Checking in on the Late Summer Crops

The past few days have been brutally hot and humid.  There's just no sugar-coating it.  It's miserable. With temperatures nearing 100 degrees and around 106 with a heat index, one longs for the first cool front or at least signs of Fall approaching. Tough.  We have more than a month to go of the sweltering sauna that is South Louisiana in summer.

The poor cows sit in the shade all day long, panting, tongues literally hanging out. We spray them down with water to cool them down.  They're Jersey cows and not really acclimated to tropical weather.  In the late afternoons, they meander out to the pasture and eat grass until well after dark, squeezing in a day's worth of eating into a few frenzied hours of the coolest part of the day.

The garden is not immune to the effects of summer.  It has withered back in the heat with the cucumbers' brown, dead leaves and vines still clinging to the trellis reminding us of the numerous cucumbers we were picking each day just a few short weeks ago.  The squash plants, similarly, have melted into the ground, giving up the fight.  Seems as if the only thing thriving in the garden is the weeds, and I'll try to get the weed wacker to get those under control.  They'll be tossed over the fence as an appetizer to the cows slumbering in the shade.

Cucumber vines dried up and dead

I did plant a couple crops the other day - Southern Peas (cowpeas) and 3 varieties of pumpkins and I'll give a progress report.  Despite the scalding heat, a good soaking rain shortly after planting enabled the seeds to swell, sprout and pop out of the ground, healthy and green.  Let's take a look:

Cowpea leaves tracking the sun across the sky

We had a fairly decent germination rate and the peas that sprouted seem healthy and vigorous.

I like to deeply mulch our plants with hay as it provides several benefits:
1. It crowds out weed pressure, making weeding an obsolete job,
2. It helps to retain soil moisture, blocking out the moisture-depleting rays of the sun, and
3. The hay decomposes, providing organic matter to next year's crop that will grow here.

Cows are notoriously wasteful when it comes to hay.  They pull it out of the round bale, drop it on the ground, trampling it in poop and pee, ruining it as far as it being edible, but it's still good for mulching.  I rake it up and tenderly place it around the stems of the peas, covering the bare earth and small weeds with a nice layer of hay.

Mulched Cowpeas

The pumpkins were a little slower in germinating.

Pumpkins popping up

But they came along quickly, their leaves broadening.

Future pumpkin pies

If one has an active imagination, just walking past the row of pumpkins can evoke the warm, spicy aroma of a fresh pumpkin pie right out of the oven and one can almost feel the first cool, northern breezes of Fall.  If you listen you can hear the fire crackling in the fireplace and the exciting sounds of college football on the television.

Time to snap out of it, buddy!  Let's sweat a little and mulch around the pumpkins now that they're tall enough.  It will give those orange pumpkins a nice, soft bed to sit on while they grow.

Healthy, fully mulched pumpkins

Summer is in full force, but good things come to those who wait.  Fall is coming! (Or so I keep reminding myself.)