As I mentioned recently, we needed a bit more mulch before the winter weather hits. After a couple weeks, I cancelled my Chip Drop request – I can always enter a new one – and bought some mulch after my garden planner said these magic words: “If we don’t mulch it, we need to sod lift the whole area.”
Yeah, I’d rather mulch it. Here’s the work in progress, starting with a perimeter mulch path at the edge, then a combination of sod removal and mulching. The areas where grass was removed are destined for more immediate planting of somewhat tall plants. We briefly considered a metal edging for the perimeter plant, so the mulch doesn’t wash into the neighbor’s grass when it rains, but realized how expensive that would get given that the entire north edge has a bit of a slope into his yard. We’re looking at a plastic edging instead.
A new pile of dark brown mulch – about 10 cubic yards – on our driveway, the day it was delivered.
A 2-foot wide line of mulch along the edge of our property in the northwest corner of our yard.
A mulched area around the lilac, with a small portion where we did sod lifting instead for upcoming planting.
A view from the side patio to the mulch pile, showing the recently mulched area and the remaining grass for the northwest corner, which will all be mulched over or removed.
One our perpetual summer projects is acquiring and distributing mulch around the yard, to help with weed suppression and generally improve the appearance of the yard. Earlier in the spring, I had a request in with GetChipDrop.com for wood chips, hoping to get a free (or close to free, with optional donation) supply of wood chips to mulch the yard. ChipDrop partners with local arborists and gardeners to mutual benefit: the arborists get somewhere local to drop the wood chips, and the gardeners don’t have to call every tree company or outright purchase mulch. It’s a simple process, but it doesn’t mean the availability of wood chips is sporadic. Each request is good for a month, and when we returned from the Canary Islands without having received wood chips, I bit the bullet and ordered mulch from a local supplier. (To be clear, their mulch is fabulous… but mulch is not cheap.)
The initial distribution wave went quickly – from delivery on May 3rd to the second photo on May 10th, we probably distributed half of the mulch. This was the easy phase, re-mulching areas that were mulched in previous years. You can see how good the fresh mulch looked around the raised vegetable beds. We have a large yard and progressed fairly quickly through those initial 10 cubic yards. I was quickly becoming concerned with other areas of the garden I wanted to mulch as I ran through the pile.
So, before clearing the entire pile, I placed a new request through GetChipDrop.com on a Friday… and received a response Saturday morning asking if I wanted a 15-yard delivery. Woot! It wasn’t until partway through distributing the refreshed pile that I named it “Mount Mulchmore.”
The process inevitably slowed, between some intolerably warm weather, my wasted time at PT, and our discussions as to which areas needed weeding before mulching and which should have landscape paper set down first. I expanded the back border to put more distance between myself and the poison ivy lingering under the neighbor’s white mulberry tree. And then, in mid-August, after mulching around the strawberry bed, I cleared the rest of the pile.
In this particular instance, I’m referring to my anxiety related to nests inhabited by stinging insects, particularly wasps. You may recall a couple years ago, I had a terrible Saturday morning when I accidentally disturbed a yellowjacket nest on the east side of our house, safely tucked between an empty planter and our shed. This past Saturday, I was talking to my neighbor about our plethora of balls in the deck box, specifically in relation to something his puppy could use. (The deck box moved to this house a couple years ago and had not been sorted through in that time.) I had already handed him an old volleyball of mine that was stored under a nearby bench, but flipped up the lid to show him how many other balls we have. As we stood there talking, I noticed movement in my peripheral vision and realized that there was a hornet’s nest on the underside of the lid.
I swore, and we both immediately moved away from the box, him in response to my action before he noted the nest as well. We both took a few more steps for safety, and he offered to lend me the wasp spray he owned, though we both noted that it should wait until evening – wasps tend to be active during the day and dormant at night, so the ideal time to spray a nest is when most of them are clustered on it, resting. I sent Cassandra a warning to avoid the side patio and after lunch, we wandered off to an Arts & Crafts Fair at Morton Arboretum.
As the afternoon wore on, I noted that the impending thunderstorm might interfere with my plan to spray the nest that evening. Before the rain started – splendid rain, bringing about four inches of water to our yard – we had some high winds that caused me – after it started raining – to pop out the side door and see if the lid to the deck box was still open. Upon discovering that it wasn’t, I stepped out under the overhang and carefully flipped the lip open again, thinking that when the opportunity arose to spray the nest, I didn’t want to disturb them with the motion of opening it again.
A little while later, the rain let up, so I popped outside, grabbed the can, sprayed the nest thoroughly, and promptly ignored it for the rest of the evening as the rain came and went. Come morning, I verified that the nest was empty, noting several corpses in the deck box. I used a plastic bag to grab the nest, tied it off, and dropped it into our garbage can. I then emptied the entire box, organizing as I went… and much to my dismay, discovered a trio of yellowjackets tucked into the palm of a rather wet softball glove. The dismay was augmented when I dumped them into the grass and they began moving! Fortunately, they were the only ones, though I did proceed carefully in case there was another nest buried in the box.
