The Spring 2022 Garden Kalendar is composed of edited excerpts from my daily, hand-written garden journal for July-September, 2021--accompanied by occasional commentaries on those passages. The journal records my work in four gardens:
• The Alumni House Garden at Coe;
• A half-acre vegetable garden on a small farm near the Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center (a garden typically identified as the Wickiup garden);
• The gardens and landscape at Buffalo United Methodist, a small church that we attend not far from our home;
• The gardens at my home on Elmhurst Drive in Cedar Rapids.
This Kalendar constitutes about 50% of my journal entries in the third quarter of 2021. In case someone would want to see the layout of the gardens, here are links to maps of the Elmhurst Drive back yard garden and the Wickiup vegetable garden. The Alumni House Garden map is posted on the website’s “map” page. As for the italicized quotations inserted between journal entries, they are passages from Dan Pearson’s Natural Selection: A Year in the Garden, a superb gardening book that I read in 2021. Because of the length of this document, the complete Summer 2022 Kalendar is posted as a pdf. ~Bob
I learned to garden with and not against nature. ~Dan Pearson
1 July (Thursday). Another day when I ignored the Coe garden. It’s now over a week when I’ve done little work there–though I did mow the lawn. The garden needs to take care of itself while I focus on the vegetable garden and the gardens at home. Yesterday after removing all the maps and issues of The Garden Quarto, I did place some ant poison in the box below the message board, an area that was swarming with ants. Tomorrow I’ll see if the ants are either dead or gone.
This morning and again after supper I worked in the back yard. One major step forward is that I may have killed–after 40 years of failure–the tree that has produced an endless succession of saplings at the base of the big maple. Today I used an electric hand saw to remove a huge chunk of the tree’s root system. I’ve never known the species of these saplings, though their leaves would indicate some version of an elm. Tomorrow I plan to fill the cavity of the old maple trunk with a mix of soil, compost, and tree sawdust and then plant something in the cavity--though I’m unsure what this might be.
Toward the back of the yard I assembled a small herb bed parallel with the rhubarb bed I created last fall. In the herb bed, I buried two large plastic pots with a Richters English mint in each one. Also in the bed is a lovage and an English thyme. I spread coconut fibre around each plant and mulch across the surface of the bed. I still have two lovage (started from seed this spring) that are homeless. Since they should require minimal care, I may plant them at the Wickup garden. [All these plants have done well; the lovage at home and at Wickiup have grown to over 6' tall, much larger than I had expected.]
After lunch, I met with Buffalo’s new pastor to discuss the church’s Sunday morning worship bulletins and other publication issues. I volunteered to design and produce the bulletins for the weekly Sunday morning services. I then went to Nelson’s Meats to confirm the catering order for the August 15 church celebration, followed by a trip to the Wickup garden. It was sunny and hot but an occasional breeze from the north made it reasonably comfortable– and I took it slow.
Most notable achievement was in the West Field, where I hoed the potato rows and dumped two wheelbarrow loads of fresh vegetation on the compost pile. I also looked for potato beetles, but they were notably few and far between--mostly solitary adults. I only came across one pair engaged in copulation. The potato cultivation was followed by pulling weeds in the J1 bed in the East Garden, which has two varieties of peas. Thanks to the recent rain, the pea vines look revitalized, but unfortunately the rain has also re-energized the weeds. I did pull up all the old radishes so I can now plant more onions. Concluded the trip by checking out the cucumbers in the R3 bed: the vines are growing and I saw no cuke bugs on plants. So far, so good.
2 July. Morning at home, afternoon at Wickiup, evening at Coe. The morning focused on covering the long east bed with mulch, which first meant laying down newspapers over 2/3 of the bed not yet covered (for weed control) and then covering the papers with the mulch from the pickup. Once the bed was mulched, I watered all the plants–except for the old Baptisia. The bed looks pretty good, though the plants are so small, dwarfed by the space around them. I followed the same procedure with the SE triangle bed, laying down newspapers, and I had enough remaining mulch to cover about 1/3 of the bed. My next task was planting five daylilies–all ones from Bluestone Perennials delivered in the spring of 2020. Somehow they were still a live, a testament to their impressive toughness. They are small and one has just a sliver of a single green blade, but they all appeared to have healthy roots, and they should do okay. I also planted the new hibiscus in the long west bed. It had dried out yesterday and was really drooping, but I watered it twice yesterday and again this morning. It appears to have revived.
In the afternoon I drove to Wickiup. During my last visit, a large blue heron landed on a dead cottonwood limb along the creek, not far from the garden. As I walked to the pickup to get my field scope, he flew away. I watched him effortlessly flapping his wings, gliding to the southeast until he disappeared behind some trees, perhaps a half mile from the garden. Today I had no such visitor–or perhaps I did not look up at the right time. I become so locked in to the tasks before me that I often miss what’s happening around me.
I began today’s gardening with the West Field. I did some weed and grass pulling while checking out the melons and looking for bugs. I harvested four hills of Red Norland potatoes, gathering 30 nicely formed, thin-skinned red potatoes. Also found a few Colorado potato beetles, but I only examined the first row. Back in the East Garden, I weeded the O3 bed with the fingerling potatoes, which had become badly overgrown with tall weeds, including several deep-rooted pig weeds. Saw evidence that mice or moles had been digging tunnels and discovered one fingerling partially eaten. I dug up four hills: found 3-4 potatoes with significant rodent damage, but most of the potatoes were fine. Next job was cleaning up dead pea plants in the J9 bed, where I now have several melons growing. Intended to weed and mulch the “D” bed with the cucumber plants but ran out of time. Before leaving I did harvest some of the thin purple bush beans and picked the garden’s first real tomato of the season: a moderate-sized Lillian’s Yellow Heirloom. Also harvested a few Sungolds and Juliet’s World.
3 July. Doors & windows open, which means my journal writing will be accompanied by the frequent sound of fireworks, including a “cherry bomb” that exploded a few minutes ago. I think home fireworks are illegal inside the city limits, but either I’m wrong or a lot of people are unfamiliar with the city ordinance or they don’t care.
My big accomplishment today was that I assembled the old swing set (the one that miraculously survived the derecho) in the back yard, then disassembled it, tied the pieces to the bed of the Chevy S-10 (including the wooden seat), transported it to the Wickiup garden, and re-assembled it again. After harvesting raspberries, a few green beans, four Mexicana F1 zucchini, and one Cocozelle zucchini, I spent a few minutes enjoying the swing, now positioned east of the young maple tree (that is fighting a terminal illness), and drank iced tea from my thermos. To my back was a gorgeous sunset. The sky was hazy, the result of debris blowing in from wild fires in Western Canada, which is suffering through a long dry spell, their high temps shattering previous records. A cruel irony: their lousy conditions accounting for stunning sunsets several thousand miles away in Iowa.
At home, I continued to work on cleaning up the SE Triangle bed. While removing unwanted grass clumps, I discovered what I initially guessed was a Sioux Blue Indian Grass, but later I found a sign indicating it’s a Panicum Cloud Nine, which does have a bluish foliage. I dug up the clump and will replant it tomorrow–once I decide where it should go. I also started digging the post holes for the framework to support the grapevine. The east hole went without a hitch, but I encountered serious maple tree roots where I wanted to place the west pole. Using the battery hand drill, I managed to cut through the roots, but the hole still needs to go down another foot in depth.
Complete Garden Kalendar: Summer 2022 pdf