beet greens are the best), lettuce, oregano, chard and strawberries.

Next year, I would love to have much more lavender growing. It's gopher and drought
resistent, two things that my garden have plenty of.

Basil, summer savory, german chamomile, mints and red shiso.