February 2024: The First Signs of Spring

The first flowers are stirring in my garden. I saw my first crocuses around February 9, the first daffodil followed around February 20, and the snowdrops jumped in somewhere in between. One of my hellebores was probably blooming even before the end of January, but it is located pretty far back in my garden and it took a while for its low, nodding blooms to move above the leaf clutter. By February’s end, my other hellebores were blooming, too. I also have shoots of garlic showing above the leafy mulch in their bed, promising that the garlic has spent the winter growing underground. I’m always tempted to photograph every new crocus that blooms. I have different varieties scattered all around my yard, so it’s always a surprise to see another pop of color appear in one place then the next. After months of drabness, each one is a small celebration.

September 2023: Bugs and Blooms Abounding

September in my garden was hot and dry. I think we got less than a half inch of rain all month, so I had to water often. Thanks to those efforts, my plants stayed happy enough, along with the menagerie of bugs living on them.

Most of my fruits and vegetables quietly did their thing all month. The sweet potatoes grew ever-bigger, so hopefully there’s a good crop under all the vines. I’ll find out after the first frost when the plants will die and I’ll dig everything up. My mass of melons kicked out a ripe one for me every so often. This year they’re on a trellis next to the sidewalk in the side yard, so it’s been easier to monitor them. In previous years I’d had trouble knowing when they were ripe, but this year I finally cracked the code. The ones with netted skins drop off the vine when they’re ripe, so if I keep an eye out I can collect them off the ground soon after they’ve fallen. The non-netted variety doesn’t drop off when ripe, but it does start to smell super melon-y and turns slightly tan in color when it’s ready to eat.

My squashes have been slowly maturing on the plants. I got one butternut that had mostly finished maturing before the plant died, but the big successes came from the zucchino rampicante squash plants. When mature their squashes are a lot like butternuts, but when they’re young they can be eaten like zucchini. These plants grew and grew and grew. I got three huge squashes from them in September (the largest of these is almost 30 inches long!) and now they’re working on a couple more fruits. I didn’t need something like a zucchini during the window of time when they were young and tender, so I didn’t eat them that way. Now the new squashes are at a point where I think they’re too tough to eat like a zucchini but not mature enough to harvest like a butternut, so I’m hoping the weather holds out long enough for them to fully mature.

My lima beans have also grown and grown and grown. I’ve been picking the pods as they dry. I should also pick some to eat fresh as a supper side dish, but it takes quite a bit of picking and shelling to get enough for a side dish, so I haven’t felt like I’ve had time. Meanwhile, my tomatoes have not looked great. Four of the seven varieties that I planted really struggled and haven’t produced much since early August, but the remaining three varieties have done their best to make up for that. Thanks to them, I’ve had sufficient but not bounteous tomatoes this year.

Meanwhile, bugs and blooms have abounded, particularly thanks to my native plants. I’ve been watching for monarch caterpillars on my swamp milkweed all summer. I finally saw one on September 3rd and I was excited to see it would grow into a butterfly in my yard. I went to check on it the next day and found a green Carolina mantis instead, so I suspect that the caterpillar was eaten. That was sad, but on the bright side I spotted the mantis all around my garden during September. She soon settled into the plains coreopsis at the entrance to our side yard. She was beautifully camouflaged there, and I checked on her every time I passed by. One evening, I discovered her laying an egg case on the fence. She stuck around for a few more days after that before disappearing for good. I hope I see her children next year. There was a second, brown Carolina mantis that spent time on the blazing star and Illinois bundleflower where she was particularly well camouflaged. I saw her regularly, but not as often as the green one.

In addition to the mantises, I saw a nice selection of butterflies, katydids, spiders, and other insects. I know that I notice more of them because I’m taking pictures of the flowers and that makes me look more closely. I think I’ve identified all of them below, thanks to Google image searches.

August 2023: Bountiful Blooms

Since John and I were on vacation for two weeks in August, I thought my garden update for the month would be short. Not so! There were still many things to photograph with lots of great colors and textures everywhere. Flowers were blooming, plants were fruiting, and there were interesting bugs hanging out everywhere if I just looked closely enough.

A serious bonus was that my garden got a good amount of rain while we were gone, so the plants were able to take care of themselves. When it’s dry and I need to water things myself, it usually takes me a whole day to do that. It’s nothing I want to ask someone else to do, so I just leave and hope for the best. Most summers things get brown and crispy, but this summer things were still in great shape when we got home. It was nice to come home to everything well-watered naturally for once!

