Struggle For The Harvest - A Rainy Summer Experience

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Read the previous part: Growing flowers - a difficult summer experience

The results of the season, or how we fought for the harvest

There were a lot of berries this year, but all the plantings suffered from rains, and in the end there were a lot of rotten fruits.

There were especially many gooseberries this year. Two pear trees also delighted us with an unusually abundant harvest of fruits.

We have collected in abundance and apples. However, due to heavy rains and disturbance of the general drainage system, our massif is being heated. Our beds are high, but the root system of apple trees is now in the water.

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The cherries on our site were planted later and were placed higher. They are still young and have given their first harvest this summer. We ate some berries and were even able to make jam from them. True, today I had to fight with aphids on cherry plantings.

Plum trees bore fruit well this season. There were a lot of red currants.

We were not even able to harvest the entire crop - a lot of berries remained on the bushes. Even the birds didn’t peck, apparently, and they were fed up with berries this year. By the way, we had a lot of birds on our site this season, we had to share the harvest with them, but they also work for it, destroying pests.

Flowers are my favorites. And since they are loved ones, a lot of time was spent on caring for flowers last summer with its lack of sun. They were flooded with rains, eaten by pests, especially slugs nowadays.

But the season began very well for flower growers. A thousand tulips bloomed on our site in May. The sight was impressive. And later it rained, the weather was warm, cloudy, and suddenly there was a darkness of slugs and snails.

For all 24 years of life on this site there was not so much of this living creature. It seemed as if someone were scattering them in handfuls on my ridges. And some were quite solid in size. Every evening I went out hunting for them and patiently collected slugs and snails. If it were not for this tedious task, then we would have no cauliflower, no basil, no salads, no other vegetables and flowers.

By the way, they still thoroughly spoiled the July planting of salads, for some reason they especially liked the mustard of the Red Giant variety, they dealt with it in one night, as soon as it rose. I noticed that they ate salads selectively, apparently, and here they have their own preferences.

Last season, I spent a lot of ash on all the plantings; almost all ridges with plants in the initial period, until they gained strength, after collecting pests, powdered with ash.

All stocks of this strategic material, made by her husband, Boris Petrovich, have been used up this season. Indeed, in the cloudy and humid weather last summer, pests multiplied at an amazing speed. And cultivated plants and flowers weaken without sunlight, they do not have enough strength to fight. They needed help.

Now I’ll return to my favorite topic - flowers. Again I tried many new varieties of different annuals on the site. Most of them bloomed excellently, some did not show themselves, but something did not work out at all. In the winter months I will analyze my work with flowers, evaluate each plant, and even then I will decide whether to leave it on the site next season for the season or refuse it.

In the spring, perennial and biennial flowers were sown on the growing ridge, some of the sown did not sprout, but there were only a few such plants, but in general I was satisfied with this ridge: verbasums (mullein), bells, rudbeckia, monarda, carnations, mallows rose well other.

At the end of the season, I already transplanted some of them into permanent residence, others stayed on the ridge - I'll see how they winter.

This summer, for some reason, there were a lot of different butterflies on the site. I was finally able to photograph a beautiful hawk moth on flowers - I hunted for it for a long time. Butterflies, it turns out, can pose well when you shoot them. Butterflies in flocks fluttered from flower to flower and greatly enlivened the garden.

My husband and I are often asked: do we adhere to the lunar calendar in our work?

We adhere, but not very strictly, since we are in a farming zone where sometimes it is simply impossible to follow the requirements of this calendar. For example, we see that the sign for landing is favorable, but rain is pouring outside the window, or, on the contrary, the weather is good, and the sign does not allow sowing … I think that the calendar should be approached reasonably. This season, after planting seedlings in the ground, Boris Petrovich for a long time could not enter some crops into the lunar calendar, but such stubborn people were caught.

This year we have used LN Klimtseva's “Calendar of works taking into account the phases of the moon”. In particular, she indicated in it that nettles will predominate among weeds this year. And it really flooded our ridges, how much we had to weed out per season … What we have this year agreed on the harvest with the calendar forecasts: there were a lot of leeks, garlic, basil, pears, honeysuckle, tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers. The harvest of these crops really pleased in 2009.

And in conclusion, I would like to quote the words of my husband, Boris Nikolaevich, who always paid much attention to working with the land:

“Work, work and more work - this is the only way to achieve success in such a rainy summer with a large lack of solar radiation.

Whoever did not give up, who was ready for any trials of nature, he was left with the harvest. We must always remember that we have a risky farming zone. Therefore, it is precisely agriculture that should be given the most attention. Then the cultivation of any crops will work."

Now we are planning all plantings on our site for the next year. We have already bought plants from the nurseries "Severnaya Flora" and "Mika", purchased varietal raspberries, common and remontant, as well as garden strawberries from the NPO Agrotekhnologii, in the city of Pushkin. In a word, we are already preparing for the next season. And we think: with what surprises will he come to us? I remember once a forecaster said: “The weather, like life, is striped. And high expectations from the summer are dangerous."

Well, then we'll just wait for summer, because most of us love summer. And how it will turn out - in this we will live and create.