And unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of strong around here this year.

Apparently thanks to some tropical patterns playing out in the world of weather, continuous cold air has been pushed into the Northeast and made everything cold and wet for the month of June.

Today my dad called to tell me that about 70% of the pepper plants have perished.  Hopefully it is early enough in the season to buy more seedlings and replant.  Sadly, the plants that died were grown from the seeds I had saved from my prize winners of last year. (NOTE TO SELF: Start seeds earlier so that plants are stronger by transplant time.)

This is the parsley in the main garden. Can you see the yellowing of the bottom leaves?  Can you hear the sobs of the people who planted them?

So this is a picture of me weeding out radishes around the cucumber plants. (NOTE TO READERS: Yes, I understand that there are a lot of pictures of my hands and feet on this blog.  I am the photographer.  These are my best features. ) Last year our cucumber plants were decimated by the striped cucumber beetle.  As you might recall, we treated everything with Rotenone (which is a poison derived from a root, so somewhat natural, right?) which worked but unfortunately fried the melon plants when an overeager farmer decided that frequent doses of the stuff was the best medicine. (No names Dad, I promised.)  Spend upwards of $400 on a new bee colony and this pretty much insures that you won’t be using pesticides. So, this year we planted radishes around the cukes, squash, melons and zukes in hopes that this organic approach would slow the little buggers down.

It did, but not fast enough.

Then Dad, in a move that smelled like redemption, decided to place screening around the bases of the plants and halted the foraging marauders.  Yay Dad!

The good news is that the beetles are staying away, and the squash, cukes and others are starting to flourish.  Even in my own gardens at my house the visit to Yellow Town has ended and everyone is charging up green thanks to some sun and fertilizer.  There is hope.  Sweet, sweet hope.

Remember my fig tree?  It was a gift from someone and another new experiment into farming.  Since fig trees aren’t native to this climate, I had to bury it in November and hope that it survived the harsh winter and came back to life in the spring.

And it did come back.  And it was alive and healthy and beautiful.  And then some members of The Accidental Farm plowed the field that it was in.  And it didn’t strike them as odd that there was a metal pipe sticking out of the ground next to a twig.  They just yanked out the pipe and continued to plow.

But, where there is loss, there is rebirth.  My sister was also given a fig tree.  My sister forgot her fig tree for the entire winter and never buried it, nay never even released it from its original pot.  By complete accident my sister’s fig tree was planted into the garden this spring.

This is my sister’s fig tree:

It is as if we are destined to succeed in spite of ourselves.

Tags: Farming, fig tree, main garden, pepper plants, rain, strong