Six and a half weeks ago, I wrote to you about turning 65 and compared that stage of life to the Mid-September Garden. The Hull Garden in the weeks since has continued to grow good food: lots of tomatoes, lots of kale and chard, some arugula and lettuce, a few cucumbers and zucchini, and lots of Rattlesnake Pole Beans. I have been indulging in an occasional carrot. Perhaps I am selectively thinning the carrots to give those remaining more room to grow, or I could just be a bit impatient and eager to eat a good carrot. Anyway, for just the two of us, the garden continues to produce almost all of our vegetables. If you say a garden’s life span is 52 weeks and a person’s life span is 95 years (both well above average), then these weeks are the equivalent to about twelve years of a life. I certainly hope my next twelve years are as productive as the garden’s last six and a half weeks have been.

That said, each day, conditions for growth here in the Hull Garden lessen, but there are about five more weeks where plants will continue to grow. I just decided this morning to pull the Rattlesnake Beans, even though there are a few buds and some very tender young beans, but it is a matter of diminishing returns. I figure if I pull them today and put down a cold frame and plant some radish, arugula, and parsley seeds, we could be rewarded with Christmas radishes and February arugula and April parsley.

The Rattlesnake Beans have been my favorite crop this year. Not only have they been the visual anchor of the garden, growing to almost eight feet high and producing a steady crop of beans from the first week of August until this week, but they have been giving us amazing food and amazing experiences. Among those experiences were the times with our grandsons here in Hull. One week this summer, I was the lead daytime caregiver for the one-year-old Robinson. In that week, Robinson and I spent a lot of time moving together as he fearlessly improved his proto-walking skills and his stair climbing and stair descent work. We spent hours on the porch and going up and down the front porch stairs to the garden. When we got to the bottom, we often nestled in the shade of the pole beans and ate beans. Not only that, but his older brother Izzy also liked to eat beans, and when he got back to Baltimore Izzy relished telling his dad his beans were not as good as mine. There was also the party on the porch in September when Ruth said that the blanched Rattlesnake Beans were the best beans she had ever eaten, and she has lived her life eating excellent home-grown vegetables. The bean dish we had last night with Rattlesnake Beans at five stages of maturity, from dried to tender (see photo in gallery below), will have to be enough. The textures of the five stages in a rice and bean dish were amazing. It was not a dish for a parent of young children or a grandparent with company, but as someone who loves their beans all that extra time sorting, pulling strings, and making stock (from the dried and drying shells), was time happily spent.

Rattlesnake Beans are an old variety. They originate in the American Southwest, where the Hopi People grew the bean, and they are also revered by the Cherokee, who have the seed stored in their seed bank. It is hard for me to give up the handful of beans that will not come in the next few days, but the thought of Christmas radishes and late winter arugula and early spring parsley overrides that emotion, and as soon as I finish this draft, I will pull them.

As I said, the past six and a half weeks have been good in the garden. We have had plenty of rain and plenty of sun. But some of the success has to do with the compost tea. In June, I gathered rotted seaweed from the beach and halfway filled a 32-gallon trash can with that rotting seaweed, and then topped off the barrel with water from a hose. For the last 19 weeks, I have been taking compost tea from that barrel. I carefully put the tea on the specific plants in the garden, and then later I add the water left over from washing vegetables or the grandkids’ bathing pool back into the barrel to restock the tea. It has never been empty these last four months. I think this tea has made a world of difference, especially for the beans and the greens. Early on, the tea was at times too strong, but its potency has lessened over time, and now I freely add the tea without fear of burning the plants with too much nitrogen. I plan to use compost tea next year, even though I will not neglect the garden as I did after the November 2024 Election.

The pictures below, taken in the garden today, show the plants that love or tolerate this season. Clockwise from top left: Italian Parsley, Red Russian Kale, Rainbow Swiss Chard with Buttercrunch Lettuce, Matt’s Wild Cherry Tomatoes, Red Torch Tomatoes still hanging on, and the yellow watering can with compost tea. That tea is still a nice brown color and still has a rich smell, even with the 19 weeks of dilution.

Those vegetables persist, but the sorrel and the mint are thriving as we approach November, and along with the arugula (there is a bee on the arugula flower in the photo below), are still going strong for the pollinators.

Please send me your carrot updates. I have heard that there has been frost in New Hampshire and in Minnesota. This is what Nancy Potter said about the Minnesota carrots captured in the photograph of her and Steve on October 23rd as they harvested a few of their carrots, “Our carrots have definitely been frosted–it was 27 degrees this morning. The root cellar is a long way from being cold enough, so digging all the carrots is still in the future.” In about six more weeks, I hope to be posting the year-end edition of the 2025 Carrot Day Massachusetts Blog, and I would love to include your carrot adventures in that post, so stay in touch.

In early August, Katy and I celebrated our 39th Anniversary. That night I said to her we would not have another 39 years together, and she laughed and agreed. This past week, I turned 65.

On Saturday morning I was working/being/hanging in the garden strategizing how to get the most out of the garden this year. Vegetable gardening is largely a question of what to do when, and there are lots of small decisions like when a crop should be removed for the next to take its place. To garden is to make many moves, some as small as harvesting kale leaves so lettuce plants nearby get more light, or deciding that it is time to pull the beets and put in the radishes, or pull the radishes to put in the beets.

