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!

October 2020: Delayed Frosts

Green was still the predominant color in my garden at the start of October, but a few browns had begun arrive by the end of the month. 

At the start of October, the nighttime temperatures finally started to stay below 50 degrees, so that was when I brought in my houseplants. Indoors, they joined a blooming orchid that I got on my birthday from my friend Alan quite a few years ago. Alan died this spring. It hasn’t bloomed in the time since I first received it, so it seems appropriate that it would bloom again around my birthday this year to remind me of him.

At the same time that I brought in my houseplants, I cut all my basil, since it also doesn’t tolerate cooler weather well. I made a delicious pesto from the basil. Most of the pesto went into the freezer for later, but some stayed out and made a great pizza topping. We spread it as a base layer on the pizza crust and then added fresh mozzarella and salami. 

I picked what I thought would be the final tomatoes and Mexican sour gherkins for the year on October 15th, but the predicted frost didn’t come and everything was able to grow for a little longer. However, by the 24th I decided that, frost or no frost, things were looking really ragged and I needed to clear the tomatoes so I would have space to get my garlic in the ground. 

I harvested one more bowl of tomatoes and gherkins, plus my now-dry cowpeas and lima beans, and then I pulled out the mass of plants in my main raised bed. Then I added some compost and planted my garlic.

In the end, the entire month passed without a frost or freeze. It was cool enough that most everything had taken on a golden brown glow by the end of the month, and there was not a lot of rain, so the plants were getting dry, but without a frost most everything stayed alive and blooming and plenty of green remained everywhere. 

And separately, I’d been wondering about our critter visitors so I put my cameras out for a few days in October. The best thing I caught was an interaction between a raccoon and Spike the cat. Bottom line: Spike knows the value of a heated cat house, and no one better be sticking their nose inside of his!

August 2020: Now We’re Cooking

The first two weeks of August were officially my vacation, but it was mostly a “staycation” this year. My garden was glad for that. It meant that there weren’t the usual multi-week stretches when the sun is hot but I’m not around to keep everything hydrated. It really helped everything continue to grow nicely.

Continuing on last month’s theme, August brought further expansion of my vegetable jungle. It’s been several years since I had this kind of happy mass. It’s not good gardening, but I love its energy. Unfortunately a little melon got lost in all the green and I didn’t see it until it was smashed on the ground. A second melon disappeared (raccoons???) just before I was going to pick it. A third melon was deformed, but I grabbed it before the raccoons could. It was crisp and refreshing, even if I got barely three spoonfuls out of it. One squash escaped to the neighbor’s yard. Another made me a lovely fruit.

We’ve been eating well using produce from my garden. John and I made several rounds of pizza using my tomatoes and basil. I also got some peaches from a local orchard and made a new peach dessert with a wonderfully crispy sugar top. I made a tomato sauce for tuna (not pictured). And John and I set aside time to make corn fritters and tomato gravy. They take more work than most of the things we cook, but they taste like summer on a plate. Here’s the full recipe as my mom wrote it down. I shared it in a previous post.

I also made refrigerator pickles using my little Mexican sour gherkins. I decided to grow them just for fun. Cucumbers have grown well in my garden, even if they’re not among my favorite vegetables, so I try different varieties from year to year. These are definitely high on the fun factor, and they make neat little pickles. I may grow them again next year.

Aside from the vegetables, I’ve had a nice assortment of blooms. Included are a massive milkweed (I love the blocky details on each flower) and surprise lilies (aka naked ladies). I think it’s interesting to drive around Evansville when the surprise lilies are up. They’re so ubiquitous. Here, there, and everywhere you’ll find one, two, or a small row of these gaudy flowers on their tall stalks. More often than not, they’re popping out of seemingly random spots in lawns: 3/5ths of the way up a walkway and a little off-center. I’m glad to have a few myself so I can be part of the spectacle.

July 2020: First Fruits

July began with a new mixture of plants just beginning. At the start of the month, several varieties of beans were emerging from the ground. The first few tomatoes had formed, but remained quite green. My wild garden on the east side of the house had buds on several native plants. Squash, melons, and cucumbers happily stuck to their own supports.

By the end of the month, I had blackberries, colorful native plant blooms, and a massive explosion of squash/melons/tomatoes/cucumbers. It’s been many years since everything was healthy and happy enough to create that kind of entwined explosion, so it makes me happy to have one again. I know it’s not really an example of how you’re supposed to garden, though.

