2 June (Saturday). Ten hours at Wickiup [my vegetable garden near Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center]. Arrived this morning a few minutes before 8. Rain and thunder to the north, very close to the garden, but the cell moved further north, leaving a perfect morning for garden work. Temp in 60s, wind out of the east, overcast, almost chilly–what a great contrast with the hot, oppressive temp/conditions of the past week. My work output this morning doubled–only took two short water breaks all morning. As for jobs, it was weeding, weeding, weeding. Cleaned up the second and third strawberry beds, the raised sweet potato beds, several batches of peas, and several raised beds to prepare them for planting, perhaps tomorrow. Also spread a lot of hay/straw; about ½ of the garden paths are now mulched. This should reduce the loss of moisture and eliminate the need for further hoeing this summer.
Notes on crops:
• Harvested a pint of strawberries, the beginning of the peak season. Since it’s been relatively dry, the berries are firm, without any mold, outstanding flavor.
• Harvested nice batch of snow peas, second picking of the spring.
• Today was the first time I’ve found a significant number of potato beetle larvae–probably killed 20 or more. Also killed 4-5 mature beetles, 2 of them copulating.
• Many flea beetles on the eggplants; I need to get them covered for a few days.
• A few tomatoes have blooms; a couple small tomatillos have already formed.
• Four new asparagus plants have appeared, ones planted just two weeks ago.
• Poor germination for peas and carrots planted late.
3 June (Sunday). I did a little work at Coe this morning: mowed grass and hoed a couple of walkways. Big outdoor wedding next Saturday. Since I’ll be in Des Moines on Saturday for the UMC conference, need to do a lot of cleaning up before I leave. MVM wanted to take Joan some flowers so I walked around the garden, looking for cut flower options. At the moment, the Alum Garden is in an early summer doldrums, but I did put together a bouquet with the following: goatsbeard, Husker Red penstemon (many lovely white bloom stalks–at their peak right now), sunflowers, rose campion, feverfew, Siberian iris, London pride (red blooms just opened yesterday), white and blue columbine, pincushions, and fern leaves.
This afternoon to Wickiup, from 2:30 til 7:45. I hoed and cleaned up the bush beans and zucchini beds. Placed newspapers around the SW round bed and covered with hay/straw. Weeded most of the garlic. Cleaned up the raised bed next to the garden gate and planted 7 skin-of-the-toad melons and 5 English long sweet cukes. It was lovely working late into the evening: temp was perfect, golden light streaming across fields, softened by the cottonwoods bordering the creek. As good as it gets, a taste of paradise.
June 4 (Monday). Another beautiful day. Today I only worked at Coe, from 7:30 am to 8:15 pm–though those hours included breaks for lunch and supper. Walked to Coe this afternoon after driving home the Fit so I could get the pickup–with repaired clutch–from Keenan Auto. Repair bill was quite reasonable, though it was tough going two weeks without my Chevy S-10. The Fit worked fine in the interim–though I need to clean it thoroughly before MVM returns from Illinois on Thursday. :)
As for work at Coe, spent a couple of hours trimming branches off three of the corner crab apple trees: bunch of dead branches and a bunch of live branches that were hanging too low, requiring anyone walking on gravel walkways to bend under the limbs or walk on grass. Almost no scab on the flowering crab so far this year: leaves look green, healthy, intact, just a few brown blemishes. I’m wondering if the late cold weather followed by the recent hot and dry conditions inhibited the scab.
Major task remains the work on gravel walkways. I discovered today that the hoeing I’ve been doing is often leaving many of the small weeds unimpaired, with roots still firmly anchored in that hard, clay soil under the gravel. I started working on my hands and knees so I can have a clearer picture of the surface, scraping small rocks back from an area, exposing the tiny plants without the protection of the gravel. I’ve done no raking for the last four days. Tomorrow I will start raking the gravel smooth and use the broom to sweep clean the red brick borders.
As I noted yesterday, not many flowers currently in bloom. But the daylilies are beginning to open up. Perhaps by Saturday the garden will be more colorful. Today, I did see my first swallowtail of the year. Might have spotted a Monarch, but it was across the garden and too skitterish for me to see definitively. I also found a robin’s nest at the top of a pillar holding up a corner of the pergola. The robin was squawking at me; later I saw the robin sitting in the nest. Tomorrow I’ll try to get a photo before the robin tries to drive me away.
