Is it spring yet? Spring travels north at about thirteen miles a day, which is 47.6 feet per minute, or about 1.23 inches per second. That sounds rather fast, and viewable. I start looking for subtle clues and signs in the snowscape. Weeping willow branches have already started to turn yellow, and the tops of distant trees look dusty pink from new buds. A few cardinals have arrived early to claim the best nesting sites before their rivals return, and I swear I heard the steely twang-and-kazoo of a red-winged blackbird. ~Diane Ackerman
Excerpts from Garden Journal, April-June 2020
1 April 2020. Today, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, I was thinking how lucky I am to have my gardens. It was beautiful early spring weather, the Alum Garden with several hundred flowers in bloom, the daffodils ready to explode, emerging buds on the apple and forsythia, and in the midst of this I’m feeling as good as I’ve felt in a long time: no cold or flu, no dizziness, no sinus problems, all my limbs reasonably functional. It was a good day.
Rained off and on this morning so I stayed in the garden shed, catching up on old email and organizing plants that I will be giving away. Between showers, I did clean up some of the “K” bed and moved the two new teakwood benches from the gazebo to the gravel walkway in front of the patio. The garden looks more complete with those benches in place.
In the afternoon to the Wickiup vegetable garden. My first job was laying out more weed control fabric between two beds that will become a row of potatoes and squashes. MVM and I covered the third walkway yesterday, so today I worked on #4. After unrolling the fabric, I moved a bunch of short logs to hold it down. The rest of my Wickiup adventure involved digging up volunteer strawberry plants to give away at Coe. It was a slow process, but I collected over 150 plants and many more are waiting for my return. Most of the plants have strong, healthy-looking roots and should handle the transplant trauma with minimal problems. I also dug up all the volunteer garlic in the western circle bed. Not many faculty or staff asked for garlic, so I’m confident we’ll manage to handle everyone’s request. While digging up the strawberries, I was pleasantly surprised by the high number of earthworms I encountered. It does not appear the earthworm-eating moles have tunneled under the strawberries.
Received in the mail four varieties of potatoes ordered from the Maine Potato Lady. An expensive price tag ($48 for the total order, including shipping), but it’s fun experimenting with varieties not available in Hy-Vee: German Butterball, Rose Finn Apple, Moulin Rouge. In preparation for planting potatoes, I stopped at Frontier and purchased a bag of bonemeal to boost the phosphorus in the soil. I also read recently that one should avoid providing the potatoes with too much nitrogen, which stimulates the potato plant to put its energy into leaves and not roots. [The German Butterball and Rose Finn Apple potatoes did great, but the Moulin Rouge variety was a failure: the plants never grew very large and the 20 hills barely produced 20 small potatoes.]
2 April. A big gardening day, many different tasks. Spent two hours packaging the strawberry plants, garlic, Moses-in-the-cradle, and geraniums that I’m giving away at Coe. Doled out over 150 strawberry plants. When I arrived at Wickiup to dig up more strawberry plants, a male bluebird was in the middle of the garden. As I moved my tools from the pickup to the garden, he flew to a series of different perches and then flew to a wooden bird house in the middle of the adjacent field–where a female was waiting for him. Other tasks at Wickiup included:
• Laid down weed control fabric between the next two potato/squash rows in the West Field and laid a double row of fabric along the east side of the garden (parallel with the road) in an effort to restrain the invasion of the quack grass.
• Transplanted 20+ white and orange onions that had over-wintered.
• Sowed a 4' row of white snow peas and a short row of Cherry Belle radishes (Ferry-Morse seeds, perhaps the first F-M seeds I’ve ever sown). It’s supposed to turn cold and wet tonight, with highs tomorrow in the 30s, but I think the peas and radish seeds should do okay. I did install four square metal cages for the snow peas to climb on.
• Dug up a lot of quack grass–or whatever is the proper name for the aggressive grass with the relentless subterranean runners. It took a long time digging it out of the raised bed with the salsify and the big circular bed next to the compost pile.
One amusing moment this afternoon. While preparing to plant the peas, a car stopped by the garden and the driver yelled something at me. I shouted back that I was hard of hearing and that I would walk over by the car. The driver–a large, elderly gentleman–asked if those were strawberry beds in the garden. I said, “Yes, I have five strawberry beds.” He then said it was a nice looking garden, and he wanted to give me a present. A woman, riding shotgun, thrust toward me a small plastic bag. In the bag was a small knife. The man said the gift was compliments of his quarry company. As he drove off, I noticed in the backseat a younger woman looking back at me and smiling while holding a dog. The gift of the knife reminded me of when my Mom and I were walking by Perkins Hardware on the Main Street of my home town. Ray Perkins came out of the store, congratulated me on recently graduating from the 8th grade, and gave me a present–a penknife. At the time I assumed that Mr. Perkins was a businessman hoping to drum up good will for his hardware business. Only in the past year have I discovered that his father had married my grandmother, who had been a widow for many years. Perhaps he gave me the knife because of the family connection–a relationship he and my mother would have understood but was never explained to me.
Garden Kalendar: Spring 2021