Green and gold

Well my garden was kind of a bust this year. A lot of my friends had a similar experience. July was incredibly rainy, and we got hailed on in August. Sigh. I am only just now starting to harvest tomatoes! My potatoes never really came up and my cucumber plants all died after being infested with bugs. Same thing with the acorn squash, just dead. The zucchini was stunted. It flowered a lot but never fruited, and the bugs have been eating away at it too. In fact, lots of my leafy plants had bug issues, mostly the kale and cabbage. I actually dug up a few plants that were covered in bugs and threw them straight into the trash. How sad! (Nevertheless, I did manage to rescue most of the kale -- it's delicious -- and the cabbage is gamely coming along.) Some of my other plants did fairly well by comparison, including the dill in the foreground of this photo taken a month ago, and the beans in the background. I got a surprising amount of green beans and ended up freezing batches of them for the winter, and there are more on the vine yet, hooray! Since the cucumbers croaked and I can't make pickles, I've been giving fragrant dill to my friends. Soon enough I'll be able to harvest some carrots and a bumper crop of onions too. And I've gotten lots of nice chard and basil over the last several weeks. I love to make basil pesto and freeze it for the winter. There's nothing like homemade pesto!