My last post was written in a hospital waiting room while
Jane was having her knee replaced. She went home the following day. I still had
to finish out the week at work wrapping up finals and posting grades (and
answering emails—no, you can’t have extra credit after the semester is over),
so Jane’s friend Jan stayed with her. Plan A was to have Jane’s brother and his
wife stay with her a few weeks after surgery. But Dave fell and broke his arm.
Plan B was for me to stay with her for a week until she could get in and out of
bed and get dressed by herself. Thus, I didn’t do a blog post last week because
we were mostly napping—Jane because of the pain medicine and I because I was
exhausted from end of the semester.
Meanwhile, May was slipping by with nothing done in the
garden. Mostly we were late because of the weather. Terry didn’t even rototill
until after he got back from North Dakota at the end of April. It seemed like the
ground would never thaw!
Because of the cold weather, the woodland garden of native
plants that I ordered during about of cabin fever in February was not shipped
until May 7. As you may recall, I prepared the spot for it at the end of March. It
arrived the day of Jane’s surgery. I rushed home the next afternoon to get the
plants in the ground. One of the plants I most wanted was Virginia bluebells.
It was already blooming when the flat arrived. I hoped for the best and planted
it along with the others.
I came home briefly Tuesday morning and put stakes into the
first 58’ feet of the garden, four rows four feet apart for the tomatoes and
the rest in two-foot rows. I picked the asparagus, swapped my long-sleeved
shirts for short-sleeved ones, and had to leave for an afternoon appointment.
Friday morning, following yet another appointment (I’d set
up quite a few wellness care appointments before I knew that I would be
caregiving), I was home for good. We often plant most of the garden at or after
Memorial Day. It was the onions and potatoes that should have been in by Mother’s
Day. We got all the landscape cloth down for the onions before lunch. I didn’t
measure the rows correctly to account for an extra wide row of landscape cloth
next to the tomatoes, so the posts didn’t line up like they were supposed to.
Hilda had the idea to leave a wider open row for the peas, which put us back on
track. With Hilda and I working together, each piece took only 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, Terry got the upper garden ready for a potato
experiment. Because we lost all the potatoes in a flood last year, we decided
to till up the north garden again. That plot is on a hill and has soil that is
not as rich but is better drained. The experiment was the furrower. Instead of
digging individual holes as Terry has done in the past, he used a furrower to
make a long ditch. Hilda cut the seed potatoes; I put them in the furrow, and
Terry raked the soil over the top and put down a marker. It was fast and easy!
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| Seed potatoes snug in the ground with markers on the top |
We had some extra furrows. Hilda bought a pot of sweet
potato sprouts at a nursery. It was another experiment. She had talked to two
people at the store. One said she had no idea how to plant sweet potatoes. The other
said to divide them. So Hilda divided them and put them in one of the furrows.
And they looked like hell. They had severe transplant shock, lying on the
ground like wet green toilet paper. I watered them thoroughly at the end of the
day, and they looked somewhat perkier and turgid then next day.
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| Sweet potato plants looking somewhat recovered |
Hilda and I went to the south garden to plant the onions. I
did a row of Cortland, and she did a row of Paterson (a new variety for us).
That was all we had in us for Friday.
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| Onions |
We had a barely measurable amount of rain overnight. We were
hoping for more. Still, it wasn’t so muddy that we couldn’t get in the garden,
but we did wait a bit to let things dry. I took the opportunity to walk to the
creek to check on my woodland garden. The Virginia bluebells were done blooming
and lay flat on the ground. I can only hope that they somehow have enough
stored in their roots to have another try next spring. If not, I can always
order more. Everything else looked pretty good. The strawberries were blooming.
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| Wild strawberry in my woodland garden |
As was the wild geranium.
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| A rather bedraggled geranium |
The may apple leaves were bigger than last year, but no more
numerous (still just two). Two of my three trout lilies got eaten by something,
even though they are supposed to be deer resistant. Sometimes the deer don’t
read the catalog. I was pleased to see the maidenhair fern again.
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| Maidenhair fern |
The jack-in-the-pulpit was huge this year. But like the may
apple, there are still only two.
