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!

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!

May 2023: A Few Field Trips

I’m a little later than usual in putting together my roundup of garden happenings for the month of May. So far in June, John and I have spent one weekend camping at Spring Mill State Park, and I spent the following weekend catching up on a massive amount of work in my garden–hence the lateness of this post.

May had its own assortment of travel. Early in the month I went back to Twin Swamps Nature Preserve, located out past Mount Vernon, Indiana. The description of the preserve from an Indiana DNR information sheet describes it this way: Twin Swamps consists of a swamp cottonwood-bald cypress swamp and an overcup oak swamp, with an area of southern flatwoods between the two. This preserve is one of the few existing remnants of such communities which once occurred over large portions of the Ohio and Wabash River Valleys.

I’d gone there last year and enjoyed the walk, so I went back this year and brought waterproof boots. I really needed them! In one spot the water on the trail was at least 6″ deep. Twin Swamps is near Hastings plant nursery, where I often stop for plants for my garden. I also stopped at Hastings this year.

At the end of the month, John and I traveled to one of our favorite spots, Scratch Brewing, which is located near Carbondale, Illinois. They were offering a plant tour, so we signed up. It was really fun. One of the owners took a group of 15 of us tromping off through the middle of the woods where Scratch is located–seriously, tromping without any trails (the ticks were bad!). It sounds like he’d spent his childhood wandering through that woods and knew where lots of interesting plants grew. He picked a variety of plants then took us to two picnic tables in a clearing where he poured hot water over several of them to make teas that we could sample. He also brought some Scratch beers to sample that had been brewed using some of the plants we saw.

He clearly loved foraging and loved plants. One of his statements to the group was, “It’s just so amazing to me how many very different flavors exist here right next to each other.” There was also a moment when he pointed out a shagbark hickory tree, then paused while looking at it and said, “That tree has made beer.” He described the process of brewing new beers at Scratch that starts with a plant or fungus that they notice has an intriguing scent or an interesting flavor. The brewers at Scratch take that plant or fungus and experiment to figure out how to include some part of that essence in a tasty beer. It sounds like there are plenty of failures, but there are also some interesting successes. We sampled a few with a pizza after the tour.

In between the swamp and the brewery plant tour, there was plenty happening in my garden. I picked up a few more plants at the Master Gardeners’ Plant Sale and at a couple area greenhouses. Some of those plants ended up in a special new garden for Boo Boo. He’s buried under the broken concrete angel beside the rear bottle tree. I added hostas over his grave since he always liked to sleep under big hosta leaves. The new garden also includes some great shade plants. When I finished it, I was inspired to get all my fairies and mushrooms and toad houses out of storage, so it’s also a fairy garden.

Also in May, the last of the “spring-y” things like the irises finished blooming and we moved into solidly early-summer blooms like peonies and baptisia. I also had some nice blooms start on the native prairie plants I have planted in the dry, compacted “hell strip” located between the sidewalk and the street. And even the many leaf combinations among my plants have been beautiful to see. My lettuce sat and sulked for half the month and then took off at about the time that I’d been hoping to have eaten several rounds of it and removed it. I’d had other plans for the space where it was at, but delayed some of my additional planting.

Below, you can take a video tour of my garden and you can also flip through my photo highlights from the month. Each photo is labeled with more information about what’s in it.

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.

A Cat a Day: November 17

Boo Boo

September 2022: Bugs and Recovery

September in my garden began at daybreak on September 1 when I got my first good look at the damage that happened because of insufficient water while John and I were on vacation. I immediately set up my sprinklers to bring moisture back to my plants, but some were already in desperately sorry shape. I spent a day watering and watering and watering.

Some plants were clearly done for. But then there were others. Do you know what doesn’t mind hot, dry weather? Lima beans! I had a lot of them. You know what else likes the heat? Sweet potatoes! And what else was barely phased by the lack of water? My strip of prairie plants by the street! And you know what else wasn’t phased by the poor conditions? Tree of heaven! That last one I really wished would have been negatively impacted. I’m so tired of that awful, invasive tree.

