Chloe and I went out today to pick the last tomatoes and dig up roots. I intended to harvest the elecampane roots (for dyeing) but gave up after I leaned against the shovel to try to get leverage to get one out of the ground and took a tumble amidst a pile of bricks. The bruises already hurt, which is a bad sign.

So I stuck to the carrots and beets. Somehow the white/yellow/red/purple carrot mix I planted ended up almost entirely white, which means my carrots look like radishes or parsnips. I planned to get the parsnips, too, but my ankles and back were hurting (I was wearing Chloe in the sling and I’m not used to crouching in it) so I gave up and went inside.

But not before getting a handful more of dried beans from the dried-bean edifice. I left the plants up when I picked them over and now a bunch of them have new, green pods hanging there. They’re trying to tempt me to leave them up! Evil, evil plants.

The little one is sleeping. We went into the garden together today, she and I, with the help of a sling that I’m still getting the hang of. (We decided to try a sling because our friends recommended one, but couldn’t find a satisfactory way to put the baby in it. Now that she can mostly support her own head, it’s becoming much easier.) I picked coriander and a few surprise heads of nigella sativa–I thought I’d seen those flowers earlier in the year, but they disappeared under the cover of the cilantro and sage and weeds in that area–while she looked around at the giant wormwood and the sprawling volunteer tomato plant that my dad unfortunately didn’t pull while he was here.

I’ve requested newspaper and shall be receiving it shortly. The next couple of weeks will be devoted to closing down the garden, which mainly means harvesting what I can of what’s there. That means picking a last round or two of green beans, digging the carrots and parsnips and potatoes (if there are any), cutting herbs for drying and freezing, gathering basil for the summer’s single batch of pesto, making tabbouleh with the parsley. Then pulling out the stakes and trellises, and deciding whether to move the unruly raspberry whose berries don’t seem as good as the ones on the plants in the actual raspberry patch, and then a lot of digging and stomping and spreading and watering and spreading again. The little one and I will also be taking an exploratory trip to Home Depot sometime soon, to price mulch. And then the little one will be spending a weekend at grandma’s while I put this garden into its winter crib.

I picked green beans today. My recommendation for anyone who wants to plant a garden while having a baby is don’t, but as a second option, plant beans. The dry beans did well and these green beans (Kentucky Wonders) are going strong despite zero maintenance on my part–I’ve already got some in the freezer. Admittedly some were a bit stringy because they’d grown so much, but you can’t have everything.

Along with plenty of beans and a couple of carrots, I pulled a bunch of weeds out of the bean patch. If weed-grass seeds were edible (are they?) I’d be feeling guilty about all the grain I’ve wasted this year. In places it seriously looks like I seeded for a new lawn. There are also squashed tomatoes from the volunteers that grew everywhere, and ruined peppers and rotted bean pods. And oh my gods all the weeds.

What this all adds up to is that I’m going to try lasagna gardening this fall. There’s no way to clean up the weed seeds and there’s no way I’ll weed them all out next year and it’s too late to spread black plastic and bake them; the only way out is to bury them. So I’m going to start begging newspaper from the mothers and start thinking about where to buy mulch–I know the city offers it but there’s a five-cubic-yard minimum and a $25 delivery fee and I don’t know how much that would work out to spread over both gardens. Fall leaves will be coming soon, and Eric desperately needs to mow the lawn, so if I keep this in mind I should be able to amend the soil a little, since I can’t currently reach the actual humus at the bottom of my compost pile and I don’t trust it anyway, after this spring’s bumper crop of weeds.

The beans are still producing, and there are still carrots and beets and parsnips in the ground, and some kale and some herbs and one cauliflower plant that sailed right through spring and summer and is only now perking up. But it’s time for things to wind down anyway, and most of the rest of the garden can be tramped down and buried. I’m not sure whether I should start doing so in patches now, or wait and do everything at once–advice would be appreciated. But either way, I’m going to try to bake myself a brand new garden for next year.

“You save your own seed?” said my cousin Bev, who’s recently discovered the joys of home vegetable gardening and has informed her husband that they’re eventually going to be keeping chickens. “Will you save something right now and show me how?”

I looked, I’m sure, dubious. Bev and her family came to stay with us for a week, and while I knew she wouldn’t blame me for having a jungle instead of a garden, since she’s had a six-week-old herself, I wasn’t sure there was anything out there I could really show her without scaring her off of gardening for life. However, the gardening bug has bit her hard, and I did have a few things out there. “Do you like parsnips?” I said, deciding.

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll go collect some parsnip seeds for you.”

We walked out to the backyard. “Tell me about all the food plants you have,” Bev said, so we talked about my bank of raspberries, about the garlic patch and the carrots and the tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers and dill. I showed her the parsnip plants (all quite brown now, and full of seeds though I’ve been snipping them off for a few different people now) and described how to save the seed–plant them one year, let them winter over and grow, cut the seeds when dry. I told her about online seed trading and winnowing. We looked at my poor tomato plants with tomatoes rotting on the vine, at the green beans that sorely need picking. “Weeds or no, your garden is so productive compared to mine!” she said.

Considering this has been a lousy year for produce, I was pleased, and a bit startled. I’ll be sharing my seeds with her this winter (especially since I hope not to be around to harvest next year’s garden and so won’t be devoting a huge amount of energy to it), and I’m looking forward to hearing more about her plans to reclaim her husband’s rose bed for vegetables next year. Maybe by the time I move out to the West Coast, where they live, she’ll be able to share seeds with me.

