Early August Status Report

 The first tomato of the season is taking its sweet time.  The plants themselves are looking amazing and they are covered in fruit.  This year I got the pairings exactly right.  Two on the left are the super vigorous varieties that are much like Brandywine, Elsie's Amish Tomato and the Barlow Tomato.  Two in the middle are the black Paul Robeson and Carbon.  Two on the right are Sun Sugar Cherry and Adelaide Festival Dwarf.

The Barlow tomato first spotted on June 23rd is just starting to change.

The Sweet Corn will also be ready any day.  I have been feeling the ear tips but I haven't gotten anxious enough to start peaking inside yet.

I am seeing some good sized ears in here.  There should be as much as we want.

The pole beans are climbing and starting to produce.  They really stalled out there in the heat wave because I did not have them mulched and the Marigolds weren't big enough to properly shade their roots.  The vines are really healthy and should produce well for many weeks to come.

It is proving to be a stellar year for Peppers.

The plants are LOADED with Peppers.

Now that I have more than enough pickles made, it is time to pull the tired out Cucumber vines.  The vines are still flowering well but not setting fruit.

I remove all of the pickling vines but left the two slicer vines because they had some nice cucumbers still developing on them.

My refrigerator is full from these two vines, and the cukes should last for weeks still.

The Blackberries will be ready soon.  Below is the first clump of berries but there are many more behind that.  I have hoops set up and I am ready to throw some insect netting over them to keep the birds from stealing my berries.  I am not willing to share these first precious fruit.

That pretty much covers the food coming out of the vegetable garden.  I would like to show off the Tiara Blue Supertunias that Romence Gardens shipped my by mistake.  I wasn't in love with them when  planted them but they are really growing on me.

The white Marigolds are in a bit of a lull right now but are covered in buds.

My annuals should continue looking beautiful all through August

Working Out Landscape "Problems" for Next Year

 Now that I am through with another season of discouraging deer from eating my Daylily buds, I am starting to make plans for changes that will improve my life next year.  I have ten Daylilies that are still difficult to protect.  Three of them I don't feel the need to save or even replace, and six of them I do want to replace with something more suitable.   Last year I dug out quite a few and replaced them with other plants.  Between the lily dig outs and the winter failures, I had to replace twelve plants.  Now that is complete and I am making plans for next year's round of replacements.

These Daylilies are going to have to go.  The yellow Happy Returns that flank the entrance to the walkway are now done blooming and will have to be cut back anyway, and the tall white lily is just beginning to bloom this week at the point that I am sick and tired of spraying repellent every day.

These yellow lilies may as well be replaced with annuals.  In years previous I have planted annuals along the right side and I am going back to that.  A row of "white" Marigolds or Geraniums would look nice, but will still have to be sprayed.  So far, the deer have never eaten Petunias.  I think I may try those next year.  That plant on the left of the walkway is the original Happy Returns plant and I have divided it many times so that I, and our neighbor, have it in a dozen other locations.  The neighbor wants more, so these will not go to waste.

This photo is from ten years (or more) ago.

I felt like I would like a medium sized perennial or shrub in the place of the white lily.  Not far away in the same bed I have this Little Lime Punch panicle hydrangea.  The deer will trim it a little in the spring when the tips are growing, but it is not a priority to them so it is easier to protect than lily buds and they do not totally ruin it.  Once it blooms it is safe and will look nice for months compared to a lily which only blooms for a week or two and must be protected to the very end.

The Hydrangea is budding right now and it will be covered in large blooms until winter.  While the white Daylily (below) is at it's prime and doesn't really look all that hot.  I have decided that Daylilies are not front door plants.  They just look too plain or too scraggly most of the summer.  I mean if this is the best it can do.... there are a lot of easier plants that look nicer for longer.

