The Harvest That Wasn’t

The Harvest That Wasn’t 

It was a bit concerning when my vegetable garden wasn’t “knee high by the 4th of July”. Right from the start of this season, I invested time and tactics into gardening like never before. There were the seedlings in the sunroom, kitchen, dining room, and nearly every other room that a ray of sunshine could beam into. Then, there was the semi-successful transfer of the spindling plants into the newly erected greenhouse, along with the frequent closing up and then re-opening of the tarp to coincide with the ever-changing weather patterns.  

Things looked on track at this point. There were ample sweet pea and green bean seedlings, more than we could consume personally, so a couple dozen plants were potted and sold locally. The calendar turned to June, and weather be damned; the balance of the vegetable seedlings had to go into the ground. Uncertain temperatures followed thereafter and that meant on a couple occasions, I had to cover the fledgling plants to keep from losing them. My confidence remained high because the first day of summer hadn’t passed yet, but deep in my consciousness, I knew things didn’t look quite right. 

There were a couple reasons for my intense interest in the garden this year; the one at the top of the list was to achieve some level of self-sufficiency. And yet, here it was well into the days of summer, and I was still purchasing a full complement of veggies from the market. My aim was to dodge as many Trump Tariff cost as possible. Another motivating reason for focusing my attention and energy into nature, was to divert my watching and knee-jerk reacting to our President’s dismantling of our democratic republican form of government, aka the implementation of the Trump Authoritarian Regime. Sad to say, I never came close to “self-sufficiency”, and I couldn’t look away from the troubling events, drip-fed to us day after day, all of which having culminated in the America that we all knew, now being no longer. 

As seriously as I took my urban farming this summer, it remained a seasonal hobby. And to be honest, not all “crops” could be deemed a failure. A harvest of three hundred and fifty garlic bulbs, complete with their pesto-producing scapes, has kept me busy looking for recipes and ways of preserving these gems. My harvest of sweet peas wound into July. I was similarly blessed with three cuttings from my full range of herbs, and my ten basil plants kept me snipping away all season long. There was also no shortage of green beans either and towards the end of August, I finally brought some peppers and tomatoes to the table. My fears of a lean year were accentuated when in mid-July, I visited the booth of a produce farmer at our local “Farmer’s Market”. I confidently asked him for a peck of bottling or second-hand tomatoes to which he replied, “This is all I got from five acres.” I turned to see just three medium-sized green tomatoes. Attempting to breathe some hope into the situation, I enquired as to when I should stop back. His reply? “Mid-August at the earliest.” Oh! I guess this growing season has been that bad. 

Then, by mid-September, we took a short “stay cay” up along Lake Erie. It was absolutely beautiful in the Ashtabula and Geneva region during our cabin stay. It was a welcome break, and I took solace in seeing many other vege gardens in the area with decent-sized green tomatoes hanging from healthy looking vines. I thought, “These look exactly like mine!” 

Reality began to sink my hopes, though, once the first of October arrived. The weather forecast showed ideal growing conditions for the month, but the buds on my pepper plants were just beginning to flower. Logic told me that despite favorable conditions and my daily feeding of rainwater from my barrels, these plants were going to run out of time. I clutched on to hope, like one would grasp a piece of timber from a sinking ship, right up to the day that frosts were forecast at the end of the month. The end result, which I could‘ve foretold four months previously, was my largest harvest was my last one; three baskets of varying degrees of green tomatoes. 

As for the peppers, well, they’ve all been stripped of their leaves and their roots washed and trimmed, and they now reside inside. No fewer than thirty-eight pepper plants, some reaching sixteen inches tall, are under grow lights for the winter. Many may not survive, and that’s alright. The theory being that next year’s start from stem must be better than from seed.  

It’s easy to be downhearted about the harvest that wasn’t, but that’s the farmer’s lament. Grieving over failed crops has been the American farmer’s plight for over a century. In my upcoming historical fiction sequel, “Gilded - The Novelization of the Life of John Hiram Beckley”, I use local data to document how John Hiram, the farmer, absorbs financial losses incurred from a late season drought in September 1881. By all accounts, it was a drought similar to what those of us worked through during the months of August and September 2025. The results were the same; an expected harvest that wasn’t.  

I do keep in mind that there are vast differences between my summer of 2025 and my grandfather’s grandfather’s farming experiences. First, John Hiram farmed sixty acres of rural Carroll County farmland whereas I simply cleared out some brush at the back of our residential plot, lifted some sod, and then began planting. I describe in one chapter how John Hiram takes his cut winter wheat to the mill, not to be sold at market rates, but to be ground and bagged for him to return home and use. On the other hand, I use an old plastic colander to collect my produce. When the crops failed for John Hiram due to fierce storms and severe weather, he and his wife Rebecca needed to come up with a plan on how their family of seven would survive. When my “crops” fail, I simply resort back to buying them from the local store. My disappointment stems from the many hours I invested; call it sweat equity. However, John Hiram was at work from the crack of dawn until the sun went down over the horizon. My best efforts this year could be accurately recorded as one of John Hiram’s half-day efforts. When I imagine John Hiram at work, I think of the local farmer who is always in his fields along State Route 303 heading in or out of the village of Peninsula. It matters not what hour you pass his farm, or the time of year, for he is in his fields with his draught horses. 

Here’s a pointed similarity in what American farmers struggle with today and conditions my distant family relative endured in the late nineteenth century. Tariffs! Congressman William McKinley was the architect of the country’s tariff policy back then, and the harm from his tariff policies pushed the farmers nationwide to unionize into a political force, The Progressive Party, to protect their farms and their livelihood. Today, the Trump Administration has slapped tariffs essentially on the world, many of which have removed vital American farming international markets IE soybeans to China. Most recently, Trump has bailed out the farmers of Argentina at the expense of his very own cattle farmers in America. The message is short and sharp. To be a farmer is to toil like few other factory workers can comprehend, and yet, the worker can be assured of his pay at the end of the week whilst the farmer can actually “lose the farm” at the stroke of the pen of Mother Nature or Donald Trump.  

These higher stakes being waged today by hard-working American farming families puts my winging about my late-season baskets of green tomatoes into perspective. Don’t you reckon?  

God bless America? Why doesn’t God bless today the afflicted American farmer?