Now well into August and my garden has gone crazy with the heat and humidity. Vicki and I were away for a couple of weeks and our house-sitter, my daughter, didn’t pick the garden like she was suppose to. We had 40 cucumbers and 20 zucchini that were all ready, a couple of the zucchini were as big as softball bats. Vicki made an additional 15 jars of pickles, but that only used about half of the cucumbers so far. 

As far as the zucchini, she has been shredding and freezing them for zucchini bread. We will have plenty of zucchini for cooking to last through September too. If we had been home, we would have picked and processed the veggies in a timely fashion, but we went on a tour of Ireland and Scotland with CD Trips of Liberty. This was the first time in Europe for us, and I was surprised with what I saw growing over there. In Scotland, which is a higher latitude than Newfoundland, they had fuchsia growing six to eight feet tall as shrubs. 

Even though their summers do not get as hot as us, their winters do not get as cold because of the Labrador Current which brings the gulf stream from Florida to the British Isles and Ireland. As a result, most of the UK and Ireland are Zone 8, which is equal to coastal South Carolina. So many plants that we grow as annuals are perennial over there. They had butterfly bushes that were twenty feet tall with trucks that were six inches in diameter. There were windmill and dracaena palms growing 12 to 15 feet tall commonly used as landscape plants. 

We drove through some of the Scottish highlands between Inverness and Glasgow which does get colder because of the elevation and the polar winds that sweep across the hillsides. These hillsides were covered with heather which was just starting to bloom with a beautiful shade of purple across the hills. Basically the only things you see in the highlands are heather and sheep. Ireland lived up to its nickname “the Emerald Isle”, with beautiful flora from top to bottom. Even warmer than Scotland, Ireland had even more biodiversity with their plants. 

It wasn’t until we got to Northern Ireland that we got to tour our first apple orchard and cidery over there. In the UK and Ireland, cider means hard cider, sweet cider is called apple juice. I’ll write more about the orchard later when our apples start to ripen up. It was just so unusual to see plants like butterfly bush or fuchsia growing in fields or in hedgerows between pastures like weeds. Rose bushes regularly growing to ten feet tall and full of blooms. To say I was a little jealous would be an understatement. It just seemed like everything grew so easily over there, plus no deer to eat everything you plant. It seems the only critters that give them problems are the hares. The stories about Peter Rabbit in Mr. McGregors garden are all true. It seems like rabbits are everywhere over there except on the menu. More to come in future weeks.