Summer Gardening 2

Coaxing a second season from my garden was more challenging than I thought it would be. Only a tiny portion of my beets appeared above ground. I stood in the hot sun in the dusty ground surrounded by towering sunflowers and looked carefully for beets among the small crabgrass clumps in the row that I had not plowed or plucked. There were perhaps twenty beets. I shook my head in disappointment.

Sunflowers Twice As Tall As I Am

The snow peas, though, were thick and green in the adjacent row. They were the soft green that snow peas always are, and they were enjoying the intense heat of the season. I should have thought that snow peas would have preferred the cool weather of spring, but the happy plants belied my perceptions. Such an ironic name, “snow peas,” in the midst of the hottest weather of the year!

Snow Peas on July 17th

I pulled most of the squash plants from the ground. They were finished producing, and I wanted to keep their area free of weeds. I had harvested three bushels of beans from my two rows, and I picked another half bushel. My guess was that the beans might not set on again.

Potato Harvest

The sunflowers were the real story of late July and early August. I had purchased mixtures of seeds, and I was not disappointed. The tallest of the sunflowers reached twelve feet. What amazing growth! Think of them! Seeds in the loose earth sprouted in April, spread roots, sent up a stalk, added leaves, and kept strengthening and extending the stalk until the flower stood twice as tall as I am! From the soil came this magnificent display!

In my solarium were trays filled with the potatoes I had carefully lifted from the ground: more potatoes than I have ever grown, and all of them from only two rows! On my screened porch stood the old grocery wire shelving on wheels that I use to dry my onions. Yellow and white onions far larger than I have had in years past were spread in tiers on the shelves. I planned to gather them in groups, tie them with twine, and hang them from nails in the solarium. I wondered if I had enough nails!

It had been a splendid garden, but it would have so few second-crop beets! There probably would not be enough to justify canning them.

Later, when I returned to weed the garden, I discovered that an animal—probably a bunny—had eaten the tops of most of the beets that had managed to come up. I had only three left! I hope the rabbit enjoyed the beets.

The snow peas were still abundant and growing richly. I kept them watered.

A pleasant outcome of the summer, salad tomatoes from voluntary vines that I had permitted to start among my lettuces when I still had rows of lettuce were now golden yellow and good! The few tomato vines that I had allowed to grow were scattered across the broad area where the rows had been, and I could easily go from one to the next without stepping on them. I collected many of the yellow baubles to decorate lunch bowls of spinach leaves or to serve as snacks.   

Gardening 1

“ … Mr. Collins invited them to take a stroll in the garden, which was large and well laid out, and to the cultivation of which he attended himself. To work in this garden was one of his most respectable pleasures … .”

      —Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I can hardly believe that the year has rolled around and I am back in my vegetable garden again. I share Mr. Collins’ respectable pleasure. While my garden is not large, I hope it is well laid out. I planted on April 20th. Steve, who plows my garden, had worked the soil into velvety smoothness. I felt that this year’s garden would be better than those of the past two years. My intuition was justified. Most of the seeds sprouted, and I could see that the garden was indeed better—at least for now!

Garden Ready for Planting on April 20, 2016

Gardening appeals to many senses at once. Occasional breezes lift my straw hat and carry it cartwheeling on its brim while I chase it, brush it off, and push it down on my forehead as tightly as possible. Robins, cardinals, song sparrows, and catbirds sing. Canada geese suddenly honk overhead and fly so low that I hear the whistling of their wings. The heady aroma of honeysuckle and the sweetness of the iris intermingle. The scent of the iris is elusive: sweet at first with an indefinable hint of sourness as the flowers are nearing the end of their bloom cycle. The mowed lawn stretching away from the garden is a golden green, more perfect than I can remember during the dark winter months.

Mission Accomplished: Garden Planted on April 20, 2016

Those who recall my blogs from a year ago know that I plant lettuce, beets, carrots, onions, potatoes, bush beans, squash, and flowers. I avoid corn because it takes up too much room and is such a beacon to raccoons that, when I have grown it, I have had to surround the garden with an electric fence. I prefer no fence.

This year, I have planted flowers on the western, northern, and eastern borders of my garden but not on the southern edge, which I have left open so that plenty of sunlight can reach the vegetable rows that run north and south. In the past two years, my flowers have been so thick along the southern boundary that they have shaded the rows. Also, I have planted fewer squash seeds than ever before. I hope to avoid being overwhelmed with so many squashes that I must hurl the majority of them into the brush on the hill above my creek.

I cultivate my garden with a plow consisting of a wooden frame, a single iron wheel, and five small plow shears in a cluster. Although, at first, the temptation to pull weeds from within the rows was strong, I avoided it for several weeks because lifting out the weeds would undoubtedly disturb too many of the vegetable seedlings.

Few experiences in my life are so hopeful as gardening. Each hour spent working with my plants encourages me to envision dinners to come, and nothing tastes better than vegetables fresh from the garden!

My Summer in a Garden: Weeding 3.0

Abundant rain kept me out of my garden. After the wet spell, I strolled out to take a proud view of my neat rows. I saw a carpet of thick, tall weeds carpeting the ground. “I must have been mistaken,” I thought. “I must have imagined that I weeded and hoed this garden a week ago. It could not have been this garden that I so carefully tended. Maybe I accidentally weeded and hoed someone else’s garden.”

Garden Coming Along on June 21st

I took my trusty hoe and began. The weeds were worse than they were before. Fortunately, the rain had made the ground easy to work. It was no trouble to pull the largest weeds, root and all. There were just so many of them! Also, the hoe cut through the upper surface of the ground just enough to clip the stems from the roots of the weeds too small to pull. The summer solstice had come and gone, and the heat was much higher than it had been even a week earlier. I follow the practice of my father and the old-time farmers: I wear jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, gloves, and a broad-brimmed hat. I prefer not to be sunburned, and the long sleeves keep me less hot than I would be otherwise. Even with my protective clothing, I soon felt perspiration, which soaked through my shirt. Before long, even my jeans were damp!

