Early August Garden

Summer is a season with three distinct phases in my valley, and August is clearly Mid-summer. It's often very hot and very dry, but the days are noticeably shorter. It's time to think about the winter garden.

Agenda:

1. August harvest

2. Preserving garlic

3. Onion Chutney

4. August garden tasks

5. Prepare for the winter garden

6. August planting

7. Prune my raspberries

1. August harvest:

All year, your most important task in the garden is to harvest AND USE what you’ve already grown, or share it with others. Harvest the low maintenance, high value crops first, and figure out how to use them in the kitchen. Just do what you can and enjoy it, and give away the rest before it spoils.

My harvests aren't big yet - soon I'll be picking beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers almost every day. This week, though, I'm contending with a large harvest of garlic, and pounds of onions that have bolted and need to be either used or frozen, because they will not keep.

2. Preserving garlic:

I found this article from Three Acre Farm - How to Preserve Garlic, which perfectly described my situation: some pretty bulbs that I might give away as gifts and a bunch of "uglies" that won't keep just sitting in a jar. Here's how she deals:

1. Gather garlic bulbs in a large bowl. Fill the bowl with water. If the garlic is very dirty, you can refill and rinse the bulbs a few times until the water is cleaner. Allow the bulbs to soak for about 10 minutes to soften the papery "skins". 

2. After about 10 minutes, begin removing the skins from the individual cloves. Do not cut off the ends. If the clove is very damaged, discard it. (I did this while watching TV.)

3. Rinse the cloves in a sieve a few times, until they are very clean. Place on a clean towel to drip dry.

4. Choose a jar large enough to fit the cloves and fill it up with the garlic cloves, leaving about an inch of headspace. Then pour pickling vinegar into the jar until all the cloves are covered in vinegar. Place a lid on the jar and store the "pickled garlic" in the fridge. That's right - no canning!

The preserved garlic will last a long time, at least one year.  Even though the garlic is soaking in vinegar, it really does not develop a "vinegary" flavor, as long as the cloves are intact (this is why we don't remove the stem end of the clove). Just remember to rinse the garlic off before you use it.

2. Onion chutney:

Last year I froze a lot of my bolted onions, but this year I decided to make chutney:

Ingredients:

• 8 medium onions
• 3 Tbsp. olive oil
• 1 Tbsp. ground black pepper
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2/3 c. brown sugar (packed)
• 1/3 c. balsamic vinegar
• 1 c. red wine
• 1 Tbsp. mustard seeds

Makes about 2 cups-

This is half the onions.

1. Peel and slice the onions into thin half-moon slices (I did the slicing and cooking in two smaller batches, on two different days, then combined them to finish).

2. Heat the olive oil In a large heavy-bottom pan, and add the sliced onions, black pepper and salt. Cook over low heat for about 20 to 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent burning. After this time, the onions should be soft, translucent, and reduced in size by half.

3. Add the remaining ingredients. Cook over low heat for 1 hour, or until most of the liquid has reduced. Stir occasionally to prevent the chutney from sticking to the bottom of the pan. The chutney should be thick and have a dark caramel color.

4. Place into sterilized jars. Keep it in the fridge, or can it.

3. August garden tasks:

I use the Second Breakfast Garden monthly guides because they are in zone 8b.

1. Watering: We've had no rain for weeks now, and while the soaker hoses are helping, I still have vulnerable areas that need a sprinkle every couple of days, and some trees that need a longer soak once a week. In August I start by watering the most vulnerable plants - my tomatoes, peppers, first year trees, lupines. 
2. Mulch: Top up mulch in perennials and garden beds to keep soil moist and cool during the dog days of summer. If you use drip irrigation, drop mulch on top of your lines to retain more water. Use untreated straw, leaf mold, compost, or green mulch.
3. Weed: Weeds are an essential part of my ecosystem. I have stopped pulling weeds in some beds, and instead I tear them off at the ground and use them as mulch. This method leaves the soil untilled; tilling exposes new seeds, and you just get more weeds. But I still pull weeds that are close to my veggie plants.
4. Pick off cucumber beetles: They are striped yellow and black bugs that feed on leaves and stems, and a large infestation can defoliate plants. They also spread the deadly bacterial wilt disease.
5. Aphids: Wherever I see aphids, I can look also for little golden clutches of ladybugs eggs. (cabbage moth eggs look similar but maybe not in a cutch?)
6. Deadhead herbs and flowers often.
7. Prune raspberries: (See below)
8. Prepare space for the winter garden.

4. Prepare for the winter garden:

August is my best chance to prepare for the winter garden. It's really too hot to plant outdoors right now, until the temperature is consistently below 90º, but I've got plenty of garden cleaning, composting and amending to prepare the beds.

I try to clear one bed each week now, starting with a bed for fall beets, and prepare it by lifting gently with my fork, then adding compost from my Darth Vader bin, that's been stewing most of the summer. I also add a layer of leaf mulch for the microbes. 

5. August planting:

I start seeds now indoors where I can control the water and heat, to set out later, when the temperature is consistently below 90º. When planting anything for the fall, make sure you plant indoors early enough to mature before the first frost date (FFD), which for us is on October 20th. My plans this year:

• Pok choy - start seed indoors 10 weeks before FFD - August 9.
• Cabbage- start seeds 8 weeks before FFD - August 23.
• Spinach - start seeds 8 weeks before FFD - August 23.
• Collards- - start seeds 8 weeks before FFD - August 23.

6. Prune my raspberries:

Everbearing first year canes

I have a difficult raspberry bed, because I have two varieties -summer and everbearing - all mashed in together. 

All raspberry plants are perennial, their crowns and roots live many years, and the canes are always in different stages. Right now I've got four things going on:

1. Primocane leafy growth of next year's summer berries,
2. Fruiting canes of this year's summer berries that are beginning to wither,  
3. Some everbearing fruit just flowering on the tips of first-year canes, 
4. And second year everbearing canes that are totally brown.

How to Prune Raspberries
I'm obviously going to leave all the first year canes: They have easy-to-spot green stems, while second-year canes have a thin, brown bark covering them. This week I do my first pass pruning, taking out any really dead wood, to give everything more room to breath. But I'll leave about a foot of cane, for small pollinators to nest in.

Then I will water and mulch, and finish up later this fall, when the berries have completely stopped. That's when I'll also take a shovel and dig up some plants to give away, leaving only 3-4 young canes per foot of row. And then in the spring I'll prune back dead shoot tips.