We're in that marvelous weather period I call "the sweet spot": warm enough to leave the door open for the dog even early in the morning, not so hot that we need the a/c. Warm enough for t-shirts and dinners outside at our favorite restaurants, not too hot for me to wear knee socks with my comfortable shoes. Most importantly: prime gardening weather, with almost no mosquitos as yet.
In another week or so it will be blistering hot in the afternoon and I'll be eaten alive by mosquitos every time I leave the house. For now I'm enjoying the sweet spot and spending every minute I can outside.
Spent about an hour this morning pulling vines and cleared a respectable area. The vines are just beginning to show new growth after the goats ate them down to bare vines. Which is sort of alarming, that we have so much to clear and it's starting to come back already. On the other hand it's good, because it's much easier to tell which is english ivy and which is poison ivy. And the leaves are still few and tiny, easy to avoid exposure to the poison ivy. I wonder if poison ivy causes more of a reaction when the leaves are small? Is the oil more concentrated? That's true of most edible plants: the flavors are more intense on new growth.
I bagged the vines and put them in the trash can rather than the yard waste bin. Paul James said to do that, and last weekend a friend told us that a friend of his had caught a terrible case of poison ivy from municipal mulch. I want to be careful about not sending poison ivy to the landfill where it will end up in someone's mulch (maybe even my own). Still, the area I cleared this morning was about 90% english ivy, 10% poison ivy. And it's going to fill up our trash bin pretty fast. Maybe from now on I'll try to separate the two vines and put the english ivy in the yard waste, the poison ivy in a trash bag. Except for the area under the dogwood with the really high concentration of poison ivy. There I think I'll keep bagging everything.
Georg staked up the tomatoes yesterday. They're looking good! We have little green tomatoes on all of them except the Arkansas Traveler. Which is looking kind of pathetic actually, compared to the robust growth of the others: Super Sweet 100, Better Boy, Juliet and Sun Gold. Juliet is a sauce tomato which I hope will produce well.
Leave a comment