We got home just in time for a “heat dome.” Actual air temperatures were around 100 degrees and the humidity brought the “feels like” temperature up about 120 degrees. It was horribly hot. My garden made it through just fine, and so did the outdoor cats. Temperatures were 20 degrees cooler in Michigan during that time, so we wished we were still up there but were glad to be home to monitor everything and everyone. I do think the heat supercharged the sweet potatoes, lima beans, and zucchino rampicante squash. They, in particular, have exploded.

I can tell fall is approaching. Summer-blooming native plants have gone to seed. Late summer blooms like the blazing star have just begun. The monarch butterflies are visiting. The tomatoes are getting tired. Soon enough the leaves will turn and it will be time to pick the squash and lima beans. With a little frost, it will be time to harvest the sweet potatoes as well.

July 2023: Blooms, Fruit, Bugs, and Brutal Heat

July was dry and very hot, but in looking through my photos I realized it was also filled with plenty of happy blooms and happy bugs crawling on them. (I was not happy with many of those happy bugs, though!)

My garden in front of the house is filled with mostly native prairie plants and it really exploded in July. I had a lot of coneflowers blooming along with some coreopsis and an Illinois bundleflower. The bundleflower is a plant I bought without really knowing much about it. I got it from the Master Gardeners, but the Master Gardeners who happened to be there selling it didn’t know anything about it. It turns out that it’s a pretty interesting plant. It has wonderfully feathery leaves that fold up at nighttime. It has puffy little white flowers that turn into amazing “bundled” seedpods. You’ll see plenty of it in the photos below. Many bees, butterflies, and other insects have visited all of these flowers.

Meanwhile my vegetable garden has exploded from meager starts to plants spreading to fill all the space available. One that’s doing amazingly well at that is the zucchino rampicante squash. Its vines keep going and going while also setting several huge squashes. I got the seeds from a friend who said it was impervious to squash vine borers, which has been the case this summer. I also have a butternut squash that hasn’t done quite as well, but it hasn’t been done in by the borers, so that’s a win. Both squashes are favored food of squash bugs, so I’ve done daily patrols to try to pull off the squash bug eggs before they have a chance to hatch. So far I’ve avoided an infestation, but I’m not letting my guard down.

My lima beans and sweet potatoes are also growing nicely. They love the heat, so they have been in their element. Another happy grower is a cucumber. I’d picked a new variety to grow this year. It’s a French pickling cucumber, and I thought it would give me cute little cucumbers like you often see pickled whole. Well, they’re cute but they’re covered with black spines so I don’t really want to touch them, and then they grow big and are still covered with spines so I really don’t want to touch them. Unfortunately that means they’re just getting big and ugly on the vines without me picking them. Oh, well. I won’t grow them again.

My tomatoes have been a mix of good and bad. Several plants had some kind of problem and shriveled up and mostly died. I didn’t put much effort into figuring out which of the many, many things might have caused this, though there were a bunch of stink bugs hanging out on one of the plants that died. I started picking them off during my daily bug patrols. The bug patrols also included picking a lot of Japanese beetles off of my azaleas, raspberries, blackberries, and bundleflower. Other tomato plants in my garden have been happy, so I’ve gotten plenty of nice tomatoes to eat.

It’s also been blackberry season. The blackberries have ripened nicely and haven’t been too bothered by the birds or bugs. It helps that they ripen around the same time that our neighbor’s black cherry tree ripens, so the birds are really distracted with cherries and miss the blackberries. I usually realize the cherries are ripe when I hear a wild hullabaloo high up in the tree next door and realize there’s a feeding frenzy going on. Clearly the cherries are some prime eating!

Things were hot and pretty dry all July. I watered every week. However, it was at the end of the month that things got really brutal. When the “heat dome” blasted through our area we had temperatures at or near 100 degrees, extremely high humidity, and heat indexes well over 110. We monitored the outdoor cats, who were clearly very hot but were able to manage. They had plenty of water, food, and shady spots. The plants seemed to manage, too.

Below you can watch a video garden tour from mid-July and see a little bit of everything that was growing in July!

A Cat a Day: July 21

Ladies Morgaine and Ygraine

June 2023: Dry, Dry, Dry, Smoky, RAIN!

June was incredibly dry. I watered my garden every single week, and while that technically should have provided enough moisture, there’s nothing like real rain to keep things happy. I always feel a little like my watering is like keeping the plants on life support–they survive but don’t really thrive the way they would with rain. June was dry enough to officially qualify as “abnormally dry,” which is one step away from being a “moderate drought.”

