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Laura Young
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Watching my garden through the middle of a North Florida summer has set me to thinking about the value of rest. When I was teaching middle school, we took brain breaks in the middle of lessons, walking breaks between classes, weekend breaks and extended holidays – all of which helped us to sustain the considerable effort of being in middle school and have some amazing outcomes by the end of it all. Human physiology requires nightly rest to benefit fully from the experiences of the previous day and rejuvenate for the next; and I've learned also to value a day of rest in the week, periods of rest within a year and even a gap year. Well-timed rest is ancient wisdom. It spans cultures, belief systems and species across time to the present.
So with the garden over the past month, I've not been too eager to fill in gaps as crops finish up. I'm letting the zinnias go to seed, turn black and occupy their space in rest. The zucchini plants are beginning to look a bit prehistoric, with their elongated knobby “spine” laid bare and stretched out in apparent repose, while the growing end seems to contemplate whether to start blooming again or give it up – to be or not to be, as it were. I'm thankful for parts of the garden that love the heat and took their rest at another time of year, namely the peppers, eggplant and tropical spinach.
There's less to do in the garden right now, and that's fine by me. In a time of relative rest, I'm cultivating dreams about what's to come in the season ahead.
What We're Eatin' in August: Sweet potatoes are out of the dirt, cured and ready for the plate. We'll be enjoying them roasted, chunked into soups or mashed with orange juice and spices. The tropical spinach is still going strong, and it's featured in salads, spanikopita, stir fry, omelets and herbed rice. The banana peppers continue to steadily bear, though we lost a week or so of eating them after a nighttime nibbler picked all the ripest ones for itself. Mostly I just pick a pepper or two right before supper and slice them directly into a salad. There's nothing quite like chopping a pepper that fresh. It's a full sensory experience of crunch, moist spray, a revelation of seeds, the scent of greenness and the deliciousness of that bit that never makes it into the salad bowl. Those of you who made different crop choices or had different garden successes might be enjoying buckets of beans, Brussels sprouts, okra and fresh corn, or the fruit of later plantings of tomatoes and squash.
What's Coming Along: As noted, I'm letting much of the garden take it easy right now. I am happy to say, though, that my limequat tree is coming along nicely in its recovery from the frozen week we had last winter. Out of six small citrus trees I had (Meyer lemon, red lime, two satsumas, a grapefruit and the limequat), it is the only one that survived. Three of the trees had started to leaf back out, but after a few weeks two of them gave up. Only the limequat has steadied on. It's a favorite tree of mine that grows at the edge of the garden. We had planted it about 30 years ago in the floor of a little greenhouse that I built of wood and glass, and there it thrived and gave us decades of luscious fruit year after year. When Hurricane Michael swept through, however, the old green house took a hit that left it leaning and cracked. We carried on with our crooked little greenhouse for a few more years but eventually had to take it down to its foundation. The limequat tree branched out into the newly opened up space, but then it got frozen leafless last winter. It's fully re-leafed now, and I'm hoping the recovery will continue, as these trees can be productive for more than 50 years!
What to Plant This Month: According to UF/IFAS Extension, edibles to transplant in North Florida during August include beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, collards, endive, eggplant, kale, peppers, tomatillo, tomatoes and tropical spinaches. You can direct seed bush beans, lima beans, pole beans, carrots, cucumbers, bunching onions, squashes and turnips. What a nice blend of summery vegetables and those that will carry on into the colder temps! After a couple more weeks of rest for the garden, I'll be ready to give a lot of those a try!