Mitzi hates this time of year. She is an Australian cattle dog mix, who, without cattle to chase all day, fixates a bit on dinner time, which is about five, but her contemplation of it begins at three.
When the time falls back, she really has a hard time. Despite repeated PowerPoint presentations, Daylight Savings Time is a concept she just does not understand. All she knows is that dinner is an hour later, and to her that’s just cruel and inhumane treatment.
So October is a difficult month for Mitzi. For me, I just get older each October. It’s something I try not to think about, but Google and Facebook make that very difficult to do these days.
For me, October is also the end of the gardening year.
For sure there are still things growing. There are cosmos still blooming beautifully just outside the back door, and of course, the weeds continue to grow. The pansies are are also still doing their thing, and I am sure Mr. D still has some things still going. Probably some lettuce, leeks, beets, spinach maybe, and then all those lovely root crops that, to me, are better left right where they are, buried in the ground.
So in addition to shutting down the garden in October, I tend to muse about the year that has just gone by. It is hard to forget that this gardening season followed a winter that was the coldest in thirty years, and the ninth coldest since sometime in the late 1800s. On January 28, the mercury plunged the farthest, bottoming out at -15 F. Overall, there were ten nights in January that dropped below zero. And if that wasn’t hard enough on the plants, an Arctic wind blew down our way in the middle of April dropping temps to a damaging 20 F.
Our gardens awoke to carnage. The hostas, always late to rise, found the holly, just next to them the previous year, gone. The boxwoods scarred by the desiccating winter winds looked on as the daylilies squinted their eyes beneath leafless weeping cherries; and though the daffodils put on a great show, the Japanese maple in the corner stood silent.
Despite the casualties, spring performed its magic giving us hope once again. Summer quickly followed and it could not have been more perfect, at least for those of us who dislike heat, but are not so keen on being cold either. Temperatures never breached the 90s, but they were warm enough to get some good crops of tomatoes and peppers.
Tomatoes, though, seemed to take forever to ripen. It was almost as if they went on strike in the middle of July. Looking at the temperature records, it’s no wonder. For twenty-one days the average daily temperature was below the normal by an average of nearly six degrees. It was just too chilly for tomatoes to do anything else but set up picket lines. Fortunately, August was more normal and one by one they crossed the lines. The last of them are now on the windowsill ripening.
Our pepper harvest was better than initially expected. Not having gotten them in until the Fourth of July, we were worried we might not get a good crop. But now the Jimmy Nardellos are all fried up or given away, and there are enough in the freezer to sustain Barb through another Ohio winter.
One thing Barb will be pining for this winter is pesto. Normally, she stocks that away, but the basil crop was a dismal failure this year. It definitely needed more heat. And perhaps we should have paid more attention to it, but since when do you need to pay attention to basil? I guess when you have a perfect summer.