In addition to the lack of rain, we had poor air quality because of the Canadian wildfire smoke. There were a few days toward the beginning of June when we were in the “orange” zone. I spent one “orange” zone day working outdoors in my garden and thought it was ok until the next day when my throat was scratchy. At the end of June we had worse air. We were in the “red” zone and almost in the “purple” zone. The wildfire smoke was bad enough to affect visibility, plus it was hot and humid. I tried not to go out in it.

A couple rounds of rain passed us by, including one that resulted in absolutely magnificent cloud formations. Then on the second-to-last day of the month we had several rounds of serious storms that knocked out power across the city (including our house for several hours) and dumped 2″ of rain in only a few hours. Our basement started to flood. There was tree damage across the city. It was awful. We got another 1″-2″ of rain over the following few days, and still we’re categorized as “abnormally dry.”

In between all of that, there’s been plenty going on in my garden. I continue to be plagued by critters. One noon I looked out the back door and saw a stocky, brown form dart across the back yard. It was a woodchuck and it headed toward my raspberries. I screamed from the surprise of it. I haven’t seen a woodchuck around here in many, many years, though there’s a hole in the neighbor’s yard that I’ve been suspicious of for a while. Additionally, we have at least one possum who stops by in broad daylight to snack on cat food. We’ve also had a lot of raccoon activity all over the back yard–pulling up my potted plants, digging though all my garden beds, upturning plants, and scavenging for any stray cat food crunchie. I’d be happy if they all just went away.

In my garden, I’ve had a long parade of purple coneflower blooms. They’re not full of frills, but they are very happy, easygoing flowers. They’re right next to my favorite grey-headed coneflowers, which are delicate and sunny. The two mixed together make me really smile. Other blooms have included a mass of lilies whose perfume is intoxicating. They’re on the far side of the house where I don’t see them every day, so it’s always their scent that announces that their spectacular blooms have arrived. Additionally, there was a wonderful mixture of other blooms. Look through the photos below to see them.

At the beginning of the month, I still hadn’t planted my sweet potatoes, even though it was time. The problem was that the raised bed where I wanted to put them was full of garlic that was close to mature but not quite. An additional complication was that I had dramatically increasing numbers of tree of heaven shoots coming up in that raised bed, betraying the fact that the tree had a fully grown root system in the bed. Any break in any root meant a new tree would shoot up. Unfortunately, harvesting sweet potatoes involves breaking a lot of roots. If I did nothing, pretty soon I’d have a raised bed full of these horribly invasive, nasty, growing a-mile-a-minute trees.

I decided I needed to do everything I could to reduce the amount of roots, so I figured there was no way around digging through the bed to locate and rip out tree of heaven roots. I thought it would be a really rough job, but it was worse than that. I dug through every inch of that bed on my hands and knees, feeling for tree roots, following them through the bed, and ripping them out. It took several hours, and it was brutal work. Hopefully I was successful in slowing the tree of heaven down.

I’d hoped to spare the garlic planted in the bed so it could grow for a few more weeks, but in the end there were so many roots to remove that I couldn’t save the garlic. I harvested it just a little earlier than I’d intended, but it still looked ok. I had a second patch of garlic in my other vegetable bed that I was able to wait a few weeks to harvest. It had grown better anyway, and looked pretty good as I pulled it out of the ground. Its absence leaves space for the tomatoes and squashes to grow.

A June highlight for me was that it was the start of berry season. First my red raspberries fruited. I don’t know of anywhere around here where I can get them, and I love them, so having my own personal patch makes me happy. Unfortunately, the birds quickly moved in and started eating them, so I covered them in bird net and strung some Mylar “flash tape” that flashes red and silver in the breeze to scare the birds. With red raspberries being such a precious commodity, I wasn’t willing to share them with the birds. Less than two weeks later, I had to pull the bird net off so I could get better access to the plants after the Japanese beetles moved in. Sigh. Still, I got a nice harvest.

Toward the end of June, the blueberries were in season. I love to eat them and I don’t mind picking them, so I always pick a whole lot and freeze most of them for later. Last year, I needed to find a new place to pick because the place I’d gone for years had closed. I tried a couple local farms last year and one new one this year before deciding that I just need to switch to Decker’s, which is about 45 minutes north of Evansville. They have a huge field and the berries are delicious. I went there three times so far and my freezer is stuffed.

Overall, it was a pretty good, though dry, June!

April 2023: Greening Again

My garden really began to green up and fill out in April. Plenty of things had already begun to emerge from the ground in March, but the blooms and leaves really started to pop in April. You can get a sense of the progression of things in the photos below.