One thing I decided on Saturday was to use some more of the compost tea on the cucumbers and beans. I was hoping that the compost tea would encourage the Rattlesnake Pole Beans and the Shintokiwa Long-Fruited Cucumbers to keep going. While they, like me, are past their peak, they, like me, are still productive. If I were to make the decision that their season is over, it is very unlikely that whatever I planted to take their place now in mid-September will produce much. Both beans and cukes have had amazing seasons. We have had beans for the past five weeks and cucumbers for the past six, and I hope they keep going strong. Not only for us to eat but to share. You see, I have a short term goal to eat beans and cucumbers this weekend because Ruth, the daughter of old friend and Carrot Day Massachusetts blog guest writer Nancy Potter, is coming to lunch and to see the garden. I want to be sure she gets some beans and cucumbers. 

The fact that there are still new flowers on both the cucumbers and beans, and that there are young beans and cucumbers are promising signs we will have something more to eat this weekend. The brown leaves and waning vigor of the plants are real too, and they will not last forever.

Decisions in the garden are not only about when but “where.” This year more than any I remember “where” has made a huge difference. This year I had dramatically different results from the same type of plants in different places. The Shintokiwa Long-Fruited Cucumber trellis in one spot has produced about 80 beautiful cucumbers, while the other trellis has produced two not so beautiful cucumbers. The trellises are near each other, only ten feet or so apart. But these photographs below tell the story. I know of course it is the soil; look at the different shades of green.

Not only were the cucumbers more numerous from one trellis than the other, they were longer and better. I had hoped that the less productive trellis might have a later season but it is not to be as the productive one still has more small fruit. Same is true for the tomatoes as the plants on one side of that path are out producing (my guess is by ten fold) what is happening on the other side of the path. I had thought the slow starters might have a better late season but that is not coming to pass as they are ending sooner too.

This past Saturday, while I was harvesting and thinking about the near-term harvests for the next few weeks, I was also looking forward to the fall garden. It is not all that different from thinking about being 65. Katy and my children have been born and grown up and are living their full lives on their own. I am still working in a school and teaching, and while much of what I will ever learn has been learned, there is more to learn and do. This season’s garden is at the stage I am in life right now. Like the garden I have done much of my season’s or life’s work but not all and perhaps not the most important part.

As I was doing that thinking and gardening and planning I thought about what I was good at in the garden. My first answer was harvesting. I spend more time harvesting food, than planting, weeding, watering, or tending. I think of myself as being good at harvesting but I decided on Saturday morning that what I might be even better at than harvesting is just being in the garden. Making those small decisions, chatting with neighbors as they pass my front yard garden, pulling weeds, cutting arugula and harvesting. I love just being in the garden and also writing about being in the garden.

I am still learning and adjusting. Right now my biggest adjustment is when to pick the tomatoes. Yesterday I decided that a big Brandywine tomato should wait another day on the vine. In years past I would have thought it was three or four days from perfection but as so many of the tomatoes have been eaten by animals (when only barely ripe) I knew I should pick it soon. The next morning I learned that I was too late as I saw that an animal had pulled it off the plant and eaten half of it.  It had eaten the ripe half. That Saturday morning decision not to pick that tomato was the wrong decision. Because of that learning I picked the Brandywine in the photo on the right (the lower one behind the leaf with just a touch of pink) and it is ripening well under a dish towel in the kitchen. We always need to be adjusting.

May your fall garden and your carrots keep growing. After four adjustments to the fence around the carrots, I think I have it right now, and it will continue to keep the bunnies out. Looking forward to that December Day when the neighborhood kids come over and we eat carrots. Please tell me how your carrots and garden are doing.

Well, I planted the carrot seeds on Juneteenth, as has been my practice the last three years. It felt good to get the seeds in the ground on such an important day. Hope that all goes well.  

As I got ready to prepare the bed, I was disappointed in the look of the cover plants. As I pulled them before putting in the carrot seeds, their color of light green with small leaves, was a sign that something was amiss with the soil.  They did not have that robust, healthy look that I like to see in the garden. There was one small section where things looked better, but overall, the plants did not look right. As I have written here before, I neglected the garden and did not put on the usual layer of seaweed in the late fall/early winter, and it showed.

There have been piles of seaweed at the beach, pushed up by storms in May, that have been there for about a month. A week before, I had gathered the top dried layer of seaweed and used it as a bunny barrier at the base of two of my fenced-off areas after I noticed that the bunnies were burrowing under the fences. On Juneteenth, I determined that I would take a fork and gather from these same piles, but get the smelly decomposing underbelly of the piles. It was too late to amend the soil by mulching the surface with seaweed and allowing the natural processes of the living organisms in the soil to bring the nutrients down from the surface to where the plants’ roots will use them. What I could do was to make some compost tea. Which I did by gathering the mucky seaweed and filling a garbage barrel with water and stirring it around, and then filling watering cans with the resulting tea.

I did notice that the poured tea had an impact on my pole beans, as there were a few leaves from the beans that got burned from too much of a good thing. Anyway, time will tell, but it felt good to be pouring brown water onto the seeded carrot bed, and next winter I will do better.

The light of June is so good for growing, and the arugula and the lettuce are center stage. Where a month ago it took time and labor to pick a salad, (more time than going to the store) now, day after day, the garden makes more than Katy and I can eat, even when we have three parties in three days, with the main feature of the meals being salad. The garden is now saving us time, and it is the time of sharing the harvest with family, friends, and neighbors.

Hope you remember, as you plant, tend, and weed your garden, that the days of the easy and glorious harvest can come. While there are months of tending between now and the frost, I am hoping and working to keep the carrots safe from the rabbits, in nutritious soil and I expect I will need to water and perhaps use some more compost tea.