This time of the year is all about the pulling and planting. Not much making stuff happens because my appendages need rest and my finger skin has extra cuts and splinters. I’m equal parts ready and willing to be outside and feeling better from the vitamin D blast, and feeling enraged and bound to all of the fecund green things out of control (and then really out of control if neglected for a day or two).
This is the fourth year battling Chinese wisteria, Japanese knotweed, lesser celandine (pretty much lost the battle with that one), garlic mustard, creeping charlie, other unknown vines and weeds, and the native poison ivy. Things are starting to get under control – everything is still coming up everywhere, but it can mostly be pinched off. I’ve moved on to the bigger things, and identified Japanese barberry (now gone), Russian olive (needs to be gone, but something needs to replace it), and a Callery pear that is well within my sites, but it’s probably too big to take down ourselves now (want to put a redbud in its place).
N made some window boxes deemed “adorable” by a passer-by (they are – just the icing on the cottage cake) and the magnolia had a bombastic bloom this year. The massive perennial planting of 2017 is coming back to life – except for most of the hyssop…? Not sure what happened there, but a second massive perennial planting has happened…
N has also foraged some very excellent chicken of the woods mushrooms, and I finally played with the wild violets that are all over the yard. My violet syrup doesn’t taste like much – more of just a simple syrup with a slight vegetal tone – and the flowers don’t have much of an aroma, so either I needed to pick them another time, or our violets suck? But the syrup is handy for experiments in fruity popsicles that have started happening thanks to a brief hot spell (now it is cool and rainy and woolly and definitely not popsicle weather again).
There’s also a big house project happening – one that’s almost done, but foiled by the rainy weather
And then there’s the veg.
The garden is planted and growing (the beets, carrots, and inexplicably the bok choy failed to germinate well, but so far I’ve had better luck with carrots in the fall. The new additional grow light (cheap led strips hung in between the florescents) made a lot of tomato plants happen.
Despite what I thought was a decent 2 week hardening off period, all suffered transplant shock and a bit of sun scald, but all have come back from it. I put them out slightly early too, but I’d already transplanted them once into bigger pots and there wasn’t room for even bigger pots – there were around 50 plants, and the leftovers went to the neighbors. I definitely started the squash to early, and some didn’t survive transplanting, but starting them indoors isn’t entirely necessary, but I’m trying to get ahead of the bugs. And something is eating the pepper plants, so I might have to buy a few…
And now we’ve got asparagus beetles – our little asparagus row is over half dead thanks to last year’s false spring – we’ve gotten a couple of side dish and garnish’s worth of spears, and the skinny ones left all have damage from the little fuckers – now everything out there has a pest or disease to nom it down to nothing and maybe kinda makes me think a little about how life would be easier with just a lawn. Most of the neighbors have just a lawn with a tree here and there, and maybe they are the smart, or at least relaxed and not in pain, ones…
But fuck lawns, they taste terrible.
ASTITCHMATISM 