It’s storming outside, has been for a while. It’s ridiculously late and I’m almost contemplating waiting for the next feeding rather than go to bed (though not really), but what I’m really thinking about is: I wish I’d picked more of the dry beans when I was out in the garden over the weekend. I got some, but there were lots more, and I’m afraid the rain is going to spoil them the way my Hutterites were spoiled their first year. Apparently the baby fog is starting to lift a little.

Two white eggplant. One green bell pepper, three red Giant Marconi (I think) peppers. Lots of tomatoes, some deep red, some the ones that Dad didn’t pick because he thought they weren’t ripe yet: Persimmon and Tiger-Like and a black one and one with yellow shoulders  (I do have them written down, somewhere). Dried Mitla Black bean husks hiding small, svelte beans. Purple Trionfo Violetto beans, swollen with ripe seeds because I didn’t ask anyone to pick them. I’m leaving them to become seed because I have Kentucky Wonders growing elsewhere, on a later schedule. Even a neglected garden is a rainbow in August.

Meet Chloe, who will someday help me in the garden, but is currently taking nearly all my attention and energy (such as they were) away from it. She was born on July 23, 8 lb., 3. oz,. 21″ (supposedly–at her first pediatrician checkup they measured her at 19.75″). She developed some pretty severe jaundice so we spend the weekend in the NICU with her under phototherapy lights, but she’s pinker and better now, though not completely rid of it–that wouldn’t normally have happened for another few weeks anyway, so it’s not a real issue. I think I have a garden outside somewhere. My parents are in town and are picking cucumbers and squash for me, and have offered to weed if I’ll show them what plants are to be saved. I’m currently okay with letting everything run wild, or alternately harvesting what we can and destroying the rest. (Dad already dug up the garlic for me, and since we’re too occupied to make pickles we have a nice braid of it in the pantry.) Whatever. For the moment, I have an entirely different little seedling to tend.

“Why is dinner so difficult?!” I exclaimed, throwing my hands in the air.

“It’s not difficult,” Eric said, eyeing me warily.

“It is! It’s like one of those true/false logic problems: ‘Statement 2 is false. Statement 1 is true.’ You keep saying you’ll eat this, but only if I do, and I only want it to get you to eat it, and–”

“It’s perfectly simple,” Eric interrupted. “You said you have to pick beans. Are there enough for two portions?”

“I have no idea, I haven’t picked them yet,” I growled. “Let’s say yes.”

“Okay. Then we’ll both have green beans. You said you wanted to eat those last red potatoes, so you’ll have those. I’ll have the last of my egg rolls.”

“I need to pick squash too,” I said. “I could saute that. With basil.”

“Then you’ll have squash too. You see how easy that was?”

I picked two more zucchini and a bunch of herb tops for dinner tonight. Man, I love cooking with fresh herbs. I was delighted to discover that my cilantro hasn’t bolted as much as I figured it had; there were a few flowers, but also plenty of usable leaves still. The basil, on the other hand, looks terrible. Possibly that’s due to the monstrosity of lemon balm and wormwood overshadowing it.

I had Eric come out in the garden with me yesterday, and he hacked down the wormwood and picked raspberries (trampling my onions in the doing, but it’s my own fault as I didn’t think to warn him about them) and cucumbers while I weeded the parsley patch and picked enough for the season’s first tabbouleh. He was impressed by the sheer height of the weeds in the garden, but wisely did not mention this after his first involuntary exclamation. He was also, I think, impressed by the beans, and so was I; they’re doing wonderfully, even with the pathetic excuse for a support I rigged up for them. He was disappointed to hear that the tomatoes are not optimally poised for a bumper crop this year, since he’s craving gazpacho, but it’s not tomato-ripening time this year anyway.

We experimented with some sweet relish yesterday–he wanted to try a bare-bones recipe, so we made a very small, simple batch that’s sitting in a jar now, awaiting tasting–and we’re making pickles tomorrow with the several pounds of cucumbers sitting in the fridge.  I pulled up a couple of garlic bulbs to see whether we ought to buy some. They look good, but small, so we’ll be buying some. That’s okay. I’ll use them in a marinated spinach salad or a sharp stirfry. I love the summer eating season.

“My lemon tree is a mutant,” I told Eric the other day. “It’s growing spikes.”

“Spikes?” he said blankly.

“Thorns,” I corrected myself. “And Meyer lemons don’t have thorns. Maybe it decided to grow them to ward off the bugs after its experience last year.”

“Maybe,” he said, with the skepticism of two science degrees and a certificate in education.

I know, of course, that it did no such thing. I assume that when I cut it down to get rid of the scale, I cut down to whatever it was grafted to, and what I have is not actually a Meyer lemon anymore. I don’t know what exactly I do have, but it’s still citrus-looking, and it’s healthy, so I’ll see what turns up.

This tree has caused me more problems, though. It’s the one that introduced scale into my house, and that scale has jumped over to my papyrus. I’d just reconcile myself to losing a plant except that that’s our wedding papyrus, and I’ve kept it alive for two years and I wanted to keep it a lot longer, but the main thing I know about scale is that it was impossible to clean up from the lemon (whatever) tree.

I’ve been trimming the papyrus as I’ve found scale on it, but now it’s down to a single stalk, and it has scale too, and I don’t know that the plant will come back if I cut off this last bit. I’ve scraped off all the mature scale I could spot; I wiped off the tiny, tiny immature ones I also found marching down the stem; I’m going to watch it vigilantly and hope that maybe, against the odds, I can completely eradicate this damned pest.