As I looked around my garden, I started to discover some gems hidden among the dry, brown leaves. Most notable among them were the monarch caterpillars quietly munching milkweed everywhere I looked. They were a good reminder that many things were still ok. My garden was also filled with yellow garden spiders trying to keep the pests at bay.

Of course, I also found some bad bugs that were ready to strip my tomato plants. At the start of the month, I discovered a family of yellow-striped armyworms all over a section of tomatoes. I’d never seen them before, so at first I didn’t know if they were good or bad and left them alone just in case. Then a little voice in my head said I really needed to do my research, so I did and headed straight back outside to kill them all.

Later in the month I discovered two tobacco horn worms poised to destroy more tomatoes–except by the time I spotted them they had been parasitized by wasps and doomed to soon die. The wasps lay eggs under the caterpillar’s skin, the pupae hatch and eat the caterpillar alive, then they eat their way out of the caterpillar and form white cocoons sticking off of the caterpillar. Interesting and also pretty gross.

Also kind of gross was what I realized when I had a chance to observe so many monarch caterpillars: the poop A LOT. In thinking about it, Eric Karle really missed out on some potential children’s book gold in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Watching these monarch caterpillars, it should have been a poop book as much as an eating book. His book could have been even more popular and could have taught a valuable science lesson!

There were plenty of other bugs, both good and bad, around my garden. And zinnia blooms. I love zinnias! The more I look at their flowers, the more interesting details I start to see. And my final prairie plants bloomed so I could see what they look like. The one the butterflies loved most (by far) was the purple button blazing star. It was not uncommon for me to see multiple monarch butterflies at a time crowded onto the two flower spikes.

In the vegetable department, I got plenty of tomatoes from my plants–enough to do some cooking. I also got some mini melons, but I’m still terrible at judging when they’re ripe, so none were exactly perfect when I ate them. I had three varieties, and apparently none are kinds that release from the vine when they’re ripe. I’ll keep trying, though. I think they’re fun. I also got two butternut squashes and one zucchino rampicante squash. The zucchino rampicante can be eaten as a winter squash, but since I started them late I wasn’t going to have any that were mature enough for that. Luckily they also function like a summer squash when they’re young. We ate that one in a pesto pasta dish with turkey meatballs. It was delicious.

Only two days after my September 1 watering blitz, we got an historic downpour with something like 3″ of rain coming down in only an hour or so. It was an incredible amount of rain. And then it didn’t rain by any real measure for the rest of the month. I was out watering every weekend. By the end of the month, everything was doing relatively well and had mostly come back from the brink. By the very end, even the final couple plants that had looked completely dead were beginning to show signs of life. Hopefully they don’t burn through all their energy reserves growing a lot of new leaves just before winter and then start next spring without enough stored energy to come out of dormancy.

(Below is a photo collage. As always, click on any image for a little more information about what’s in it.)

Michigan Vacation 2022

John and I spent the last two and a half weeks of August in Northern Michigan. The first week+, we stayed at my family’s cottage between Alanson, MI and Petoskey, MI. It’s in a small settlement of homes and cottages and is a very short distance away from Crooked Lake. The area is beautiful and full of a lot of land that’s been set aside as nature preserves by the Little Traverse Conservancy. Many of these preserves have trails across them, so John and I always do a lot of hiking on them. This year we visited a few new preserves as well as some old favorites. For one, the nature preserve on Oden Island in Crooked Lake, we canoed over to it, parked our canoe on the shore, and hiked around before canoeing the rest of the way around the island.

Other fun included a trip to Pond Hill Farm, a place that serves delicious food highlighting its own locally grown ingredients and wonderful wines, beers, and hard ciders that incorporate things like Michigan cherries and blueberries. Of course, we also spent time on a Lake Michigan beach. There are several nice ones to choose from, but this time we went to a favorite that’s part of another Little Traverse Conservancy nature preserve. Yet another notable excursion was taking the hand-powered ferryboat to Sanctuary Island in Alanson, MI. The entire boat ride is about 30-40 feet at most, but it’s a unique experience. Once on the tiny island, you can walk around on boardwalk trails and enjoy the Crooked River flowing by.

