I like to photograph my garden every year on Memorial Day to track where we’re at from a phenology perspective. From the plants’ point of view, we look roughly average, but from a human point of view it’s been anything but.
I swam in a lake in 95 degree heat yesterday; just under 4 weeks ago that lake had ice on it. It’s been a wild swing from winter to summer, seemingly overnight.
We got some bad news this week. Our main line sewer needs to be replaced and pretty much everything in the foreground of this picture will need to go. I’ll know more next week. I was very upset at first but I’m now trying to look at it as an opportunity.
It was such a weird week. This also happened: a red-tailed hawk caught a squirrel in our yard and landed with it on our deck for a minute or two. I was astounded at its size. And not terribly sorry to lose a squirrel, honestly—the hawk dispatched it quickly and efficiently.
Did you know that wild sarsparilla get flowers? They’re hidden under the leaves. I found these on the plants that get a little bit of sunlight each day—in deep shade, I couldn’t find any flowers.
I love the way the gooseberries, wild columbine, and serviceberries are intermingling in our back yard.
My interplanting of shallots and strawberries is coming along swimmingly. The strawberries are thriving in their new raised bed (new in summer 2017). It’s wise to periodically (every 3-5 years) dig up all your strawberry plants, amend the soil, weed thoroughly, and replant them. They get so overrun with weeds over time. Raising them up like this has kept the rabbits from them and made it easier to keep them weeded.
They’re currently covered with blossoms and tiny green strawberries. I’ve been watering them daily to keep them going strong through this heat wave.
One plant that is LOVING the heat is my Meyer Lemon tree. It spends winters inside and generally looks unhappy the whole time, but the second we bring it out in the spring, it starts to revive.
Peppers are also off to a good start with their ollas for water. I’m curious to see how this experiment works out.
My community garden plot is all planted—it’s double in size for this year as my good friend who gardens next to me is taking a year off from her plot. Crossing my fingers that we’ll have a veritable squash kingdom come August, if we can keep the vine borers away.
Last but not least, monarch season has begun! I’ve only seen one, but Anneke found 40 eggs in our yard two nights ago. If all these survive, we’ll have a household record number of releases, in the first round of the migration.
How are you surviving the heat?
Another day, another basket o’ beans.
I blanched them for a couple minutes (Adam said “you nimrod 90 seconds is more than enough” but I like them a little softer). I was able to freeze 2 quart size bags, bringing my grand total of bean preservation to 3 quarts. Plus we’ve eaten some too.
Adam ripped out all of our bolted lettuce today. We’re trying to find the energy to plant something else there; most likely some kale. Not anymore tonight though.
He also stripped off the leaves from the bottom 5-6 inches of each brussel sprout stalk. The teeny tiny buds have appeared and apparently stripping off the leaves will help the plant put its energy into those buds now. We’ll see. (This is what one of our gardening books said to do.)
FINALLY. We have tomatoes. Over the past few weeks I’ve watched the plants getting bigger and bigger (they’re about 5 ft tall now) and they had so few blossoms. This week they finally started setting fruit. Going to be a couple more weeks but at least I know that it will happen now. We can probably make fried green tomatoes one of these days too.
Here’s the whole garden. Shoot, this was almost a week ago now. See how behind I am? The zucchini have thankfully stopped getting bigger and now are setting to fruit. We will be giving away zucchini soon, I fear. Those things are massive.
Finally, I used a box of old slate tiles from an old project in our old house to make some little paths through the strawberries and asparagus, and to the rain barrel (we used to have the time and money to do things like remodel our bathroom with slate tile, imagine that). I didn’t do a super fantastic bang-up job and there might be some re-positioning of tiles every spring, but it works for me!
Here I am digging them up. (And seriously look how big her onions are. I am totally jealous, though I got to take some of those home, too.)
We packed up a flat and brought them home and planted them in my failed-rhubarb spot from earlier this spring. I like strawberries better than rhubarb anyway.
I am always doing this work in half-light which really impedes my photography, but oh well you get the point. This is the east side of the garden, at the front of the house (SE corner). My plan for this spot is asparagus along the back, then a little walking path (yet to be installed) and then strawberries in front. As you can see I have an unplanned hollyhock. A HUGE unplanned hollyhock. I planted it from seed last year and it never really did anything so I had counted it as a loss.
Coming later this week: homemade kimchi!
Stacking Functions Garden 