Once the box was empty, I hauled it onto the grass, scrubbed it down, and left it to dry. In the afternoon, we started to refill the box, though we left some damp items drying nearby. We closed the lid… which turned out to be a mistake. When I went back out to put other items into the box, there were a few hornets at the spot where the nest had been, presumably trying to rebuild. I left the lid open again and retreated. When I returned a while later, they were gone, and I sprayed the area again to discourage them from returning.
A couple days later, with no evidence of hornets in the open box, I finally closed the lid again. So far, so good.
It’s been a weird growing season. Yes, I started things like tomatoes late, but the okra, beans, and corn were planted at appropriate times. You wouldn’t know it from looking at them. The okra is the smallest of them, just finally peeking over the edge of the raised bed it’s planted in. There are a few beans on the bushes, and most of the corn is still shorter than me. (And I’m pretty short!) The back vegetable garden has just been growing slowly this year, well, except for the kale and chard, which are huge. The surviving squash, cucumber, and melon plants in the back are just barely showing off flowers. And it’s mostly been outside our control, just the weird range of hot and dry weather we had earlier in the season, with the occasional cool dips. The surviving plants have started to expand – later than usual – as the weather has almost settled into something resembling normal. And our grass has replenished from the intermixed brown that carried into July.
It’s not all bad though… our berries have been amazing this year, from the ever-bearing strawberries (now preparing for a third harvest round), raspberries, and a mulberry tree that would normally have been done a month ago and is still filled with a plethora of red (still ripening to purple) berries. Our grand success for the season, however, sits in the front yard, a placeholder for an area that will acquire more fruit in future years. In fact, the white pumpkins’ vines filled those placeholder spots and sprawled across the new herb garden, eclipsing the basil and cilantro in their beds. With an anticipated two months or more of growth still left, some of the pumpkins are already huge and new ones are still forming. If we’re lucky, at least in terms of the garden, fall will come slowly and we’ll be able to harvest some delicious treats from the back yard.
It’s been a weird start to our growing season, between our travel and a cooler than normal spring. Because of our travel, anything that was supposed to be started indoors for our client – typically in March or thereabouts – was started early May in our house. That accounts for the eggplant (complete failure this year, none of them started), two varieties of broccoli, and two varieties of large tomatoes. They moved outside last week and are still small enough in their garden beds that they didn’t photograph well. Fortunately, we have some vegetables that are proceeding nicely… not the okra though, where only three plants have appeared so far.
In the keyhole bed, the kale sits as a giant above the chard and next to the spindly scallions. At the far edge of the bed, carrots have volunteered next to the peas. Outside the bed in the keyhole opening, a tall garlic has caught up to the peas in the bed.
Hiding in the just mulched (this morning!) bed are two hills of watermelon seedlings and two of cantaloupe seedlings. I should absolutely thin these out more. Yes, more, I’ve already killed off about half of the seedlings on each hill.
One the left, clearly visible, are the Coco Black Bush Beans surrounded by mulch; they’ll get either cages or trellises to climb soon. On the right, fairly hidden because of the fresh mulch (also this morning!) are several short rows of corn.
The North Georgia Candy Roaster, a variety of squash, is coming in nicely in most of the divided bed, except for the squares that had leftover mustard greens from last year. The greens have now flowered and will presumably be reseeding themselves.
Three hills of tromboncino seedlings in pairs with some small catnip near the front and a tall catnip in the back just waiting to be harvested and dried.
Though not pictured, it is also strawberry season, which will be joined soon by raspberry and mulberry season. That said, I’m stepping outside to plant more okra, three plants just doesn’t cut it.
Near the end of April, we flew to Tenerife North Airport in the Canary Islands, spending just over a week at a resort in Puerto de la Cruz. It was fabulous and I have some lovely photos to share here… but not today.
The day after we returned, we had ten yards of mulch delivered shortly before we left to see Cats. On principle, I immediately grabbed a couple buckets, so I could say I had started it on it the same day it arrived. One of our neighbors immediately popped out to offer a loan of his wheelbarrow, because our neighbors are awesome that way. I assured him I had one, and sure enough, by the time he stepped out for his newspaper the next morning, I had made a significant dent in the pile using our garden cart. By the following Sunday – Mother’s Day in the United States – the pile was down to about half of its original size.
And that’s about where it’s still at today. We spent a good chunk of Mother’s Day helping out in someone else’s garden – enough that even with sunscreen and a hat, my face was a bit pink in a photo taken the following evening. The fact that I wasn’t near home for that photo added to my tiredness – I flew out Monday morning to attend a conference in Washington, DC, and flew back Wednesday afternoon. Alas, there was no time to be a tourist on this trip, unlike last year’s visit for the same conference, and the conference was just as full an experience as it was last year, ranging from breakfast hours to team dinners.