In April, the redbud ended its blooms and added its ever-lovely heart-shaped leaves. Multiple kinds of ferns sent tendrils out of the ground to unfurl in a multitude of sculptural ways. Epimediums sent their delicate, fairy-flower blooms up above new leaves that later spread to catch raindrops. Astrilbe leaves emerged with delicately-cut, feathery edges. Young wild ginger and hardy begonia leaves shimmered almost glittery when the sunlight hit them. My favorite bright orange tulips exploded across the garden under the maple tree. The irises were began their show. New growth and bright colors were everywhere. The one exception, though, were the azaleas out front that are missing a lot of their leaves after the unusually cold weather at Christmas. Time will tell if the bushes recover. They still managed to put on a nice show of color, but they promise to look very bare once the flowers fall.

Meanwhile in my vegetable gardening, the garlic powered onward in both of my main vegetable beds. I’m hoping I can find ways to fit other vegetables around it before it’s ready to harvest in June. I started some lettuce in a couple other beds, but it grew very slowly, so it’s also still taking up space at a time when I had hoped it would be grown and picked. My sweet potato, tomato, melon, and squash starts are growing nicely indoors and are past ready to go out, but are destined to fit around the garlic and lettuce.

May will bring much more planting and new plants in the spaces that April created.

March 2023: In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lion

The saying goes that if March comes in like a lion it will go out like a lamb, and if it comes in like a lamb it will go out like a lion. Well, this March was bookended by tornado warnings. It’s also been pretty consistently rainy, so I haven’t been able to get into my garden to get any work done. I have not enjoyed this weather very much, though at our house we got through it all without serious damage.

The worst of the March storms for us came on March 3 when we had a tornado warning that included downtown Evansville. Tornados did touch down in the Evansville area, but at our house it was just the damaging winds. The Weather Service reported that we had 50-70 mph wind gusts. They were strong enough that we had a big branch break in the magnolia tree. I heard it crack and fall as I headed to the basement. My weather station isn’t very high up, so the wind speeds are never really accurate, but I will say that before that day I’d never seen it register a wind speed over 18. On the 3rd, its peak windspeed was 27. The storm also included at least three inches of rain and the all-time lowest recorded barometric pressure for our area. Even after the storms moved through, the very strong wind blew and blew and blew for hours. It was unrelenting.

Other than the storms, we had some warm days and then some cool days and then warm and then cold. I was grateful that the magnolia tree’s early blooms reached their peak before the cold weather moved in and edged their blooms in brown. Looking back, I like the look. In the later half of the month, we had lows in the 20’s, and that completely froze the magnolia petals, turning them completely brown while preventing them from falling off the tree. They’re still stuck on the tree and don’t look very attractive at all.

In March my late crocuses finished blooming and my daffodils began theirs. The hellebores grew and developed nicely. The two larger hellebores expanded and filled out beautifully. The two smaller plants were almost destroyed by slugs, but once I figured out that they were under attack and gave a counter attack, they each produced a single, fancy flower. I love the white flower with magenta dots, but I also like the way the light came through the all-pink double bloom.

By the end of the month, the hops was up, and so were the ferns. The redbud was budding. Also, enough green stuff was popping up everywhere to give everything a decidedly fresh, green color. In terms of edible plants, my garlic started to emerge, and it looks like most of what I planted survived. I also started my tomato plants under a couple grow lights.

February 2023: Something New Every Day

I began February feeling like things were a little behind. Often I will see my first crocus blooms by the last couple weeks of January, but there was no sign of them this year. I have several very early varieties of crocus, and I love the little hints of spring that they bring to my yard just as the brown, cold, dull winter is starting to feel tiresome. It always impresses me to find their blooms shining among the dry leaves in January.

January is also the time when I typically see the fresh hellebore leaves and blossoms emerge from the ground. They sort of crawl out of the earth with tight, dark knots of leaves and buds. Slowly their leaves expand and the blooms open. Typically, the blooms face downward, but as the days pass their flower stalks grow longer and the flowers rise higher and lift a little more skyward. Still, they’re tricky to admire and tough to photograph. They’re beautiful flowers, though.

Not seeing any blooms, I was starting to get a little worried. But then in the first full week of February I spotted my first crocus, followed by the second only a few days later. Soon, the hellebores were showing signs of emergence. Spring was underway! From that point, things started to move along quickly, picking up more and more speed as they went. Every day while Perry and I were out on our walk, I would notice a new crocus blooming, new hellebores appearing, new leaves, and finally the first signs that my garlic made it through the winter and was sprouting happily. Some of my favorite surprises were the reticulated irises that I always forget about until I suddenly see their delicate blooms in my garden.

