I promised your garden tour, so I guess let’s do an August garden tour. Today is August 5th and it’s looking really nice out today, so let’s do a garden tour in nice weather.

When all my garden neighbors lost their tomatoes to blight, I began to worry. I trimmed the tomatoes for better air flow but it was not enough. I did what I could to help the plants. It has been a wet year, wetter than even I feared. Let’s try and save my tomatoes, shall we?

Weeds are nature’s way of repairing the soil. So, why did I spend dozens of hours messing with the balance? Much of my time in the garden is spent weeding: weeding before making beds, weeding beds, weeding paths… I was starting to doubt this was the way to go.

Two days after I’d abandoned the mushroom beds in a bad mood, my husband joined me in the garden to help. He flew the drone while I did some weeding, and then we got to work. Three mushroom beds, more ripe white currants, and a potato harvest were waiting.

Mulch is a lazy gardeners best friend. I might not be lazy, but I sure like efficiency. Now that my friend and I had weeded the tomatoes, it was time to mulch them. I am a huge proponent of heavy mulching, so today we’ll talk about mulch. A lot.

A scorching hot break between heavy rain storms gave me a chance to finish the carrot bed. A friend came to visit for a few day. Her visit was jinxed with bad weather and my period being particularly painful. Nonetheless, we harvested and processed cherries, dug for potatoes, and weeded the tomato bed.

I’d promised my dog some carrots. It was time to finally follow through. I could have planted these a lot earlier. But they are even now going into an unfinished bed.

Despite rain and mosquitoes, Pepper and I get a lot done in the garden. After checking on what my husband did the day before, we harvest some currants, string-trellis some tomatoes, cook a delicious dinner from volunteer potatoes, and return the next day to continue a new bed.

During pockets of sunshine between endless rain, I weeded the beds, added edges along some of my beds using materials from the plots, and planted some more seeds.

Almost every day brings fresh rain around here at the moment. Many days, we are forced to work around the weather–and take breaks when it rains. Or we ignore the weather and go to the garden anyway. On a rainy day, we made strawberry jam, then rescued the garlic from the non-stop rain by harvesting it and sorting it in my living room.