Garden Journal: Fall is Arriving at the Laughing Dragon Garden!

It has been a long time since I have had a chance to post a garden update. I have many good intentions to post more regularly, but much of my time that I would normally give to such things as blogging have instead gone to spending time with my new grandson who arrived in April.

Some autumn harvest goodness!

But now fall is here and it's time for a quick recap of what's been going on in the garden.

Seems to be the trend pretty much every year, we have unexpected successes and we have equally surprising complete failures. The summer of 2025 has certainly been no exception.

On the Upside...

Back in July and August, we were gifted with an exceptionally good harvest of black raspberries. The fun thing about our black raspberries is that we started with a single "volunteer" plant a few years ago which has now grown into a whole row of bushes.

A bounty of black raspberries!

Although we have nurtured the plants along, most of them were planted as a result of birds eating the berries, sitting on top of the wire fence towards the neighbors and pooping!

We not only ended up with plenty of berries to eat, but we have at least 10 bags of frozen berries in the deep freezer in the garage.

The strawberries could also be considered quite a success, in large part thanks to the sheer length of the season we have enjoyed.

The first berries were ready at the very end of May, and we actually were able to get six lovely berries as recently as a couple of days ago, on October 1st!

From the spring

To the extent there is a "secret" to a very long strawberry season, it seems to be digging up the bushes in early spring, removing excess foliage, fertilizing the bed, replanting the plants and off you go.

The idea that strawberry plants only last a couple of years is not exactly true. If you start with heirloom plants and do the above every year, they will *not "revert to wild." Hybrids, however, will start producing only small hard berries after a couple of years.

Our green beans — as always — did quite well, and provided some good harvests for the freezer. We are still working with self-gathered heirloom seeds that date back to 2014!

The harvest was a little more modest than expected because of the vast number of voles and water rats we had in the garden this year. They had the very frustrating habit of chewing off the plants at ground level, even after they had gotten quite large. Grrrrrr!!!!

Which was — turning to the disappointing events in this summer's garden — also the sad fate that befell our snow peas.

We came out one morning, and all the plants (at the time more than waist high and flowering) had been chewed off at the ground, leaving the tops to die. So we had to start over, this time with a sturdy hardware cloth "cage" around the plants.

In the end, though, it was a disappointing year for snow peas...

We did enjoy a good long harvest of fresh greens and lettuce, from May on and still going strong as we enter October. Just a few days ago, I sowed another batch of spinach, which we will continue to enjoy until the first frosts... which typically happen sometime in November.

The tomatoes were somewhat mediocre, this year.

For the most part, it was weather related... we had many many cool and foggy days this summer, and just not enough sun. Normally, we have morning fogs that burn off by lunchtime and then bright sun for the rest of the day... when it stays gray and misty all day it's definitely not ideal for tomatoes.

And we only had about one week where the temperatures consistently made it up into the 70s (20-ish degrees C).

About the biggest daily harvest of the summer... from less than a week ago!

Our blackberries ended up — surprisingly — in the "disappointing" column, likely for the same reason as the tomatoes.

There was no shortage of flowers and fruit, but the vast majority went directly from barely getting ripe to mildew and rot, leaving very few viable berries.

A few of the good ones!

The pumpkin bed also turned out pretty substandard, with the plants never really taking off... we need to test the soil, because clearly some nutrient was missing, that kept them from thriving.

In the end, we got just eight pumpkins, and all but two seemed to be "dwarf specimens." Mind you, they are pie pumpkins, so giant fruit was never really in the picture!

Back to the plus column, we did have — and are still enjoying — a bumper crop of apples!

We only have a couple of modest sized trees, but they probably gave us in excess of 200lbs of apples, all told.

Our preferred way to preserve is either to peel, slice and freeze for pies, or to make apple sauce of a variety of things.

Our garden mascot, surrounded by part of the apple harvest!

Of course, there were many other things in the Laughing Dragon garden that didn't involve growing food, but gave us lots of enjoyment, regardless.

For example, I had an envelope of old marigold seeds... which (surprisingly) exploded into a giant thicket of color!

Similarly, we had one particular rose bush that just kept setting beautiful fragrant yellow blooms from late spring and is still going!

The herb beds are also doing extremely well, with an abundance of chives, marjoram, tarragon, rosemary and thyme.

That said, for some reason we seemed completely unable to grow dill this year!

But that's the nature of gardening... there are always changes and mysteries!

One of the herb beds, overflowing with fragrant goodness!

And I think that's about all I have to offer, for this garden update! I appreciate you coming by and sharing in the Laughing Dragon Garden's adventures.

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All photos are my own!