5 June (Tuesday). Nice day, though warmer and more humid than yesterday. High temp probably in low 90s. At Coe all morning, doing same old jobs: hoeing gravel walkways, digging up dandelions and sedge (Carex vulgaris). One big task today was transporting plants from 3rd floor Peterson to Coe garden, moving everyone except the Big Ficus and the ponytail palm. I also cut off more limbs from crab apples, pruned the espalier, and trimmed about 1/3 of the yews. And I continued attacking the walkways, trying to remove grass and weeds from the crevices between red bricks around walkways. Slow, tedious work.
I didn’t get out to Wickiup until after 4:00 pm, working there til 7:30. I pulled out weeds from zucchini row, killed potato beetles larvae (so far their damage has been minimal), weeded the pepper plants (they looked okay), and watered the melons and cukes I transplanted two days ago (they looked unhappy–a lot of scorched leaves on the English cukes and two melon plants are not going to make it). Harvested nice crop of snow peas and 1/3 gallon of strawberries. In the latter bed I spied a tiny rabbit. I got my trusty hoe and chased it out of the bed, pursuing it around the garden, periodically swinging the hoe in the rabbit’s direction. By some miracle I managed to hit it. After killing the rabbit, I dumped it along the side of the road, providing someone an easy lunch. Returning to the strawberries, I killed three more young rabbits and dumped them with their sibling. I hated to kill the bunnies, but I don’t want to be growing food for a family of rabbits. I never did see the mother.
6 June (Wednesday). “For everything there is a season. . . a time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted.” As for today, it was a time to pluck up what nature planted in the gravel walkways–8 hours of plucking up. I’m reminded of a passage I recently read in Richard Mabey’s The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination: “Everywhere I have travelled plants have surprised me by their dogged loyalty to place, even to the point of defining the genius loci, and then by their capricious abandonment of home comforts to become vagrants, opportunists, libertines.” While I wish the walkways’ vagrant, opportunistic libertines would give up the ghost, throw in the towel, move to another “loci,” I remain impressed by their determination to thrive in such a seemingly inhospitable, gravelly environment.
7 June (Thursday). Another hot, sultry day: weather feels more like August than June, and still no rain (missed the rain last evening that was west of C.R.). This morning I taught my class on the parables so no gardening this morning–except for weeding Coe’s raised herb bed before going to the church. In afternoon I went to Wickiup. Watered the skin-of-toad melons: 3 have died; 4 still alive. Lost all the long sweet English cuke plants. Too hot and dry; I should have provided them some temporary shade. Most of my time at Wickiup was weeding two raised beds where I had planted carrots. Discovered a few carrots hidden in the grass and amaranth. I watered them–as I also did one row of beets, which looked wilted. Killed by hand a lot of potato beetle larvae. Watered the eggplants under the floating protective cloth, which appears to be working. Plants looked good; didn’t see any flea beetles. After watering I recovered them. I saw a lot of flea beetles on the potato leaves, but as far I can tell, they don’t do any significant damage to the plants.
8 June (Friday). Still no rain–though we’re surrounded by thunderstorms. If it doesn’t rain tomorrow, I’ll need to start some serious watering at Coe. Most of today was spent at Coe, cleaning up walkways. Temp was bearable, but it was humid, and I worked up a serious sweat this afternoon, pushing myself to finish before tomorrow’s big wedding. At least for a few hours the walkways are the best they’ve ever been since I started working in the garden. I did a lot of cleaning between the bricks that border the walkways, all of that work on my hands and knees, close up, so I could see what I was doing.
After supper MVM and I went to Wickiup for about 90 minutes. She harvested snow peas and shelling peas while I crushed potato bug larvae–perhaps 150 of them–slow, unpleasant work. I took the cover off of the eggplants–they were mostly free of flea beetles and the plants look good. We then picked over a gallon of strawberries. I ate a few as I was picking them: juicy, delicious, fragrant, nice size, darn near perfect. We also harvested some speckled romaine, Hopi Red amaranth, and black-seeded simpson and red sail lettuce. Unfortunately, all the spinach has bolted–but it provided a lot of greens the past two months.