April 2024: April Showers Bring April Flowers

April was rough with way too many severe storms, violent wind, and tornadoes coming way too close to our house. The worst of it was April 2 when we were awake at 5:00 am and heading to the basement to shelter from tornadoes. Thankfully we made it through the month without storm damage.

Meanwhile, everything emerged in my garden. Some of my favorites were the ferns as they curled their way out of the ground and expanded into their spots in the garden. I always love their changing structures and textures. Another plant with a beautiful emergence is the peony whose leaves twist and turn as they expand from the soil. I also love the colors and textures of the epimedium leaves that line up and expand together in a team of hearts–not to mention the fairy-like epimedium flowers held on delicate stems.

The early spring daffodils and tulips had mostly passed by the start of April and were replaced by things like wild geranium, tiarella, irises, and azaleas. The colors in my garden intensified as the plants began to fill the formerly-empty space. My berries bloomed, and my garlic grew ever larger.

I didn’t do much work in my garden, spending the month mostly just watching its progress and taking pictures. I did start a few tomato plants and sweet potato slips. Many years I’ve felt like I got them going too early and had to try to hold overly-eager plants indoors for too long. Trying to avoid that, I think I may have gotten them started a little later than I could have, though it’s always difficult to know what to do.

On the last weekend of April, John and I were able to go to Scratch Brewing, one of our favorite little breweries. It’s located in Southern Illinois and we’ve gone several times before, though it had been almost a year since our last trip. The beers are hyperlocal and incorporate many plants that the brewers have foraged from the land around the brewery. The flavors are complex and unique.

We arrived late in the afternoon and shared several rounds of samplers along with a couple wood fired pizzas. Beers on tap that weekend included one brewed with dried oak, hickory, and maple leaves; one brewed in a copper kettle with wild cherry bark; one brewed with elderberries; and one brewed with chanterelle mushrooms. All of these items were grown or foraged nearby. The pizzas also featured local foods for their toppings.

In addition to having really interesting drinks and food, Scratch has a beautiful setting. The indoors is full of artwork and the outdoors features a variety of rustic seating areas. We ate in the roofed area built around a log cabin. We had a view of the woods, and an Eastern phoebe had a nest nearby in the eaves so we watched her come and go.

We spent the night nearby, then checked out Inspiration Point in the Shawnee National Forest the next morning before going home. At first, Inspiration Point didn’t seem all that inspiring, but then we braved the steep little side trail and gusty winds to get out on the actual point where the view was, in fact, inspirational. It was a fun little trip.

October 2023: Fall Fluctuations

Temperatures were all over the place in October. We began with days in the 90’s, but things quickly turned colder, and after the first week the lows were consistently forecast to go below 50. That was my signal to bring in my houseplants. Often, this process is really rushed because I like to leave everything out till the last minute, but then the last minute comes unexpectedly and the next thing I know I’m dragging a bunch of plants into the kitchen in the dark after work. This time around, I was able to spend an entire morning giving the plants a little TLC before I brought them inside and found places to put them all. Finding places for them is always a challenge because there are very limited spots inside the house where they will get enough light. Because of that and because they take extra fiddling indoors, I start looking forward to taking them outside again as soon as I bring them in.

Temperatures stayed pretty steady through the middle of the month. Some days were a little warmer and some were a little cooler, but there were no extremely warm or cold days. That meant everything could just keep growing pretty happily–as long as I watered. Our drought continued with hardly any rain to speak of. Leaves gradually started to change. My plants started to crisp here and there as they began to anticipate the end of the growing season.

I picked several rounds of lima beans and got a few more of the fancy blue beans I was trying to grow. Among the limas, I successfully got some very pretty ping zebra beans. I’ve been trying to grow them for a few years without success, but this year I’d read that they simply take a long time to mature. I took the suggestion of starting some plants early indoors, and that did the trick. The blue beans were an experiment that I shouldn’t try again, but it will be tempting to give it a shot. They have an amazing blue color, but only if they mature in cool temperatures. Apparently, temperatures here weren’t cool enough for blue beans until September, so I only got 5-7 blue ones, but those few were pretty spectacular!

I also got an assortment of tomatoes. Every time I enjoy fresh autumn tomatoes in a meal, I think of the guy I passed once at a farmer’s market who was proudly proclaiming that he never eats a fresh tomato after Labor Day because he thinks they’re inferior then. He’s missing out on a couple months of tasty tomatoes!

Things continued along until the final full week of October when temperatures ticked back up into the mid-80’s. Despite the toasty temps, the forecast was to end the month with a serious freeze, so I spent the final weekend of October working to harvest everything I possibly could. We also (finally) got rain, though that made the harvesting more difficult. I was able to harvest my sweet potatoes before the rain started, which made digging through the soil much easier. My harvest was ok, but not nearly as good as last year. The plants had looked healthy, so I’m not sure what happened. I also picked even more lima beans, a few more of the giant zucchino rampicante squash, all my basil, some tomatoes, and some melons that may or may not be ripe.

