It's a Jungle out There

Wow has it ever been a rainy summer.

Last night I went out back to try to stain a few more boards, and as I went to the wood pile for some fresh ones, I noticed that everywhere I looked, in every frame, there were at least four or five slugs.

The slugs aren't so so bad just yet - they're about an inch or an inch and a half long, and while I have found a few in the veggie garden, so far the damage is minimal. But man are they gross. Have you ever tried to get slug slime off of your hands? It's nearly impossible! And seeing three or four of them feasting on a dead dandelion is one of the grossest things ever. I don't know why, they look like little turds or something, all slimy and brown and gluttonous. Blech.

And the grass is super long again, much to hubby's chagrin. For awhile it rained every day, and because we use a manual reel mower , it's really a mess to mow when it's wet. Now it's so long that it sees the mower coming and lies down. Poor hubby's had to hack at it with a scythe to get it tame enough to mow.

The flower garden is, on average, about 5 feet tall. I have cosmos this year that are approaching six feet before blooming. I don't know what that is - an abundance of nitrogen? - but it's kind of scary and where the cosmos were meant to be part of a nice planted pot, they're now more of a hedge. The apples will be huge this year, and we've collected nearly 5 lbs of black raspberries and a pound of red currants. All from the perennial garden.

The veggie garden's also doing well - the turnips are huge, and the pumpkins are blooming like crazy though there's not much fruiting going on. I have the dreaded cucumber beetle again. Next year I must buy proper seed potatoes, because the store-bought ones that I planted aren't blooming. There are tiny potatoes in the dirt, and I've unearthed one pretty big one (about 4" long), but the plants haven't bloomed and I was under the impression that harvest should only start once the plant has bloomed and started dying back. If I'm wrong, please let me know because I'm tempted to just eat all the little delicious marble-sized potatoes right away.

My grandmother gave me kale, for making boerenkool, and it has taken off. I was worried about deer, so I covered it in dog hair from a visiting Toulouse, but most of it has washed away. I've had no deer activity so far, thank god, and my kale harvest will be bountiful come September. My corn is about 2 feet tall, and I've been eating cherry tomatoes the last couple of days. The regular sized tomatoes haven't come yet. The beans are ready to pick, and I'm going to harvest them tonight for our cottage weekend (we're going away for a couple of days to Skootamatta lake, with a big gang of friends). The cilantro has all started to bloom, which is fine with me - I'll let it re-seed itself again this year, because it's really fun to have and really easy to pull out if it's a nuisance. My red peppers are coming along, but my cayennes are shrimpy this year. My romaine went bitter, I think. So far, my cucumbers are doing better than they were last summer, when the cucumber beetles got them from the get-go. I've been brutal about killing those little bastards, so maybe my efforts are finally paying off. And finally, the canna lilies are starting to unfurl their beautiful zebra-striped leaves, and I can't wait to see them towering over my garden.

Once I get a chance to get in there and clean things up, I will take some photos for sure.

And once the lawn is finally mowed, perhaps the yard will also be more presentable.

I finally learned the correct way to prune raspberry bushes. I think I had been confused about what it was that I'm growing for a number of years, but finally I figured it all out, and hopefully next year's batch won't be so painful to harvest but will still be equally bountiful. My arms are so scratched up I look like Courtney Love in 1994.