All of this was punctuated by good food, a massive construction project in the empty lot behind my house, and a storm at sunset on the Evansville riverfront. And raccoons. A big family with four juveniles has been terrorizing the entire neighborhood. I set up my cameras to try to get a sense of what they were doing and how often they were at my house. Here’s a compilation of the “best” footage I got over several nights. It also includes footage of Spike’s reaction to the raccoons and of Spike and Boo Boo being cute. Also thanks to the cameras I now know that Perry likes to carry his toy around at night.

*As a reminder: Click on any photo below to get more of a description of what’s happening in it.

Rare Harvests

I have figs! I have figs!

Perhaps six years ago, I got to taste a fig straight off a friend’s fig tree. It was the most unique and amazing flavor. I decided I wanted to grow my own, and so the saga began.

The winters here are borderline for growing figs. The first winter mine all died. The second winter I wrapped them in burlap and moved them to a protected corner of the yard. And they still died. I thought.

After I planted new ones, the roots of the previous years’ sprouted fresh. That winter I brought them inside when it got below 20 degrees outside, but then it stayed cold and they stayed indoors and came out of dormancy. They leafed out and sprouted fruits but didn’t get enough light and the tiny figs fell off.

Last winter I brought them inside when it got below 15 degrees outside, but got them back outside quickly. The winter didn’t have too many cold snaps, and they happily started growing at the first signs of spring. Like every other year, this summer they were nice and green and leafy. Unlike other years, I saw figs forming!

I held my breath, ready for the figs to drop too early, but, no! They turned dark and heavy with sugar. Would the flavor be as extraordinary as I remembered?

Yes indeed.

Another rare harvest is the butternut squash. I got four small ones off of that volunteer vine! It looks like it’s true that the squash vine borers don’t like butternut squash because the vines never succumbed. I will definitely plant more in the future. The only problem came when we brought Larry the cat inside after he’d spent a month roaming my garden. It only took a week before the squirrels were making a mess of it.

I’ve also harvested a couple melons (one too early, sadly), the corn is looking good from a distance but aphids have damaged the ears, the okra is blooming (really the flowers are the main reason I grow okra!), I’m collecting one blackberry at a time in the hope of having enough to make jam (though with Larry the cat outside, the birds and squirrels left me more berries this year), the beans finally started to amount to something, the flowers are blooming, and tomatoes continue to ripen (although I have yet to taste some of the most intriguing varieties including Dragon’s Eye and Cosmic Eclipse).

Larry the cat has been doing OK in his life indoors. He is a difficult cat, which we anticipated when we brought him in. He has tons of energy, he is a gawky teenager, and his brain seems to short out regularly which results in people being bitten. He’s loving, too.

This morning I felt like I bargained for his soul. It turns out that he belonged to the relative of a neighbor but had come to live with the neighbor when the relative lost her apartment. No one at his new home could stand him indoors, so they put him outside. Then he disappeared for the last week and everyone was worried.

I told them we’d taken him to the vet and were treating him for problems that the vet had found. I told them I could tell that he’d been cared for. I offered to take over caring for him and said I had been planning to see if we could work him in with our other cats. His previous caretaker seemed a little relieved and agreed.

She did make sure I knew his real name is Raja and that he’s part Bengal. She said if she could find them she’d drop off his vet records.

He always turns to look when he hears voices across the street. He still considers her his person.

Meanwhile, the Ladies are a little stressed about another cat being around, even though we can’t officially introduce them all until Larry’s intestinal parasites clear up. The one good thing for them now that he’s indoors: they can sit uninterrupted at their back door once more. They can’t complain too much about their life of leisure and luxury.

Growth

Looking over photos from the last month in my garden, I can clearly see its mid-summer expansion. My new raised bed holds corn, okra, edamame, and red raspberries. Just when I’d doubted that the corn would produce anything, it shot up and started to tassel. Hopefully it doesn’t fall over before it’s all said and done. I harvested my soybeans this week. The okra is just now starting to think about blooming. All is good.

Expanding even more are my mystery vines. This spring, I spread compost on a section of my garden before planting melons, one squash, and cucumbers. Lots of little volunteer vines of some kind popped up from that compost, and I was curious to know what reminders of good food past they would become. I kept a few and clearly they were something big. The plants headed out of the official garden space (partly due to my attempts to steer them away from the plants I’d meant to plant).