(Click on the individual photos below for more details about what you’re seeing in each one.)

One of the highlights of our vacation was a trip John and I made to explore some new-to-us areas. We went to the Leelanau Peninsula and South Manitou Island. To get to the Leelanau Peninsula, we had to go through Traverse City, and while there we stopped at the Botanic Garden at Historic Barns Park. There were a lot of beautiful gardens and plants to see there–plus the gravestone of Traverse Colantha Walker, a champion cow. The site was once a farm connected to the Traverse City State Hospital that housed mental patients from 1885-1989. The patients worked on the farm and produced food for the hospital. Colantha was a special dairy cow who lived there and was part of that food production. We had a good time exploring the gardens and the trail lined with little fairy houses that people have made. There are quite a few trails on the property that we should go back and explore more.

Soon it was time for lunch, so we headed north up the Leelanau Peninsula to some of the many wineries and cideries that it’s known for. First we stopped at Black Star Farms, a winery that also features farm-to-table food. We tried a couple wines along with some delicious sandwiches. After that, we took it slow and stopped to sample hard cider at two cideries: Two K and Tandem Ciders. Both were excellent, but our favorite was Two K.

Then we headed to Leelanau State Park on the northernmost tip of the Leelanau Peninsula where we had camping reservations. This campground was what had inspired the trip. Some friends had stayed there last summer and described the campsites on the Lake Michigan beach. By the time we made our reservation, the sites that are right on the beach were taken, but we got lucky and found a nice campsite that was just across the little campground road from Lake Michigan. On our first evening there, we got to enjoy a really nice sunset from our campsite.

The next day was an even bigger adventure: we took a ferry to South Manitou Island. It’s a small island in Lake Michigan and is located near Sleeping Bear Dunes on the mainland. It is officially part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. At one time, people lived on the island, but now it’s all part of National Park Service land. South Manitou was important for Great Lakes shipping and has a major lighthouse on it. If you’d like to know more, this National Park Service website has A LOT of really interesting information. I think the information about the lighthouse and its keepers is particularly interesting.

The South Manitou Transit company runs ferries across from Leland, MI to South Manitou twice a day, so you can make it a day trip or you can bring camping gear and spend the night. We bought sandwiches from the Village Cheese Shanty in Leland (it is apparently what everyone does), and found a spot on the ferry, the Mishe-Mokwa. There were plenty of people aboard, but it wasn’t completely full so there was room to spread out a little. There were groups of backpackers aboard and several families, including one whose great-great-grandparents had lived on the island. It was a good day to be out. The water wasn’t too rough. We made good time and got a good look at a passing Great Lakes freighter and the North Manitou Shoals Light. It took an hour and a half to get to the island.

For a little island, there’s plenty to see. John and I decided to hike to the Shipwreck of the Morazan. It was listed as about 7 miles round-trip, assuming you followed the trail. Well, the trail was supposed to go out from the lighthouse, but the lighthouse is under a lot of construction and all the trails around it were closed or blocked. We stumbled around looking for the way and feeling our limited time on the island ticking away. John suggested we give up on looking for the trail and start walking around the island on the beach, so that’s what we did.

It was a really pretty day and very beautiful on the beach. We successfully navigated over the rocky shore and around several clumps of downed trees poking out into the water. But it seemed to be taking much longer than expected. We hoped there would be a way to get back up the bluffs to the main trail above us, but nothing turned up so we kept walking. Eventually, we made it to the Theodore Beck homestead where there was a trail up the bluff. Back on track, we hiked to the bluff overlooking the wreck and then to the old growth cedars. Then it was time to make the trek back to the dock to catch the ferry. Our feet were tired and sore, but we even made it back in time to take the last tour up to the top of the lighthouse. It was an absolutely amazing view from the top.