Garden After Third Massive Weeding

I struck the hoe over and over against tough roots. I bent low over rows to pull huge pigweeds from amid the potatoes. I could not believe that, for the third time this year, I was involved in a monstrous weeding, as if the previous two weedings had been for nothing.

Next year, before I order seeds, I will read my blogs. Maybe I will become a regular customer at the farmer’s market and will skip gardening. What joy is there in repeating exactly the same hard work of a week ago?

The fact that many of my seeds had not sprouted in the first place was haunting me now. Large gaps were not shaded by the leaves of vegetables and had to be hoed smooth. Not far from where I live is a perfect garden of about the same size as mine. It stands so near the road that I am forced to look upon it. The rows are as straight as a ruler, the plants are spaced exactly alike down the rows, the stakes have the same height throughout and do not lean, and the weeds—well, there are none. What gardener has the patience and the good luck to have a garden like that? I would ask the owner if I could take a picture to post online, but I fear that the obsessive compulsive individual might rightly ask to see my garden. So everyone will have to imagine how faultless and immaculate that other garden is.

The First Flowers in My Garden

My garden is what a garden is meant to be: haphazard, uneven, inexact, and overgrown in spots. Of course, the previous sentence is only a literary stunt intended to sound true but a cheap alibi nonetheless. I wish my rows were as satisfactory as those of my neighbor, but, before I covet my neighbor’s cucumber, I will content myself by saying that, after I hoed my last weed, I harvested three fat zucchini that will send me into an ecstatic state of mind at my dinner table. As I carried them to the house, I almost forgot my aching back.

My Summer in a Garden: The Chaos of Weeds and the Price of Order

I went away for a week. The weeds in the garden sensed that I was gone, and they went crazy. When I returned, I found a sea of thriving weeds where my garden had been. I had hoed them before I left. Where did they all come from in only a week? How did they get to be so tall in only eight days?

I have known many who would have given up—who would have said, “I can’t tackle a problem this big”—who would have let the weeds take the garden and who would have hoped to find a cucumber or a carrot hidden among the weeds later. Not I. With hope springing eternal, I got my hoe and began at one corner of the garden.

It was about 6:00 a.m. My plan was to finish the weeding before the deer flies were awake. Few insects in my area can make a human life a misery any more aggressively and ruthlessly than a deer fly. At about 9:00, I was still hard at work, and the first deer fly found me. It bit my neck. Then it bit the small of my back, where my shirt was clinging to the perspiration. For the next three hours, it alternated between biting my neck and biting my back. Several times, my instinct to eliminate my fierce adversary overcame my wish to protect nature, and I swatted at the fly. It was always too quick, flying off just as I swatted myself with the palm of my hand.

Painting of a Summer Farm, My Flea Market "Find"

 

The weeding went ever so slowly. When I reached the beets, I had to hunker down to pull by hand the weeds from the rows. I uprooted at least two beets, and I dutifully replanted them, mounding the dirt around them. In my experience, such replanting never works. Usually, the plant perishes. When it lives, it remains small and relatively unproductive. Why do I bother to replant the uprooted vegetables? Because I feel so guilty for having clumsily removed a growing plant that had sprung from an expensive seed.

When I came to the carrots, I was ready to cry out in anguish. Locating the stems of the weeds was practically impossible. Each time that I thought I had a weed stem firmly grasped between my thumb and fingers, I would softly pull back the foliage with my free hand to see if I had a weed or a carrot, and, with an astonishing frequency, I had a carrot in my grasp. The work proceeded with agonizing slowness. Even as careful as I was, I managed to tear several carrots out of the earth where they had been happily growing.

After several hours, my mind became my enemy. I kept thinking, “Surely, this is not a wise investment. The seeds, potatoes, and onions cost too much money and not enough of them grew. Here you are, losing hours that could be spent on more important tasks, and you could just as easily buy fresh vegetables at the farmers’ market. Why should you provide yourself as an entrée for a deer fly?”

By the time that I was ready to agree that I was a fool, I had reached the squash and cucumbers and was beginning to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The sun was beating down, and the perspiration was flowing freely. My shirt clung to me, and the band of my broad-brimmed straw hat was clammy. Even so, I was not going to give up now.

With a fury formed from the desire for victory, I slashed at the weeds. I did so in brief spurts of energy. My muscles were so tired that I could not sustain a long attack. In between bouts, I stood supported by my hoe for several seconds while summoning enough energy to flail at the bindweed, lamb’s quarter, and redroot pigweed. With a final effort, not Herculean but quite puny in fact, I scraped the last weed away.

I wish I could say I felt sorry for the carnage; after all, weeds are simply plants I consider to be in the wrong place. They were strewn about the garden, their wilting leaves half buried under dirt, half trampled by my feet. At the time, I was hardly contrite. I looked across a garden with well-defined rows of lettuce, onions, beans, and even flowers! Such lovely order had arisen from chaos!

Suddenly, I heard my first wren. I should say, “For the first time, I paid attention to the song of the wren.” Undoubtedly, the wren had been singing all along. I had been too focused on weeding to notice. As the bird warbled its notes, I relaxed and realized, “This is why I have a garden. It is my song expressed in vegetables that I can serve for lunch and dinner—vegetables with no herbicides, insecticides, or other ‘cides’ to make me ill—vegetables utterly organic and radically flavorful.” I could not put a price tag on something so pleasant. Smiling, I nodded that the garden was worth the work.