I went out of town for a short vacation at the end of June and when I got back, I got a note from the person garden-sitting for me that marveled about how well my squash plants were doing. So, that was the grand reveal. I checked the backyard to see what she was talking about and found a beautiful little butternut squash forming on the vines.

I haven’t intentionally planted winter squash for years. I tried it twice and had the heartache of watching them wither and die as squash vine borers burrowed into the heart of each vine and did their dirty work, pooping sawdust-like excrement where the plant met the earth. I looked for remedies, but there was nothing that seemed like it would work for me. It was also a heartache that after the plants died I had a big hole in my garden that represented the missed opportunity to grow something else that would have thrived in my space. With not much space to grow things, that lost opportunity is huge.

The first little squash on the vine has been joined by several more. I’m sending positive thoughts their way and hoping to get at least one ripe one before squash vine borer or some other disaster strikes. It will be a great achievement to eat a squash meal grown in my garden. [Though while working on this post, I saw an article that said butternut squash is less susceptible to squash vine borers, so maybe my happy compost accident will lead to future years of fruit!]

The one squash I intentionally planted this year was a quick-fruiting summer squash. I hoped that it would be able to stay ahead of the squash vine borer and produce some fruit for me (the borers have to have a certain number of warm days before the larva stage that burrows into squash vines becomes active). I did manage to get a couple mature summer squashes from the plant, but then the borers swooped in and killed it.

The melons and cucumbers are doing fine, but I knew they would. They aren’t bothered by the borers. Actually, I’m not that fond of cucumbers, but they grow so well. And their flavor has its good points.

And there is a lot of other great growth and bounty to be had around my garden and kitchen:

• June apple season came and went. I managed to get enough lodi apples to make a batch of applesauce, although I’m ready to upgrade my squeezer and may go online to get a vintage one like my mom used to use.
• I also picked and froze gallons and gallons of blueberries. By now, the people at Wright’s Berry Farm in Newburgh know me by name.
• My “Bobcat” orchid is blooming again. It looks like a bunch of roaring cats’ muzzles.
• I have a couple planter areas where I add annuals every year. I use similar types of plants, but each year’s arrangement unfolds differently and I enjoy the subtle variations. One such spot is my brick pile garden. Another is my mosaic planter.
• I harvested my carrots and I’m enjoying some blackberries and the first of my tomatoes.

Growing Crispy

After a wet spring and early summer, Evansville has dried up. Despite my watering, my garden is getting crispy.

It feels like everything is ready for the cold weather to come so it can stop wasting away, go into dormancy, and start fresh next spring. It’s difficult to fight my garden on that.

There’s not too much to eat from my garden. My tomato plants are struggling onward with a few green knobs growing on them. There’s a little basil and a mass of lima beans. Dreaming of my friends’ bright stands of zinnias and sunflowers, I’d planted a couple sections of them but only ended up with a couple spindly pops of color.

Then the other day I glanced out the kitchen window and saw a crazy orange orb suspended at least ten feet above the ground in my neighbor’s tree. It was like an alien egg pod or a giant, mutant butterfly chrysalis. Then I realized it was one of my super overgrown cucumbers. It was pretty impressive. I later saw it had fallen to the ground and had a few small bite marks in it. Apparently the squirrels didn’t find it as delicious as my tomatoes.

Now that the downtown farmer’s market is over for the year, I’m sadly without local produce. In September, I’d snagged some purple plums that turned into a fantastic fruit platz. I finished my sole bag of local apples today and have squirreled away some winter squashes (But, ha-ha Squirrels, I didn’t take a bite out of them first.). I’m sad not to have better access to fresh, local autumnal produce.

Maybe part of my problem is that I need to plant a few more autumn-blooming plants. My toad lilies are happy and beautiful in the face of other plants’ crispy brownness. I’m glad to report that all three varieties have returned. I was afraid I’d lost at least one to the city’s herbicide. They’re much diminished because of it, but they’re there.

 

I also love the horny seed pods of the moonflower. They’re great at accentuating my garden shed and garden art.

And today I was surprised by the beauty of the flowers turning to seed pods on my hearty begonias. I’ve never noticed it before, but it’s very wonderful. The flowers slowly stretch and extend and fade from pink to a beautiful green. They’re quite elegant.