My intention was to mail order a Little Lime Punch or a Little Quick Fire which are both panicle Hydrangea that bloom on new wood.  But, the local fancy nursery that I knew had a good inventory of Hydrangea just put their stock on 25% off so I went and got a beautiful two gallon plant for the same price as a one gallon plant usually costs.  After the extended rain the other day, I took my transplant shovel around and started cutting loose Daylilies while the soil was soft.  I put my spade in next to that white Daylily and the whole clump came up.  No cutting needed!

I was thinking that I may put a medium sized decorative grass to its right. but I already have some good vertical elements with the Echinacea.  I think a lighter colored Heuchera may be more appropriate on the corner replacing the yellow Daylily.  I guess I could always divide a shorter grass I already have because the deer are not interested in any of my many decorative grasses.  

Which brings us to the dry creek bed.  I had six Daylilies left in that area.  Four of those are on the replacement list.  The reason I hadn't already removed those is that I really liked a couple of them and they are a bugger to get out of that rocky planting situation.  This large pink one is gorgeous, but sort of stuck out amid the more subtle wildflower look of the other flowers in the creek bed area.  I have a couple of ideas for a more appropriate, more deer resistant plant to replace it like maybe Ironweed.  Because the pink Daylily is so pretty, the next door neighbor took it and tucked it in a corner where it will hopefully fare better than on the edge of my open lawn.

Nearby it was two toned lily.  The deer love this one.  Not only was it on the edge and easily accessible, it seems to taste better than some of the others.  Truthfully, the deer seem to prefer the lighter colored blooms, and while they will eat dark red ones, those are easier to protect.  The deer are not as determined to eat every. last. bud.  It was always the first Daylily to sustain deer damage every year.  I am just going to replace this with a Foxtrot grass division I already have potted up.  I think it is a Sweet Sugar Candy variety and I have more of those in a safer place.

And lastly, this little lily.  I had planned to remove it last year, but I had run out of ideas for replacement plants so I just left it.  It managed to produce one bloom this year, and the deer reached under the net and ate the rest.  I have more of this color in a protectable spot at the end of the vegetable garden so it was dug up and will be replaced, probably with Yarrow.

I am in the process of digging out half a dozen more Daylilies in less conspicuous spots.  Most of them are not even being replaced.  If the space ends up looking too empty, I can always plant something new in the future.  Sometimes the peace that empty space affords is more valuable than the satisfaction of a nice looking plant that you have fought for.  Gardening should bring joy, not frustration.  There is no reason to keep a plant that is bogging you down.

Dill Pickle Day

 Tomorrow will be Dill Pickle Day, which is fine because I don't have any conflicting plans for tomorrow anyway.  We got a wonderful steady rain all morning which we greatly deserved.  When it finally cleared up and I wrapped up the indoor projects I had gotten into, I went out to see what had to be done in the garden, and the cucumbers need to be picked.  I have had a busy day and I looked at this pile of work and thought it sure would be nice if they would just pickle themselves.  But then I remembered a quotes from one of my favorite books...

“when you look at a [garden] from the outside, it looks like work is the cost. From the inside, you find that the work is the reward or, rather, the work is all there is, and it’s a beautiful thing”

~Kristin Kimball Good Husbandry: A Memoir

Sneaky Snake

 I wanted to share one of my garden friends with you.  This is Sneaky Snake.  He lives in a hole in the railroad tie right next to the horseradish.  Unless it is very hot out, I see him each day in the mid to late morning when he is sunning himself. I am not much of a snake person.  I won't handle them unless absolutely necessary, but I don't mind having them around a long as they don't surprise me.  Sneaky and I are used to each other and no one gets jumpy or nervous or moves quickly.  I am sure I could pick him up easily if I wanted to.  But I don't want to. I just get a kick out of his routine, and enjoy talking to him.  Today as I was walking back and forth and around the garden shed doing my chores, he assumed this position with his chin on the edge and just watched my comings and goings for almost an hour.

We'll Figure It Out By The Time We're Done

 We've had this old park bench for years.  We don't often sit in it, we just use it as garden art.  It has been in numerous spots in the landscape and has been sitting here at the end of the porch filling space since the Lilac Tree died and had to be removed.  

