How the Garden Grows

Squash plant overtaking the peas; Deb Marshall photo

This has been a slightly odd gardening year – unlike last summer, it’s been pretty wet, but lately not quite wet enough; unlike last summer, not so horribly hot, but kind of too cold many nights. I’ve been picking baby summer squashes and zucchinis for several weeks now, and even a few cherry tomatoes from the plant in the pot on the wart, but only this weekend have the peas finally started to fill out, and that is just wrong. The first bed of parsnips I planted is a loss – only one seed germinated, and then one more appeared a couple of days ago. The first germinated parsnip is about 2 inches high and has been for weeks. There’s a pepper plant in that bed that’s big and happy and producing fruit, and on the far side of the bed, where the parsnips happily grew last year, beans are doing well, so I don’t know what’s going on. Not even weeds have appeared where I want to see parsnips, just a few stray catnip seedlings that show up everywhere, thanks to the careful ministrations of Catmandoo. I may try seeding that side of the bed with turnips; maybe stirring things up a bit will cause late germination.

Fava bean flowers; Deb Marshall photo

The beans are finally blooming and looking lush, though the scarlet runners are only limping along. All my squash plants are looking big and healthy, though I’ve sighted the nasty squash bugs which may or may not wreak havoc before we’re done. Those odd, alien creatures the fava beans, which like cold weather as a rule, are looking quite poorly this summer; they’re unusually short and look like they’ve been used hard. But they’ve started blooming, so all may not be lost, though I don’t see any pods yet. Some critter has dug a lovely little hole in the side of one of the fava bean/pea beds; I haven’t caught a sight of the homesteader so I’m not sure what exactly it is, and I don’t care so long as it doesn’t eat peas and beans and peppers. I suspect a chipmunk.

Critter hole under the French peas; Deb Marshall photo

 The sunflowers are starting to bloom, but they’re slow this year, too – only chest high instead of last year’s giants, and several not even thigh high yet. The passionflower vine, which I put outdoors for the first time this summer, is very happily producing a number of flower buds, so it likes its summer digs. I can’t wait ‘til the flowers open – they smell like heaven, but last only a day or two, and they take a long time developing so I can’t guess when they’ll open. All the flowers on the wart seem to be pretty happy this year, but I lost one of two hibiscus I planted in the ground last year, and the mock orange, another new addition, started well then fizzled. I’m going to take a chance planting a lovely hydrangea, hoping it will take to the earth and live to see another year; we don’t do well with bushes, for some reason. I don’t seem to speak bush and can’t tell when they’re in distress.

Potted plants on the wart; Deb Marshall photo

 

Parsnips weren’t the only thing that didn’t germinate – this summer there’s not a single cosmos in my whole garden, first time ever; but volunteer California poppies, calendula, and dill are everywhere, and one lone coriander plant popped up in the middle of the hay mulch. I even have a very large volunteer cherry tomato plant behind the raised bed near the house, and another in the compost bin. Marjoram from a single plant that I planted a decade ago, and Jerusalem artichokes and bee balm -  all refugees from at least 10 years ago – have migrated back to the garden, or perhaps emerged from down below it after moving about some and staying out of sight for years, and have taken over huge sections against the back fence , which is not where they were when I planted them all those years ago. Along with a giant clump of some daisy-like flower (where did that come from?) and some lovely yellow ground-cover-like thing that arrived several years ago in the discarded remains of a windowbox, that turns out to be hardy in my garden, they are starting to crowd out the grass and sweet-sour grass I’ve been weeding out for what feels like ages. Some morning glory seed I put into the ground there came up and is starting to climb the fence, and the old heads of Love Lies Bleeding that I buried along  the fence line has sprouted a million little seedlings; I hope a few will grow to adult-size and bloom.

Bee balm, daisy-like thing, and unknown hardy creeping vine; Deb Marshall photo

Anything that grows along that fence which isn’t a noxious weed or grass makes me happy. The fence wasn’t originally part of the garden, but the Barkie Boys’ continual intrusion into the garden, especially chasing Abu’s big red ball through the beds, inspired the Husband to string up some leftover cement wire as a fence on the field side, using some leftover PVC pipe as fence posts.  He snaked it behind the pear tree, and we’ve since planted a sour cherry tree - which the birds harvest long before we get to it - just inside one end of the fence. We added a garden arbor at that end and the blueberry bushes form a natural barrier along the house side; the fence wraps around the woods side a little way, and so encloses the raspberry patch we put in a few years ago, too. 

Bee balm with butterfly and bee; Deb Marshall photo

I’ve been slowly trying to build a slightly-raised planting border inside the fence for the last few years, using my Reclaim the Garden method: put down a lot of flattened cardboard boxes and folded up newspapers, and every fall dump the contents of the spent wart-rail boxes and planters on top of the cardboard.  With some manure and any extra compost we manage to make worked in a year or so later, and a whole lot of weeding (the field keeps trying to sneak under the fence into the beds) and a lot of cooperation from earthworms which slowly turn the cardboard into soil, eventually I have a partly-domesticated border, and eventually it’ll extend all the way to the nether end. In the meantime, I have many semi-successful plantings – a volunteer lettuce, a new catnip patch, a hosta under the cherry tree, a clump of garlic chives – but the most successful have been the plants that moved themselves there and are taking over. So successful are these old friends that this fall I need to rescue an iris I put there that’s been completely engulfed by the marjoram.

Morning Glories, catnip, baby Love Lies Bleeding, and that yellow viney thing; Deb Marshall photo

This year the raspberries are very prolific, and the bees and I do battle over the luscious fruits. The birds are causing some destruction in the blueberry patch, but worse, this year has been a great year for the annoying fungus that results in mummy berries. The ground around the blueberry bushes is littered with them, too many to remove, so we’ll need to bury them under inches of mulch sometime soon to foil the fungus’s ability to reproduce. 

Passionflower vine and the critter that lives on the wart; Deb Marshall photo

We’re half-way through summer, and it seems to be speeding by.  It seems that every morning I wake up and think, This will be the day that feels like summer: I’ll sit in the screen tent, reading and listening to the birdsong, waiting to see Buzzy Boy as he visits his feeders, watch the bees collecting their gold, breathing in the scents of full-on summer. This will be the day when I don’t get sidetracked by all the other stuff that needs to be done. This will be the day that feels and sounds and tastes of summer.

Hibiscus; Deb Marshall photo

Yeah, right. That stack of anything-but-serious-reading books I bought is still piled high by my bed, I haven’t had even a single screened-in nap or supper, and soon every spare moment will be taken up with bean picking and processing, followed (one hopes) by tomatoes and basil and many more squashes. And yet – the gladiolas are up and starting to form buds; and when I let the Barkie Boys out the kitchen door for last outs before bed, the air is filled with summer. I step out and my heart is tickled by the solar lights lining the wart rail, many of them changing colors; and two steps down the wart stairs puts me in a place where I can admire the great round color-changing solar light I perched on the pedestal base of the birdbath, all that remains after I dropped the silly thing last fall putting it away. I set it up near the critter hole in the fava/pea bed; I wonder what the critter thinks of its new streetlight?

First Sunflowers; Deb Marshall photo

I’m charmed. But then again, I’m a quarter French-Canadian!