And finally, my good, old cat turned 19! For his birthday, I let Shamoo wander around outside and tried my best to let him stay out for as long as he wanted. It’s pretty dull supervising his outdoor time because he doesn’t do much, so I tried taking so photos. Eventually I made him go back inside, but I gave him some fishy treats as a consolation.

He still seems content with life, although I hate to tell him that the time of coldness will soon be upon us again. He’s moved back into his heated cat bed already.

At the Close of the Summer

August through September: a time of out-of-control cucumbers and beans, green tomatoes, caladiums, sweet autumn clematis, moon flowers, and toad lilies.

(Click on any photo for a larger image and a slideshow.)

Garden Update and…SQUIRRELS!

The rain has slowed down and things are getting crispy. My plants have lots of greenery but not too much to show for it. In my vegetable garden, the lima beans are growing like mad. I think there are some beans in there, but it’s really hard to find them in the mass. The cucumbers are also spreading like mad but with few results. They all started out so sweetly, too:

Meanwhile, it’s been a strange year for tomatoes in my garden. I decided to move them to a new spot, although in my garden there’s not much distance between the old and new spots. This year, my tomatoes have been going badly since the seed starts. The timing was bad and I didn’t get them in a greenhouse for the usual boost. After the transplant to my garden they grew slowly.

The best producing tomato is actually a variety that originated here in Evansville with one of the great Evansville founding families. The variety was contributed to Seed Savers as an exemplary specimen and was chosen from over a thousand new seed varieties as one to highlight in this year’s seed catalog. I thought it was a nice connection, so I got a packet. The tomato clearly knows it is home, because it’s growing and producing very well. It has nice, little, yellow grape tomatoes.

My other tomato plants have not. I got a couple big green-when-ripe tomatoes off one plant earlier this summer. I always enjoy trying new varieties, but unfortunately this one will not be a new favorite. I’ve gotten a couple smaller, pink tomatoes off of a volunteer plant from last year, and that’s been about it.

A couple other plants have green tomatoes on them that are taking forever to ripen. They’re new ones with exotic names that I’ve been curious to taste: Dragon’s Eye, Cosmic Eclipse, and Lucky Tiger.

Yesterday evening, I noticed that one Dragon’s Eye tomato was starting to change color. At last! Soon I would behold the tomato billed as, “Very pretty pink-rose colored with green stripes that turn gold.  They look shiny and almost fake.”

It crossed my mind: should I pick it so it could safely ripen inside? No, I thought. Vine ripened is the best. After all, what could happen?

Someone just the other day had asked me whether the squirrels were messing up my tomatoes. I’d responded that I haven’t really had any problems with them for a long time. So long, in fact, that I’d considered changing the name of my blog from “Squirrels and Tomatoes” to “Raccoons are Sneaky Jerks”.

Well. This noon I went outside to pick some basil for my lunch and I realized that that marginally ripe tomato was gone. Was it hidden by a leaf? NO. Had it fallen onto the ground under the plant? NO. IT WAS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN! Had I dreamed it?

I went back inside and was fixing my lunch when John said, “Hey, there’s a bunny right over here in the lawn! It’s right next to the house.”

“Weird,” I thought. I looked out the window and there was a big, adorable rabbit right next to the house…strangely close to the house. What was that thing it was hopping toward?

“THAT’S MY TOMATO!!!!!”

I ran out to view the carnage.

I know that bunny didn’t climb up into the tomato cage to pull this down.

Stupid squirrels. [Grumble. Grumble.] It wasn’t even ripe.

Sigh.

Right now I’m attempting to ferment garlic in honey. It is the first use of this year’s garlic from my garden. I read about fermenting it on a gardening blog that I follow and it sounded intriguing. I found the instructions here. The honey takes on some of the garlic flavor. John eats raw garlic medicinally to ward off colds, so this sounds like it will be even better.

There was a whole lot of peeling involved which was time consuming, but the finished product looks really neat in the jar. It’s supposed to be ready in about a month.

One final plant happening to note: I got a bloom from the third and final orchid that I own that I’d never seen bloom before. All three mystery orchids came from plant sales without any indication of what the bloom would be like. All three have been gorgeous. This one is miltassia Dark Star ‘Darth Vader’.