The Assumption of Mary, August 15th, is a well-known date in Croatian inland as the summer destroyer. Around the 15th, we get a hard weather change with strong north winds that drastically lower the temperatures. We still get some warm days, and even temperatures above 30°C, but the nights are always colder, so there’s no chance for a heatwave anymore. This year the change was late, but it came on August 17th. We didn’t get much rain, but the temperatures dropped significantly, with morning temperatures around 11°C (51.8°F), which we didn’t have since mid-June. The rain that we got revived the tired veggies and woke up the ones that were sown last week. Now all of the baby plants that I’ve recently sown are out and growing.

The autumn lettuce is all out, and the one that I’ve transplanted has rooted well and it has started growing new leaves. Due to the accident with the seedlings, many of the lettuce varieties have been lost, so I’ve sown them directly to the garden and all of them are now out

I’ve also recently sown spinach. I had some leftover seeds that I wasn’t sure of, so I used lots of seeds on a small bed. To my surprise, all of them germinated, and now I have a bunch of spinach plants growing in a small space, there will be serious thinning time once the plants get big enough. 

Chard which was eaten by the snails is also starting to grow new leaves. The lower temperatures will be good for the plants, and maybe I’ll have an autumn harvest after all.

The colder weather also brought some new flowers on all of my peppers, including ajvar peppers. I got some seeds from the ajvar production company, which were gifted to people to preserve the varieties, and now I have small peppers. I’m not sure they will have
time to ripen since they aren’t grown usually in these parts of Croatia, but we’ll see.

Summer killer also brought me my first pumpkin, which I have no idea where it came from. I thought the vine was watermelon, but now I’m certain that it’s a pumpkin. If only I knew how it got to the garden.

The summer killer did wonders for most of the vegetables in the garden. Except for the tomatoes, they will most likely also be killed along with the summer, but that’s expected. We can’t have it all at once.