It makes sort of a nice backdrop for the flowers, but its sitting days were over because the wood was so rotten.  For the past couple of years I just set things on it, like a garden tool so I didn't forget to put it back etc.  My husband kept threatening to throw it out.  It wasn't very useful, but it would leave a big empty space....  I had sort of made up my mind that I would replace it with an inexpensive metal bench from a big box store.  One that wouldn't rot.  Ever.  But that seemed like the lazy way out, not to mention wasteful and I couldn't find anything I liked anyway.  Or at least nothing inexpensive (this one cost $7 at a yard sale).  

This spring, the seat board that the side-to-side stabilizer braces were screwed into broke loose.  It would no longer even stand up straight.  It leaned like the tower of Pisa.  Moving it to mulch or weed around it was like trying to relocated a fifty pound slinky.  Something was going to have to be done.  A decision made.  Action taken.  One day my husband must have got some inspiration from somewhere because, out of the blue, he asked me "do you want to help me tear apart that bench?".  Yup.  I do.  So, being of the mind set that if we know how to do it and have the tools and supplies, then we should do it.  We decided to renovate it.  And that is how we get ourselves into these little predicaments. 

We tore it apart, wire brushed and painted the ends, and my husband dug around in the scrap lumber pile until he found enough suitable black walnut boards leftover from another project to rip down to the right size.  All that sounds so easy but it's time consuming.  It didn't cost us anything but elbow grease.  And I suppose the scrubbing and the ripping and the sanding and the sealing was easy compared to putting that bugger back together.  The boards were measured and cut to length and precisely drilled so that we could just bolt it back together again.  But apparently, at the bench factory, either the wood is drilled to fit each hole in the iron channel, or they just made the holes really big to allow for adjustment.  Hard to say.  Whatever proper assembly procedure there is was eluding us.  After some trial and error we found that we had to start at the front and place each slat in order.  The thing acted like it was ticklish and kept trying to squirm out of alignment.  And we couldn't bolt the last few slats in until we had all of them in the channel.  Otherwise the last one wouldn't go in at all.  This was one of those projects that, as my husband likes to say, by the time we figure out how to do it right it will be all over.

But it sure looks nice, and it is STURDY.  I am so used to it being all wibbly-wobbly that I almost don't know what to do.    I can sit on it without getting filthy, or falling through, or collapsing it like a deck of cards.

It makes much better garden art now.  It almost looks like fine furniture.

Rustic was fine, but glossy is better.  It seems to say "come and have a seat.  Enjoy the garden."

I guess the hassle was worth it after all.

A Cool Pickle Day

 This week of July is typically the hottest week of the year for us.  And that's exactly when Pickle Day usually happens.  But today is rainy and cool with a breeze and right now, at 3:30 pm, it is only 62F (16C).  

We use the turkey fryer to process pickles so we can keep a lot of the steam outside, and we had to move the turkey fryer to the corner of the deck because the breeze kept blowing out the flame.

The turkey fryer basket holds seven pint jars which is perfect for the amount of pickles we eat each year.

I cut enough cucumbers to have two or three pints of refrigerator pickles and had brine left over which will keep for another week.  When I get more cucumbers, I will make a batch of dill pickles, and I will have the option of processing more bread and butter.

The refrigerator batches are my favorite.  They are so crisp because they have not been cooked and we have been out of sweet pickles for over a month now so these will go fast!

More Free Plants

 Next to the firepit planter there are some volunteer Celosia seeded from last year's plants.  No sense in having them go to waste.  If it were spring and temperatures were cooler, I may be able to transplant these directly from the gravel to the planter, but considering the hot weather, they will need to develop a better root system before they are on their own.

I yanked them out, breaking a lot of the hair roots in the process.

Put them in a cell tray of potting mix, and watered well.  They wilted fast, even in the shade.

Today they had perked back up.  I will wait a few weeks for them to develop a new root system, then wait for a few cooler or rainy days to add them to the firepit planter.