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| Jackin-the-pulpit |
By the fifth oak, the shooting stars, Jacob’s ladder, and
phlox are blooming.
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| Shooting star |
I looked under the abundant ginger foliage to find the hidden flowers.
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| The flower of wild ginger growing low to the ground |
There was one tragedy. The yellow pimpernel that Hilda won in a drawing was eaten to the nubs. Our leading suspects are the ground squirrels, although we also have a lot of rabbits. The nubs are still upright. I wonder if they will sprout again.
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| Pimpernel nubs |
Out by the asparagus, Terry’s lilacs are beautiful and
fragrant. I love the smell of lilacs.
When we first moved here, I transplanted some wild iris to a
bare spot temporarily. I thought I moved most of them to various wetter places
where I thought they’d be happier, but all attempts failed. I obviously didn’t move
them all because here was the sight that greeted me in their original location.
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| Wild iris spreading like crazy |
Hilda got down to the garden first and planted half a row of
Walla Walla onions. I finished the row with Red Bull. I’d had an inspiration
that we could use one of the empty furrows in the north garden for the leeks.
Having a furrow in the regular garden is a big pain. (A note on leek culture:
the tiny leek plants are planted in a ditch 6 to 8” deep. As they grow, the
ditch gets filled in so that the leek will grow with a long white part under
the green leafy part.) I went up to plant leeks while Hilda planted shallots.
After lunch, we put down one more piece of landscape cloth for a second row of
shallots. We had TONS of onion plants this year. I suggested leaving the leftovers
in the trays to eat as green onions. The Red Bull plants were already almost
market size.
While Hilda finished the second row of shallots, I planted
pea seeds. I broke up the crust with a cultivator that has a bunch of spikey
wheels that create three parallel row about half an inch deep, perfect for peas.
We’ve found that planting peas in three rows with a trellis/fence around the
outside gives good yields.
I think I love planting seeds the best, especially big seeds
like peas and beans. The tiny seeds are a pain, made worse by bifocals. Planting
plants requires a great deal of care and attention so that roots and shoots are
transferred intact. As careful as I was to get the onions planted straight and
unbroken, when I looked down the row, they were tilted at all angles with bent
leaves all over the place. Sigh. Experience suggests, however, that they will
pull through just fine.
But seeds just need to get into the ground. I lined them up,
staggered across the three rows, pushed each one down a little with my finger
and gently swept the soil over the top with my hand. I felt like I was tucking
them into bed, even though my goal was to get them to break dormancy and grow. Wake
up, little peas! We eagerly await your pods!
When I was done with that, my back had had all it could
take. I went into town to get some posts for the fence that would support the
peas and protect them from rabbits. Before I left, I had the thought that I
would put the posts in when I got back. When I got back it seemed like a better
idea to sit down for a spell before making supper.
Terry and I were both excited to hear rain in the night. At
day break, however, Terry discovered it had been barely a tenth of an inch. The
radar showed more coming about 8:30, and that was the rain we were waiting for.
It didn’t slow the birds down one bit. In fact, they may have been at the
feeder more because the temperature was in the mid- to upper 40s most of the day.
They needed food to keep warm. Here is a hummingbird in the rain.
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| Mrs. Hummingbird in the rain |
Here are Mr. and Mrs. Oriole and Mr. and Mrs. Grosbeak out
for Sunday brunch.
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| An oriole couple and a grosbeak couple out for Sunday brunch |
By the time the rain stopped a couple hours later, we’d
gotten 0.9”. The potatoes were watered in. I can wait to lay the drip
irrigation. Hilda and I took a day off of gardening to catch up on the inside
chores and rest our sore gardening muscles. I took the opportunity to make the
cinnamon swirl bread that I’d promised for Mother’s Day before I realized that
I would be at Jane’s house. Here is Hilda with the finished product. I wanted
to get a picture of her taking a bite, but by the time got my camera from the
basement, she was already done eating! She was very pleased with it. She shared
with Dad, and he was pleased with it too.
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| Hilda with her belated Mother's Day cinnamon swirl bread |
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