The garden: August 2006 Archives
I'm not taking about these bears (which I could use more of in my garden if I knew what brought them in), but instead I'm taking about these bears. I would say, and have said as I'm furiously knocking on wood, that I could have spent the summer dealing with a Noah's Ark full of pesky, garden-munching, soul-crushing critters that foiled my green-thumb attempts at every turn but I haven't really needed to. As it is, I've come to grips with the waves of deer and their fawns who had, up until last week, let the impatients planted around the house blossom and fill out to give it a quaint, cottage feel. Then those fuckers mowed them down entirely. But I'm not bitter, mostly. And that's about it. The big fence around the garden has done its job but I actually also believe I just don't have a critter problem. That fence wouldn't keep out woodchucks, rabbits, or porcupines but I haven't seen any evidence of them anyway. The chipmuncks and squirrels, while pervasive, simply eat the birdseed but they're cute and we do have birds so it's fine. But then there are bears.
We don't see the bears usually come through our place, but this year, like clock work, they've come meandering through and just made a mess of things. Early May had them up-end a trashcan we'd left outside. No harm, no foul...that was our error and so we moved the trashcan in and that was then. Then about six weeks ago, a weekly sweep of our property by the bears took down and smashed every fucking bird-feeder we had. So far, we've gone through 7 gold-finch feeders and 5 regular bird-feeders. In an act of defiance, we suspended a regular feeder way up in a tree with a rope so that only the birds could get to it...until the bear climbed up and swipped the rope with its paw and dropped the thing to get at the seed. All that is fine, sorta, but our last remaining feeder, bolted to the corner of the garden was hit hard sometime last night and left for ruin. And the thing is, I'm all about nature. I wouldn't even mind so much if they'd just do it while we were around so I could get it on film and post it on the blog. Is that too much to ask?
I walked out into the garden this weekend to this. My GOD. The faithful, dutiful attention I've provided Le Jardin Beau all summer and now I have a garden plot so choked with overgrown aggression that I'm stymied. And for anyone who has read "The Ruins" this summer, you all will know exactly the creepy feeling I got when I was crawling on my hands and knees behind the tomato beds and a tendril of something ever so gently caressed the back of my neck. I practically SHIT myself. It says something when I'm sort of afraid to go into my own garden, I think.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be my mother's son if I didn't want my garden to be something for and about nature so I'm proud that I have a garden and flowerbeds attracting hummingbirds (even though the thick, heavy humming of the damn thing almost made me shit myself again because I couldn't see what it was and thought I'd mucked around in a hornet's nest). Here's the close up if you can't find Waldo.
My one and only strategy out of everything I'd planted this year, was to create a lush, flower-filled environment around our little fountain up on the deck. This is where I started and this is where we are today.
I'm finishing the third month of gardening this weekend and it is becoming as difficult for me to start accepting that the summer really is coming to a close. School starts for everyone this month, the hot, dog-days of summer should be burning themselves out soon (hopefully), and the nights should start to cool down. August for me is always a month of exhaustion; just too many hot, humid days taking their toll in ways that have me constructing excuses not to leave my office or meet up with people or do anything that requires more than laying around all day, reading and sweating.
The garden suffers from this laziness too. By now, what had once worried me as being too sparse and underplanted is now a wild riot of vines and stalks, flowers and fruit, all spilling over the edges of the beds, making it almost impossible to navigate through them. It is this faith that gardeners must hold on to and believe when they first plant in May: that thing will grow and they'll do so in very big, very broad, far-reaching ways. Had I not used the square-foot garden method, I'd be out killing myself with weeding but the close-knit planting technique almost eliminates weeding and the few stray green things that I can't identify get nipped pretty early. My lazy days just have me out wandering around the beds, checking out the tomatoes and picking cucumbers but not in any determined or focused way. Meandering is what I do, just bending over a plant here and there, looking and enjoying for no apparent reason. That is the best thing about my garden right now: of course I'm getting crazy about the tomatoes ripening (and I might have snuck three grape tomatoes that were ready and calling to me) but overall, there isn't that much produce. Lots of cucumbers of course, a week and a half of beans, and now the tomatoes, but that's it. Everything else is just there because it's there. Flowers, non-producing peppers, herbs, and other stuff I stuck in just to see what it would do. It's almost Zen gardening, I suspect. No real expectations so no real worrying on my part about what will happen. I'm totally into this chilled-out approach.
Of course the months put into this year's garden will serve to guide me for next year. While I still have a good month or two left in this season, some things have become apparent to me already that I need to change up for next year:
Plant fewer nasturtiums. I bought one clot of these edible flowers and stuck it in one of the beds but all the rest I grew from seed, not expecting them to do much. Which was really, really wrong. All the green lily-pad type leaves in this picture are nasturtiums. They vine and grow very big, but are very succulent and floppy if you try to arrange them. They also, unbeknownst to me, have a rather good vining capability so one of them actually found the tomato trellis by itself and vined up, giving the rather dull tomato vines some much needed color (and as I type this, I shudder at the thought of the vines after finishing 'The Ruins' this weekend). Nasturtiums are a good ground cover to keep the soil moist, but by August, they've overtaking everything and are kind of annoying me. Next year I'll do fewer and start training them on the trellises for effect only.
Watch the various plant heights - I have stuff stuffed into places willy-nilly. It's sorta OK and I'm not looking for any English Garden hard-ass rules and regulations, but I could do better with a little fore-thought.
Add more color - I need more flowers or colored-leafing plants scattered around. The coleus did me well this year so I'm going to stick with more of that. I'll probably ditch the snap-dragons since they got way to big and lanky for my tastes, but I'll keep some of the petunias, sweet-potato vine, and the different salvia I tried.
Use the lettuce and herbs- I planted these simply as a ground cover this year. It was just a "what will it do" kind of thing. The lettuce I planted it late (even in May, I thought it might be too hot and the stuff would go to seed too quickly) but it has been doing just fine, even though I've yet to go out and pick it to eat. The only explanation is, I need to see what it does first. Now I know and now I know I can pick it and eat it. I will probably still put in a late summer/early fall planting of lettuce this year to use to eat. The herbs are perennials so as long as I mulch them, they'll be back bigger and better than ever next year.
And that's what I've learned so far. I've been extraordinarily lucky in that I've had very little destruction or disease in my garden. The critters around have left almost everything alone and the worst of it is the basil that has had some little green bug munching away on it. Unlike others, I think I've gotten away with murder in the garden this year and can't really complain.
More pictures here.
