gardening notes
We have reached the time of year when my gardening chores need to be nonstrenuous, completed early in the day, or both. I'm trying not to let the weather totally defeat me, but I've only gotten a little, teeny tiny bit done in the past week. It felt like much more than it was, but I think that was the heat. And trying to fit the gardening in among multiple 15 hour work days probably had something to do with it too. Anyway, here's what I've done in the past 7 days:
- planted a few things from the farmer's market: phlox, stokes aster, another rudbeckia and some blue annuals to replace the pansies in the blue & white bed. (Which has gradually become a blue, white and purple bed.) I waited way too long to take out the pansies, but I just didn't have the heart to pull them up while they were still pretty. Then they were a little bit scraggly and I was too busy to deal with them, and then suddenly they looked positively awful and I couldn't wait to get rid of them.
- weed wacked the ditch by the road, and the hill above it. While up there I discovered why those dwarf sunflowers are performing so poorly: they got et! Something ate them right up, every last one. Ah well, so much for that grand plan. I've been wondering if a deer happened by our yard recently. We do see them occasionally in the neighborhood, and I've noticed the tops eaten off some flowers, including a huge sedum. Well, it was huge before it got eaten. Normally when something eats our plants I blame the rabbits, but whatever ate this stuff was tall.
- weeded the blue and white bed, herb garden and vegetable garden, and deadheaded the blue and white bed. The vegetable and herb gardens are easy to weed because we've stayed on top of that pretty well, but the blue and white bed had gotten a bit overgrown. It's those damned brambles, popping up everywhere. They are my nemesis. Along with the yucca, which is surprisingly invasive, but I'm not even thinking about that yet. Yucca has humongous, thick roots -- the root I dug out was the size of a partially deflated volleyball, and the plant was fairly small! -- and you have to get every last bit of it. I failed to do so and now we have a half-dozen more to contend with. In fall I'll have to dig out that whole bed to get to the yucca roots.
- harvested the shallots, and sowed seeds for autumn vegetables: pumpkins, brussels sprouts, and more beets. The pumpkins are the jack-o-lantern kind, not the eating kind. I'm actually a week or two late on them & they may not be ripe in time for Halloween. Oh well, we'll still enjoy them in November.
The sowing was done this morning, while Georg worked on staking the tomatoes. We hear those cages at Home Depot are useless, so he rigged up this wonderful thing with wooden stakes and twine, which also uses the chain link fence behind to support the plants. Later in day I'll go take a photo of it.
One of the tomato plants isn't doing well at all. We think it isn't getting enough sun, because the tomatillos in front of it got so much taller than expected. I thought they would be the size of peppers, but they're actually 3-4 feet tall and sprawling all over the place. I'm afraid that transplanting the already sad tomato in this heat will kill it. Maybe we should cut back the tomatillos that are blocking the sun.
Still no ripe tomatoes but lots of green ones. The healthiest plant so far is the Super Sweet 100 cherry tomato. The others we can't identify until they ripen, because I stupidly forgot to write down the order in which I planted them. Each little peat pot was carefully labeled, and then I stuck the pots into the ground without noting which was which. Good thing we planted a wide variety of colors and shapes so we will be able to distinguish the ripe fruits.
The zucchini plants are going insane. One of them is starting to encroach on the driveway, but I think I've gently trained it to grow back towards the soil. The squashes are starting to come in more frequently but not faster than we can keep up with eating them.
One of our zucchini plants is a variety with extra big blossoms, and last week Georg made the most wonderful squash blossom soup. I think it was a Rick Bayless recipe and it was yum. The only bad thing about squash blossoms is that the flowers close up in mid-afternoon and bugs tend to get trapped inside. So each flower has to be opened and checked for bugs. I guess this would be a problem if we were stuffing and deep frying them, but that sounds like way too much work.
What's really freaky is when you pick a blossom with a bee trapped inside. I guess the bee gets scared, because the whole flower starts buzzing and vibrating, and you can feel the bee moving around inside. The first time that happened to me, I dropped it and shrieked like a little girl. Okay, every time. At least I mustered enough courage to cut the flower open and let the bee out.