Summer                                                                  Hiroshima Moon

Kate and I spent time working in the garden this am.  I plucked out extra beets, collard greens and chard.  Getting a second round of all these underway.  The tomatoes have grown fat, tall and filled with fruit so I got out the plastic tomato handcuffs and cuffed separate stalks to the red metal supports.  Barring a drop in temps (unlikely, eh?) we’ll have a big tomato harvest.  The leeks and potatoes continue strong, dark green.  Both of these develop out of sight, as do the carrots, but the above ground leaves and stems give good evidence of their overall health.

Kate put out water for the bees while I was gone.  A neighbor called and said she had a lot of dead bees in her bird bath.  Not sure it was due to lack of water but it never hurts to add water for them.  I forgot that when I moved them into the orchard.  It’s looking like  this will be a non-honey harvest year which means I’ll have to do the work to  overwinter these colonies, something I did not want to do anymore.   Ah, well.  So much for that management idea.

Kate does a wonderful job of keeping our garden beautiful by fighting the good fight against weeds and other invaders.  She is, as she names herself, “a ninja weeder.”

Beltane                                                          Garlic Moon

Still bagging apples, plums and pears, too.  This seems like a lot of work, but for our size orchard it makes sense.  Whether you could scale it up to commercial orchards I don’t know.  Would depend on access to cheap, competent help at the right time of year.  The rewards are certainly there.  A fruit crop without the worms that come from insects depositing eggs on the fruit’s surface or under its skin.  In a bad year the difference between a decent crop and almost no crop would be the bags.

Each year the land and the plants speak to the gardener.  So a key part of gardening, even critical, is listening skill.  If you don’t hear the news that there is not enough light here, no matter how many7 times you plan the zinnias in the shade you will be disappointed.  If the stunted growth and yellowed leaves of a vegetable doesn’t tell you the soil needs amending, you will not have good vegetable crops.  If wormy fruit doesn’t tell you you need to do something, you’ll have poor apple and pear and plum crops each year.

Kate takes care of another form of communication:  weeds.  Weeds are just a plant out of place so there’s nothing inherently wrong with them.  You just don’t want them there.  Usually natives or imported exotics, weeds are plants that have found what I call a happy home, a place where they can thrive.  That means weeds can crowd out, out feed, sometimes frankly poison plants you want to grown.

Often vegetables and flowers we want to grow are not native to our region, may not even be native to our gardening zone.  Any pressure on their growth makes them more vulnerable to weed competition.  So often time the gardener is in the peculiar position of championing plants that may not want to grow in your particular garden while trying to eliminate those that are perfectly happy there.  Some times you can use natives, many only use natives these days, and they make gardening much simpler.  Since they grow like weeds.

Beltane                                               New Garlic Moon

Hilled the leeks, blanching up as far as possible on the stem creates the best tasting leeks.  Thinned beets and chard.  Checked the garlic.  Soon the scapes will come, curling back on themselves, ready to cut.  I plan to make a garlic scape and leek spaghetti when I harvest them.

This part of gardening is fun, helping the plants mature, watching them carefully as they grow from seed or bulb or crown or transplant into teenagers then young adults and finally become procreative, producing the parts that grace our table through the winter months.

The carrots show no interest in germination, slow pokes as always, needing a soil temp of 75 degrees, something we’ve not reached or at any rate not sustained.  Collard greens and pac choy have not germinated yet either.  The chard has begun to emerge and the onions, all of them, have substantial growth underway.

On the fruit side we’re beginning to see young, still green or white berries on the strawberry plants.