On the ferry ride back, everyone was warm, tired, and happy from their adventures on the island. The kids ran around and played tag. The adults got adult beverages and laughed and talked. It was festive. I decided to get a Mishe-Wokwa Margarita because the whole thing including the silly, hand-lettered signs and the insinuation that this was an awesome bar on a little ferry cracked me up. From the ferry, we drove back to our campsite at Leelanau State Park, made hobo pies in a campfire, and called it a day. The next morning we drove back to the cottage (though I did look for some Leland Blue Stones on our way out of town).

When we got back to the cottage, John was feeling a little off. He’d been exposed to two lung-fulls of allergens several days before and had been feeling a severe allergy flare-up ever since. However, it seemed like the allergies should have resolved by then. To be safe, he took a covid test…and it was positive. Soon, I wasn’t feeling too good, either.

Thankfully, we were at a place where we could isolate and didn’t need to get out or find alternative accommodations. We had three days of vacation left and then extended our stay by an additional three days. We mostly stuck around the cottage feeling like absolute trash. Periodically, we took short walks at more Little Traverse preserves. It wasn’t a fun way to extend our vacation, but, thankfully, we were in a nice place to have an extended vacation.

The cottage is full of decades-worth of stuff my family has taken there. My favorite find this time around was an old bottle of Vicks’ VapoRub that was in a vintage blue glass jar. I used it to try to break up my nasal congestion, but the old bottle promising relief from the “distress” of colds made me smile. My fever lasted the longest, and once it was definitively gone we made the long drive home.

August 2022: A Promising Start

My review of August in my garden will be relatively brief. We were home for the first two weeks of the month and then gone for the following two and a half weeks. Things started out relatively well. We finally had some nice rain, breaking the drought conditions. Unfortunately, this included a really severe storm on August 1 that felled trees and knocked out power to 30,000 customers in our area. The power stayed on at my house, but several of my plants were a little battered by the wind, particularly my tomatoes that ended up getting beaten at least three feet lower to the ground.

Before heading out on vacation, I had seven varieties of tomatoes with ripened fruit, melons forming (but, sadly, not ripe enough to pick before we left), the last of my blackberries, and a lot of flower blooms. Flowers included everything from zinnias, maypops, and my potted jasmine plant to the surprise lilies that are fixtures in yards this time of year throughout our area. They pop out of the ground with little warning on long stalks. Their leaves came and went in the spring, which lends them another common name: naked ladies.

As always, you can click on any of the photos to get more of a description of what’s in it. I also recorded another garden tour video. When I recorded it, I had a fear that we would come back from vacation and my garden wouldn’t look nearly so go–and, sadly, I was right. We got nice amounts of rain for a couple weeks leading up to vacation, and I gave my garden a good soaking the day that we left. That watering would have held the garden beds for the first week of our absence. After that, I prayed for rain, but it didn’t come. Our time away was unexpectedly extended by a few days (more on that in an upcoming post), and I anxiously watched the Evansville weather radar from afar as several rounds of rain and storms dodged every which way, always managing to miss my house. Additionally, my other efforts to get my plants and garden watered fell through, though last-minute action by my neighbor friend did save some things.

We made it home late on August 31, and even in the dark I could see a lot of things didn’t make it. I thought about sharing the photos in this blog post, but I decided to start my September post there. I rushed to soak everything with water as quickly as possible. Two days later, we got intense rain, and we’re forecast to get rain all week. Of course, I’m sad that all this rain didn’t come earlier to nourish my garden in my absence.

I’m thinking it would be a great venture for someone to start a Garden Sitter business, especially considering all the people who discovered gardening during the pandemic and who are now traveling more. It would be great to be able to call a fellow gardener to have them monitor and thoroughly water my garden. Maybe they could also identify and remove garden pests (like the fat and happy yellow-striped armyworms I found eating my tomatoes when I returned from vacation). Till someone starts that business, I’ll be stuck with the usual trepidation leaving my garden for an extended time.