So, summer appears to be over for the most part.

It was an interesting one.  I have been busy with work, hanging out with the kids...  The youngest one does not nap anymore so i don't really have large blocks of time to just sit and write.  Also,  i have been having computer troubles. I killed another laptop- by dropping it....  hubby cobbled together a desktop,  then its video card or something died.  So then he rebuilt another laptop for me out of our oldest daughter's old one but its sloooow.  He's going to fix the desktop at some point but for now, this laptop is working ok.

There are frost warnings in the county East of us for tonight. The daytime temps have been around 60 degrees F for the last few days. 

The garden didn't do so hot this year.  We had another groundhog that kept eating everything i planted. Mainly the cucumber, bush beans and squash plants. Then there was a plague of  squash bugs that took out the ones that survived.  I got a lot of sweet peppers again this year, some okra too. The potatoes did very well.  I have been digging them up little by little.

 We got a few very large tomatoes (Pruden's Purple and Cherokee Purple), quite a few Siberia, a good number of Elberta Girl and of course the Romas and the San Marzano types went crazy.  The problem with the tomatoes was odd this year.  They were doing well and i was keeping up with the Florida Weave staking/support method until we got this monster rain storm that blew the plants to shreds,  knocked down the weave strings and exposed the partly ripened fruit to direct and strong sunlight. I lost a lot to a combination of sun scald and broken stems.

Elberta Girl:

 Pruden's Purple:

Cherokee Purple:

Summer Squash and two types of Okra:

Bush Beans:

Potatoes:

It was a cool spring and a cool summer. Most years in late August we have a string of very hot days,  i think we only reached 90 or above two times. There were plenty of days in the 80's but nothing super hot except for the days when it was so humid it felt  like it was in the 90's.

The weeds really took over after the rain messed up the tomatoes.  I sort of gave up trying to juggle time off, house cleaning, being too tired and achy from working and rainy days when i really couldn't get anything done outside.  The rain was strange this year too.  It didn't rain often but when it did, it was torrential and we got a few inches at a time.  I can handle working outside in light or steady rain but not in downpours.

I'm expecting an interesting winter....