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.

Beltane                                                          Beltane Moon

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
–  Omar Khayyám

When we began life here in Andover, we decided we would like cut flowers in our home as often as possible, especially during the growing season.  We’ve not always cut them, but we sure have grown them.  Kate brought me two vases just a moment ago, one with fragrant lilacs and the other early purple iris and late, yellow daffodils.

To do this over the course of the growing season, that is, cut flowers for inside, requires planning for perennials that bloom throughout. (I’m not much of an annual guy, though Kate buys some each year.) Not always an easy task.  I still have some lacunae, late June and late July.  Finding fall bloomers that would survive here was a task for a while but asters and monkshod and clematis fill in with the help of the occasional fall-blooming crocus.

Beltane                                                                            Beltane Moon

Just looked back over my last several posts and realized my not so happy face stares out of most of them.

Feeling a little fragmented, not focused.  Not that things aren’t getting done.

Yesterday I planted tomatoes and peppers.  A bit early, maybe.  But the predicted lows look pretty hopeful.  Up here in Andover we land in the southern reaching tongue of Minnesota that has a predicted last frost date of May 22-28.  At least according to Bruce Watson and son’s Minnesota weather calendar.  Today I planted chard, collard greens and carrots.  Tomorrow pac choy and some more collard greens.

To plant the carrots I had to replant several lilies in our longest raised bed.  Seven or eight years ago I went to a lily sale at the Mn. Landscape Arboretum and purchased a number of lily varieties grown by Minnesotans.  I planted them in this bed as  part of a cut flower garden, before we turned it over to vegetables.  The lilies love this bed.  They have multiplied like crazy and now get in the way of the section of the bed I want to use for leeks and carrots.

Planting carrots, as those of you who have done it know, requires patience.  The seeds are tiny and getting them to come out of the hand one at a time is not easy.  Still, they’re in the soil now.

We decided to plant crops that we store over the winter so this year we’re focusing on onions, carrots, chard, beets, collard greens, potatoes and tomatoes.  In September I’ll plant next year’s garlic crop, too.

We also have a number of fruits on the way: raspberries, strawberries, apples, cherries, currants, blueberries and wild grapes.

Now is the time of watching the weather, scanning for bugs and disease, nurturing the plants.  Attending to the crops.