Some of my daily surprises happened indoors, like my Venus flytrap that I’ve managed to keep happy for nearing a year. It’s even blooming now! Also blooming is an orchid that I haven’t gotten to flower in a while. Outdoors, I heard a series of sweet little birdcalls and realized that after almost 15 years I finally had a couple of chickadees gracing my yard. They’re such sweet little energetic birds with such a crisp black and white color scheme. I’ve always loved them. They joined my usual flock of tufted titmice, cardinals, and juncos along with the ever-present house finches, house sparrows, and starlings.

February ended with a bang–the magnolia tree going into full bloom. It felt very early to see such an explosion of flowers. Looking back through several years of my garden photos, this does look like this may be the earliest it’s bloomed. A couple other years it bloomed a week or two later than it’s blooming now, but most years it was blooming a full month later than now. I’m just glad that this early bloom didn’t get caught in a freeze!

Even with everything popping up on a daily basis during February, there’s still more to come in March. I’ve had quite a few pleasant surprises already this month. And I’ve gotten my vegetable garden started indoors. At the end of February I started my tomato seeds and started some of last year’s sweet potatoes sprouting. By March, I was seeing signs of sprouts. Stay tuned!

November 2022: Final Harvests

Remarkably, the month of November began still with no killing frost or freeze. We came close very early on, so I harvested all the tomatoes I could find along with all of my sweet potatoes. It’s always interesting to see what I have growing underground in the sweet potato patch. The vines looked healthy this year, but did they produce sweet potatoes? The answer was yes! I got a good harvest and can tell that there are several varieties represented in that harvest. Some have orange flesh and some are all purple, but, as in previous years, the best grower was a Japanese variety that has purple skin and dry, white flesh. They’re all tasty.

I’ve been growing the sweet potatoes in a raised bed that contains sandy soil, so to harvest them I just reach my hands into the earth and feel around for the lumps of potato. The whole process is a lot of work, particularly because I have to dismantle my Boo Boo butt shield (aka: the metal hoops covered in bird net to keep the cats out because…you know…sandy soil). I let the sweet potatoes cure for a few weeks and then we roasted some to sample. They were excellent.

That same weekend I also raked up all the leaves on the ground. I wanted to make sure to do it before they started to break apart and smother the grass under them. They were still wonderfully fluffy and colorful when I raked them, which made them much easier to deal with. Normally the leaves would be coming off the trees a little after we had a frost, so I’d just get my leaf blower out and blow the leaves into my garden beds to decompose over the winter. This year, however, everything was still growing when the leaves came down, so I bagged them all up to store temporarily. I’ll spread them on my garden beds as I clear those beds out for the winter. I got 15 big bags of leaves, including some nice maple leaves I raked up from my neighbor’s house!

The cold snap didn’t materialize as early as first expected, but from the forecasts it was certain to arrive in the third week of November, so I picked one final round of lima beans and tomatoes before it hit. For the record, I picked them all on November 11 with weather so pleasant I didn’t need to wear a jacket. Then on November 12 we had a surprise snowfall followed by frigid temperatures. Finally all of the summer’s growth stopped in my garden. Sadly for me, the snowfall occurred on the one day I was out of town visiting friends, so I missed it! Hopefully this won’t be the one and only snowfall of the year, but that’s exactly what happened a few years ago.

In my absence, I told John to take my camera out and capture some images of the snow on top of green, blooming plants. He did, so all the photos below with snow in them are thanks to him. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of still-vibrant plants frozen under snow. The concern that this raises is whether the plants will be damaged by the quick change from temperature highs in the 70’s to a stretch with lows in the 20’s. That other year that I mentioned earlier when the only snow came in November, we had a similar shift in temperature and my plants were damaged because they hadn’t gone through their normally gradual autumnal shutdown. Adding to the potential plant stress this year was the fact that our area’s moderate drought continued into November. In fact, we got only about three-quarters of an inch of rain for the entire month. I tried to counteract this by watering up until the freeze.

After the snow and cold weather finally killed things off, I was able to start clearing this year’s plants out of my garden and start planting for next year. I reworked the soil in my main raised bed for vegetables, adding leaves and stirring things around with a broadfork, then I planted my garlic. The garlic went in a little later than I thought was best, but I’d wanted to get the area cleared and the soil turned and couldn’t do that as easily until things had died back. Time will tell whether it was ok to wait.

Only at the end of the month did the plants finally start to settle back into the earth, with leaves and fruits gradually losing their shapes and colors. Meanwhile, I still had bright, fresh garden tomatoes to enjoy indoors! They’d ripened nicely in a bowl on my counter. It was pretty remarkable to have fresh garden produce at the end of November.