It has finally stopped raining here in North-East Germany, and the garden is loving the much-needed reprieve. There are no fewer tasks in the garden, though, and with the good weather, I get to take care of them.

August brought fruit harvests and last chances to plant. I baked yet another delicious cheesecake–with fresh plums this time. And crawled into abandoned plots for blackberry harvests.

Note: The video version of this post gets released on Sunday, August 18, 2024.

More good news, the Inca cucumber is finally flowering, so it’s not just loving the rain, it’s now also loving the sunshine. It hasn’t rained in 24 hours. If we can get a few more days of this, we might be able to save what’s left of the tomatoes. But for now, let’s have a look at that cool cucumber thing.

This plant has many names. By now, I have chosen to call it caigua, as that seems closest to the original name.

And yes, there’s noise again. There’s so much noise. Today, it’s the gardeners.

We fled the noise to take care of the greenhouse which had by now turned into a jungle. I could barely get in and out.

Slightly overwhelmed, I started by giving the large indeterminate tomatoes more support. I’d been very careful not to carry blight into the greenhouse, and the plants were looking strong and healthy.

Once the plants had strong strings supporting them, I began trimming.

By now, I was paranoid about getting blight, so I gave these a pretty good trim. I kept a few suckers at the tops of the plants for photosynthesis, but chopped all the lower ones off.

Suckers, so leafy parts of the tomato that don’t carry flowers or fruit, don’t stay suckers forever. What gardeners call suckers are actually secondary stems. They will eventually turn into branches with fruit.

If this hadn’t been such a wet year, my tomatoes would have gotten to keep all their branches. Hopefully, I’ll get to try that at some point in a dryer climate when we move to our own plot.

While we live in this extremely wet area (during an extra wet period, no less), I’m a convert to sucker pruning.

There is also no room to grow more vines, even if they’d carry fruit at some point. The greenhouse is pretty full.

And yes, I know that my extra small shirt and pants don’t fit. I have lost too much weight again. I am doing what I can to gain some. 42 kilos…. My stomach issues don’t make that easy but I am will figure it out.

But now, even normal-sized humans can get into the greenhouse again.

Someone had harvested every single plum from the tree across from my plot, so I checked the trees on the path.

I harvested them underripe to ripen at home–did you know that works?

As always, I only harvested a tiny percentage of what was growing. When I left, the trees were laden with fruit still. The neighbors would take every single fruit soon. I don’t think the birds, insects, and rodents got many.

And that despite these being clingstone fruit, so very hard to remove the stones from. I could skin them with my tool…

So, I cut some manually to make cake, and decided to try a trick.

I’d heard a night in the fridge would help, so I put the giant bowl away and baked a cake instead.

I followed the same cheese cake recipe as before, just with a small twist at the end.

I made the base dough, and again got surprised that it always comes together in the end.

My hands warm the butter and make it all work out. But it never looks like it when I start.

Ridiculously, I still feel guilty every time I eat cake. Society really has done a number on us, hasn’t it? I am severely underweight. I should eat as much cake as I can.

I have to remind myself that it is advertising and corporate greed that instilled these ideals, not common sense. I baked this cake. I harvested these plums. I should feel pride not guilt.

I added slices of plum on top of the cheese cake. I was improvising and hoping for the best.

Baking is a lot less forgiving than most cooking. I am always nervous about recipe changes. I was merging a plum crumble idea (not even a recipe) with my usual cheese cake recipe.

I had an idea in my head but little experience baking cakes. And yet, it worked.

I wobbled the cake to check if it was done. A light wobble is perfect. In an oven, you’d carefully poke it or take out the pan.

After enjoying a slice of cake, my husband and I headed to the garden for more blackberries and a few odd jobs.

Pepper enjoyed the shade between the sunflowers while I did some weeding.

My husband watched Pepper while I crawled into the plot next to mine. He also maintained the hedge facing the path, so my neighbors could get through easily.

And I fought my way to the blackberries. Even though I have permission for this, I always feel like I am trespassing when squeezing through the bushes. Especially, as I have to climb the fence. More undeserved guilt, I guess.

The unbelievable amount of blackberries here is absolutely worth the struggles, though. You see that sea of green I am harvesting from. That’s all blackberries. Somewhere in there is the fence line. My forest plot is on the other side.

This is one of the abandoned plots, so no one is taking care of anything. The blackberries are loving it.

My husband also put up the hammock. I couldn’t figure out how to attach it. He showed me, so now I can do it. They took a break while I collected more berries.

No one else is harvesting the berries, so I am only sharing with the animals. Sharing here isn’t hard. There are so many brambles.

My family was happy to wait for me. I harvested those in my easy reach but left hundreds of berries further up, down, and especially in.

We’d come here late, so we were both glad there was cake waiting at home.

After some time in the fridge, the plums were a lot easier to handle. I processed them all in one sitting. I finished the entire batch during my morning kitchen time. Painless.

I was glad I had plans for the pits, though. A lot of the flesh clung to the stones. I was glad I wouldn’t waste any of it. The steam juicer I’d never meant to buy was coming in handy yet again to turn waste into food.

I used my jam recipe to make a nice batch of plum jam. The pits were juiced into three half-liter bottles. Not bad for waste.

So long, and thanks for being here.