Barganews vegetable garden

With the bulk of the summer events in Barga firmly behind us and with just the main Barga Jazz Festival to come in the following weeks now is probably a good time to have a quick recap on what’s been happening in the barganews vegetable garden. To put it mildly, it’s been a terrible year.  Last year we had problems with the lack of rain. During August the stream close to the vegetable garden dried up and water became very, very scarce. This year the reverse has been the case with constant rain at the start of the season which meant that the fields were too damp to even get a tractor on to. Planting potatoes was at least a month or even six weeks behind the normal time so everything in the vegetable garden this year was planted late and since then, well where has the summer gone?

If I look up at the temperature showing on bargaweather.com it says 17° This is is supposed to be the warmest time of the year.

The vegetables have suffered quite a lot. We have 100 tomato plants growing quite happily with some very large tomatoes on them but all but a few are green and is the sun does not arrive shortly, they will stay green, Pomarola this year is going to be in short supply – maybe we should think about making and jarring green tomato chutney but with one hundred plants, there is only so much chutney that you can consume.

The potatoes are late and looking in difficulty. The maize has been battered to the ground by the high winds and constant rain. Hopefully with a bit of sun they will start to rise again but they too are going to be very late. If the autumn comes early then there will be no maize this year. We planted 20 zucchini plants,  most of which did not supply any zucchini whatsoever.

Another effect of planting late has been that the busiest time of the year for weeding in the garden – July and August coincided with the busiest time for work on barganews documenting all that has happened in Barga. This has meant I could give very little time to the barganews vegetable garden. Weeding has been, lets say at the very least, minimal.  Consequently the weeds have taken over a good part of the garden.

In fact, the only weeding that I managed to do was to clear the weeds from underneath the electric fence so that they didn’t touch the wire and short out the fence – there by allowing animals in to the garden.

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I planted two sorts of lettuce, none of which have come up as they have been suffocated by the weeds.

The other plants which are looking slightly in difficulty at the moment are the Saraceno which we planted this year from the first time. I was hoping by now that the plants would be about waist height but the lack of sun and the rain has batted them down to the ground. Maybe if the sun starts to come later on this month they will once again rise. Everything depends on what happens in late August and early September.

To sum up – not a very good year this year but hey, its a learning process.