The zucchino rampicante squash was incredibly happy in my garden this year. I’d gotten three giant squashes from it in September and it was working on several more through October. Unfortunately, quite a few of them had blossom end rot and weren’t usable, but I also got the biggest one of the year that was about 34 inches long. Another had buried itself in my neighbor’s hydrangea plants. A few more of the squashes were still young and tender, so I picked those to eat like zucchini.

I’d hoped to have time to turn all the basil into pesto to freeze for later, but there was too much to do and I wasn’t prepared with enough of the right ingredients, so I decided to grind up the basil with a little olive oil and freeze that. My hope is that it will still be relatively easy to pull out of the freezer and turn into pesto one batch at a time.

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!

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.

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.

July 2022: Endurance

The heat cranked up in June and stayed hot through the entirety of July. There were some short respites (a 90° day, yay!), but they were few and far between. We had weeks with multiple Excessive Heat Advisories (maximum heat index temperature is expected to be 100° or higher for at least 2 days, and night time air temperatures will not drop below 75°) and plenty of Excessive Heat Warnings (the maximum heat index temperature is expected to be 105° or higher for at least 2 days and night time air temperatures will not drop below 75°). On top of the heat, we had drought conditions. It was brutal.

I watered my garden a lot all the way through July. It’s painful knowing that our water bill will be extra high, but I know if I don’t water it, my garden will die. It’s one of the costs of gardening, and a time when I’m glad that my space is really pretty small. Even with the small space, it’s an all-day project. And with things being so unpleasant outside, watering about all I did in my garden in July.

My tomatoes haven’t loved the heat, and I’ve barely had enough ripe ones for a daily sandwich for lunch. The ones in the raised beds at the side of the house have done ok, but the ones I planted in the vegetable bed in the back have yet to produce. They’ve all grown a lot, but I’ve had few ripe fruits. The lima beans have also seemed lackluster this year. Only a few plants are growing big, but there’s still time to get some beans. Melons and squash have been slow to take off, but they’re doing ok. The blackberries have done well, though they’ve appreciated my watering. Meanwhile, the basil and the sweet potatoes are quite happy with the excessive heat and have exploded. I’m glad at least something likes the heat. (I sure don’t.)

Another area that seems particularly happy is the row of prairie plants I put in the “hell strip” area in front of our house between the sidewalk and the street. It gets direct sun, has compacted soil, and is far from the outdoor water spigot, so the conditions there are pretty rough. What I have planted there are mostly native prairie plants that are supposed to do ok in dry soil. This is the first year for this group of plants and so far I’m enjoying them and their hardy nature. Since they’re still getting established, I’m watering them regularly with a soaker hose, but they seem plenty happy with the environment they have. I threw in some non-native annuals this spring as they all get established, and I think the color combinations look good.

Sprinkled through the entire month were plenty of insects–and a lot of them the bad kind. I went out multiple times a day to collect and destroy Japanese beetles. They’re remarkably easy to knock off leaves and into a mug of soapy water where they drown. They love my raspberry plants, but have also bothered the blackberries and azaleas. In addition, I’ve had more Mexican bean beetles than I ever remember having before. They look a little like orange ladybugs, but they munch through bean, squash, and melon leaves like there’s no tomorrow. Toward the end of the month, I started to get some of the Japanese beetles’ bigger, nastier cousins: green June beetles. They easily destroyed blackberries and instead of falling gently into my mug of soapy water, when frightened they tore through the blackberry bushes and toward my face. I don’t remember having them ever before. I’ve learned that they are incredibly unpleasant though also an incredibly beautiful, iridescent green.

Not insect pests, but I also had batches of bird pests–mostly robins but also catbirds and maybe a mockingbird–discover my blackberry plants. I think that just before my blackberries were ripe, my neighbor’s black cherry tree fruited and attracted scads of birds. When those cherries ran out, the birds looked for tasty alternatives nearby and found my blackberries. I hung sparkly, silver fabric in the blackberries to try to scare them off. I think it kind of worked, but didn’t entirely.

As a happy finale for the hot, dry, rough month, I finally got a maypop bloom. They’re alien-looking with a wild disk of frilly white and purple threads above a second disk of white petals. I’ve always wanted to try growing one, and I finally found one at the Master Gardener’s plant sale. What I’ve also heard about them is that they tend to be aggressive spreaders, so I’m attempting to grow mine in a container. Hopefully it works because the blooms are amazing and so much fun.