Summer Gardening 1

I have always planted my garden early, harvested the vegetables early, and stepped aside in late July to let crabgrass and pigweed take over.

This year, I did not follow my usual practice.

For the first time, I experimented with a second crop. On the 7th of July, I planted a row of snow peas and a row of beets. By the 17th, the peas were well above the surface of the earth, but the beets had not yet made their appearance. I wondered what was keeping them.

Diver’s in Middletown, Ohio

Which Has Everything for Gardeners

And Where I Bought My Seeds

I felt under obligation to prevent pigweed and crabgrass from growing. The pigweed presented no problem. The little pigweed starts were easily pulled. The crabgrass posed a challenge. When the ground was dry, the blades of the grass tore off between my thumb and forefinger, but the roots remained in the soil—ready to send up more blades within a short time. I had to hunker down and dig the roots with a trowel. A steady rain on the 18th meant that I spent a few hours digging crabgrass on the 19th; the soil was nicely workable after the showers.

Bean Harvest 2016

When I first picked beans in mid-July, I picked a bushel of them. I think I noticed a phenomenon. My beekeeper friends can correct me if I misunderstood the situation. I began combing the bush bean plants for beans not long after the sun had come up. When I was perhaps a third of the way through my two rows of beans, buzzing interrupted the quiet. Bees were busily collecting pollen from the sunflowers and squash blossoms. I have the impression that the bees arrived all at once, as if they had awakened at the same minute. Perhaps the angle of the sun served to signal the bees that it was time to fly to the flowers.

Having harvested the lettuce long ago, the beets next, the carrots after the beets, and the onions most recently, I cleared half of the garden space. In that open area were my voluntary salad tomatoes and my new rows of snow peas and beets. My original beets were canned, my carrots were frozen, and my onions were dried on a tall steel rack that I wheel onto my screened porch for the purpose every July. Later, when the onion stalks had dried completely, I tied bunches of onions with twine and hung them from nails in my solarium. Throughout the fall and well into the winter each year, the walls are decorated with golden and bronze onions.

When I first planted my snow peas and beets in mid-season, I was full of anticipation. I hoped they would thrive, but I had never tried to grow a second crop of vegetables so late in the year. I worried, asking myself questions I could not answer. Will they struggle with the heat? Can I keep the plants watered? Will the crabgrass take over, despite my best efforts? As so often happens, my excitement was mingled with trepidation.