Fooled

By now in most Georgia Augusts, we would have been in our second or third week of oppressively hot & humid “Dog Days”. The usual effect on the garden is that everything wilts a bit and basically shuts down until the nights start cooling off again in September. The typical summer garden staples like tomatoes, peppers and beans can’t even avoid this; even though the plants seem to sustain themselves fairly well, the pollination process ceases and production stops (the heat breaks down the pollen too fast and it is rendered sterile, or something like that).

But this year August has been, uh, unusual?

We had stretch a week ago where the highs barely got into the mid 70s. This is a far cry from 98, 99, 100 with air as thick as a wet wool sock. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that every August day has been “comfortable” @ 3:00 PM, but relatively speaking things has been unusually tolerable.

Despite the ratty looking foliage on most of my tomato plants (a wet summer has allowed mostly nuisance foliage conditions to thrive more so than the normal), they have ramped up production (again) significantly. For example, this Brandywine seems to have more large green tomatoes on it than it does leaves:

The by the end of July, the Asian long bean vines had valiantly produced themselves into tired looking tangles that appeared to be in their final stages before expiring for the season. This is my first year for these and I had come to the conclusion that the 10,000 feet or so of beans these few plants had already provided us would be it for the year. Apparently this write off was way way premature. Like the Brandywine plant above, these vines seem to covered with substantially more beans than leaves.

It would appear that the fall flush of production is upon me and we still have a week of August remaining. Time to buy more canning supplies and freezer bags I guess. 🙂