Summer in Vermont is a many-splendored thing. First, there are the blueberries, raspberries, and wild black raspberries. If you can get through the mosquitoes, the harvest is great. My summer apple tree is dropping its apples, and the other night we saw two large deer out there eating them. It was an ooo-aaah moment for the kids, and I took a blurry picture of them before they ran off. It wasn't until the next day that I realized they had also eaten the leaves and branches off of half my 2-in-1 pear tree. Darn animals. Time to put up some soap-on-a-rope. I'll never forgive them for eating Sonja's sunflower house last summer....
Anyway, back to the splendor. We managed to harvest maybe 15 pints of raspberries, and made two batches of freezer jam. We ate lots of them fresh and gave a couple of pints away. The blueberries (despite the rabbit damage) still produced significantly more than last year- maybe 2 whole pints or so. After catching and relocating 5 or 6 woodchucks (not counting the skunk), our pumpkin patch is doing much better this year. We may get pumpkins.
There are flowers coming up that I don't remember planting, and some that are flowering for the first time this year, and some that didn't make it through the winter, so the perrenial bed is sort of unruly, but fun. I'm still learning. The herb garden is somewhat less grand than last year's, but the girls still like to eat chives, various flavors of basil, and lemon balm. Cucumbers are beginning to come on now, and I ate the first red cherry tomato today. It was delicious!
I'll admit that I'm really looking forward to the crisp, cool days of Fall, though. This year, the heat and humidity, and days and days of rain are making summer less of a joy than last year. But every once in a while it's good to think about the perks of this warm season and remember that the blueberries won't come around again until this time next year.
2 comments:
I want more details on catching and releasing 6 woodchucks. And how do you know it wasn't the same woodchuck who tried to un-relocate himself 5 times?
We bought a hav-a-heart trap (live trap) and baited it with broccoli (which woodchucks love). We caught a small one first, and when I went back to check the trap, there were 4 others standing around trying to figure out how to get their little guy out. So I knew we had a bunch, and some were big, some small. We took the first one several miles up the mountain and let him go in the unpopulated woods. We did the same for the others, and then caught one more extra. The skunk was caught before I discovered the best bait (skunks like cantelope) and let go as is, so he probably still lives in the backyard somewhere.
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