I took this morning “off” to recover – which really just means I didn’t launch straight into early morning mulching again, opting instead to deal with unpacking and laundry. And since my weather app says it’s 94 degrees Fahrenheit outside (the forecast was for 88 with some rain, and it hasn’t rained), I will certainly not be moving mulch this evening. Especially since I am still, not surprisingly, tired.
Shrubs, bushes, trees… whatever. We thought it would be wise to grow more food in our garden, so in addition to the vegetable beds (which we are not currently planning to expand), we added several fruit-producing, well, twigs at the moment. Except the peach, that is almost as tall as me, and we have an American plum that just arrived today that is taller (and not pictured, since it’s not in the ground yet).
A blueberry surrounded by leftover bits of a holiday tree.
The other blueberry, also surrounded by leftover bits of a holiday tree.
A hazelnut tree
The other hazelnut tree
A peach tree, with the mulberry tree behind it.
A shrubbery! Wintergreen, to be specific, with a fingerful of pink berries.
A red currant bush
The holiday tree remnants around some of the twigs are to increase the acidity of the soil… yes, we deliberately saved pieces when we discarded the tree in January. Where there are two of something – hazelnut and blueberries – it’s because that’s needed for cross-pollination; otherwise, we’d just have a couple sad bushes with no fruit. And now we return to the bit where gardening is built on hope… and patience.
This gardening season has been… strange. You may recall I started the season with sixteen eggplant seedlings. We have no eggplants. Early summer saw an unusually high number of rabbits in our garden; I’m guessing they enjoyed the seedlings. That or the burst of exceedingly warm weather around the same time, followed by a temperature drop, and fairly sparse rain throughout the season killed them off. Given those choices, I’d prefer if the rabbits ate them.
Fortunately, some of our other plants thrived. Not surprisingly, we have tomatoes again – all volunteers from seeds dropped in previous years – along with small pumpkins (a volunteer from the composter in the keyhole bed), and three varieties of cucumbers that I planted. The strangest of those are the lemon cucumbers, a round yellow variety that have a delightful crunch to them.
This was our first sizable harvest, a few days before we left on a trip to England and Scotland. Cucumbers, like other plants in the squash family, have a tendency to spread their vines under (or over!) other plants, resulting in what I refer to as stealth fruit, which are ones I don’t find until they’re either larger than usual or otherwise overripe. The two cucumbers pictured above with yellowing (orange-ing?) skin are examples of stealth fruit. We made an effort to finish our early harvest before leaving on vacation, knowing that we would likely be coming home to more ripened fruit.
We were not wrong. There are a handful of green, of varying shades, cucumbers on the vine; we picked every one that looked ripe or overripe, including a couple lemon cucumbers that had been partially eaten. The eaten ones were left in a garden bed, so someone can finish eating them or the seeds can have a chance of germinating next year. We did find that the skin becomes less edible at this stage, so the lemon cucumbers will likely be peeled before eating. Unfortunately, it didn’t rain much while we were away, so many of the cucumber vines have dried out, which means they’re not likely to produce more flowers or fruit.
Of course, we also have an abundance of tomatoes! Amongst the traditional red cherry and yellow pear tomatoes, I found the occasional batch of yellow cherry and red pear, a consequence of growing the two varieties side by side for so many years. We have the usual sprawl of tomato plants, refusing to be contained in their beds and cages, so I expect we’ll miss some during the harvest process and have volunteers again next year. Fortunately, the rain has arrived, which should keep the tomato plants happy for the next few weeks. At some break in the rain, we need to harvest raspberries and strawberries too.
It’s been a busy week and my brain is working through a plethora of stuff, so this is a short post. I was super excited to notice flowers on the strawberry plants this week!
Or as I prefer to refer to them… future strawberries.
Great, now I’m hungry. And we don’t have any strawberries in the house. I suppose that’s OK, I know storebought won’t taste as good as homegrown ones.
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona Aurora, where we lay our scene….
More alike than different, these plants are currently segregated: whites on one side, purple on the other. I know, nothing looks white or purple right now… that doesn’t happen until much later in the season, when the fruit ripens. They won’t even go into the ground for another month, at which point we’ll have to decide whether we really need sixteen plants worth of eggplants, or if I should hand some off to friends.
Oddly, I hadn’t intended to start plants indoors this year. I was taking a cavalier attitude of only using last year’s leftover seeds and free seeds from the library. (Yes, our public library has a seed library!) That worked until I found out about a free seed event near me – the selection was lovely – and I was halfway home before I remembered that eggplants require starting indoors for our climate.
If you’re wondering why there’s loose dirt in the box, that’s because a cat sat in it and knocked some of the starter pots over.
