View near Graveyard Falls area along Blue Ridge Parkway, on Sunday October 3. Here come the colors!
Well, that certainly didn’t go as expected. As I sit here on a rainy early October afternoon, watching colors appear in the leaves of our nearby hardwoods, it feels time to reemerge from a self-imposed “sabbatical” from most communications. My intentions were to do a better job documenting (as in blogging) this most fascinating, busy growing season. However, the three month gap between the early July blog entry and that of today indicates a complete failure to do so. To make matters worse, one of our cats (we think it was Pico) must have been cornered by our dogs one morning last week. My old laptop was on the floor next to the chair behind which the cornering occurred. Pico peed on the laptop, thus putting it out of its misery. It is now in a repair shop with hopes that my July, August and September pictures (of which there were many) can be salvaged. We shall see. At this point, the only way to see pictures captured from the garden are in my Instagram and Facebook feeds.
View of the back yard as of today - the “main garden”. All cleaned off and ready for next season!
Rather than make this a book in size, I will chop what transpired between the July and this blog into digestible bits. The garden of 2021 was a truly epic garden, exactly as I hoped for support of the on-line tomato course Joe Lamp’l asked me to co-produce with him, Growing Epic Tomatoes. I practiced what I’ve been preaching for years, in my Epic Tomatoes Book, my Instagram videos and blogs and talks. We were rewarded with an awesome, intimidating (at times) yield of the tomatoes that were among the most interesting and best tasting of my 40 years of gardening. From our 105 plants were averaged between 50-75 lbs of tomatoes daily from late July to mid August. We ate, tasted, cooked, canned, and sauced. We once again have 63 quarts of tomatoes all canned up.
Highlights of the garden were a set of four newly acquired family heirlooms, 16 new hybrids created by me to explore the outcomes of heirloom X heirloom tomato crosses, a wide selection of old favorites and some Dwarf Tomato Project explorations. We were delighted with the results of summer squash and bush beans planted in straw bales. The only mild disappointments were the eggplants and peppers, in containers in the driveway, where conditions were not nearly as optimal as the mid-yard tomato locations.
Other gardening-related highlights for me were the Nantucket garden festival Zoom, a few live Seedlinked Zooms, visits of Joe Lamp’l to my garden (and vice versa) to continue the filming of the Growing Epic Tomatoes course, weekly 90 minute Zoom Office Hours with our students to answer their questions, running a tomato tasting at the Hendersonville Farmers Market, a Zoom for Iridell County NC Master Gardeners, two Zooms for an Austin Texas Master Gardener event, appearances on Mike Nowak and Niki Jabbour’s radio shows, and a few visits to my garden from tomato friends, including a few of our tomato course students.
In late July, I started to experience some gardening burn out, so decided to withdraw from most social networking and focus on gardening, cooking, tomato preserving, seed saving, and local hiking and kayaking. I also had some good, long thinks about what I would like the future to look like with respect to my gardening efforts. A few early thoughts are continuing with reduced exposure and activity, meaning pretty much the end of annual seedling sales, reaffirming my decision to “quit the road” and stop accepting and travelling to gardening events where I am invited to speak (I will probably also reduce the number of Zoom type events). My garden will be significantly smaller and simpler. I am considering stopping my quarterly newsletter, as there will be far less to report. I really want to clear room to complete the Dwarf Tomato Project book and get it published, then consider additional writing projects that have been on my mind.
Growing Epic Tomatoes will relaunch next year; I am off to Joe’s garden next week to finish filming the modules that will complete the course. I will continue to support the course via the weekly Office Hours, Facebook group and platform question areas. We will likely enhance the course with additional filmed content, a topic I will be discussing with Joe next week, adding extras as we identify to make the course as comprehensive, informative and interesting as we possibly can.
Mostly, I want to stay healthy and spend as much time as possible enjoying this wonderful area we find ourselves in, and as much time as possible with my best friend (my wife of 40 years and counting, Susan), and our three dogs. It has been a wild and unexpected - often delightful - ride since the publication of Epic Tomatoes. It has utterly exceeded my expectations of what would follow. I am now quite ready to fade from being surprisingly “out there” and exposed, and just quietly do my things here in Hendersonville. I’ve made so many new gardening friends, appreciate so much your participation in my opportunities to share what I’ve learned, and have learned so much from all of you. For all of that I am so deeply appreciative.
One of my favorite bands, Radiohead, have a song, “How to Disappear Completely”. I won’t be completely disappearing - there will just be a little less of me out there discussing my gardening passions.
In the next blog, I will begin the breakdown of my gardening results from 2021 - tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash and beans - the different projects involved - and then maybe take a peek forward and start to get my head around what the 2022 garden will look like.
Finally - my other big project to complete is fulfillment of the many seed requests I’ve received. That should begin very soon!
The now empty (almost) gravel driveway part of the garden