From Soggy Spring to Summer Swelter!

Hello and welcome back.  And, many thanks this Memorial Day to all of you who have served in our armed forces!

My apology for not writing sooner, but it's been a busy time here. We've moved quickly from a monsoon-like rainy and cool season to mid-summer heat in just a short span of ten days. It's above 90f here in Lancaster which is way above normal for the end of May. And many changes have occurred in the gardens.  Here's a quick rundown on our "home" garden. I'll get to the county park garden plot later in the week.

I recently discovered leaf miners on the spinach and beet leaves. These little guys are the larva of some small creatures who specialize in burrowing into leaves and feeding until mature. If left to multiply, they can do considerable damage.  The only organic remedy I am aware of is the use of pyrethrin sprays to halt their progress.  I used some on the affected beet leaves, because we do not consume those leaves. I chose not to spray the spinach since we use it for salad. I was able to get control by removing affected spinach leaves, which is really just a partial solution, but one I thought best to take. While pyrethrins are organic, they are, in fact, a poison.

The roses have really taken off this year. We seem to have many more blooms than usual. The salmon, yellow, and red are prolific. The "blue" rose seems more temperamental when its comes to rainy weather and the blooms are opening with brown spots caused, I think, by too much water,

The strawberries have been a bit strange due to all the rain while the first ones were ripening. The excessive amount of rain diluted the sugars in the berries which left them bright red, but bland to the taste. The ones shown below, a bit over a pint, ripened during the dry warm spell and are good in size and quite sweet.

The peony below waited to blossom until after the rainy spell. Good choice!  As they became full, though, a thunderstorm hit and the blossoms became heavy and bent to the ground. They browned out a few days later. They are beautiful, but not long lasting, with a period of flowering that lasts just ten days or so. Then they just show green until the following spring.

The snap peas are beginning to flower and set pods. These are the variety Lois bought at Longwood Gardens. The brand name is "Renee's Garden" and these are excellent!

The pole beans and zucchini are coming along. The beans are stretching to start their climb up the trellis. The zucchini in the foreground now has two blossoms with fruit developing.

All in all, things are going very well. It's always a pleasure to be able to go outside the kitchen just a bit and pick vegetables to serve with our next meal! And not long from now, it will explode with squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and much more.

I hope to see you again later in the week!

A Soggy Slow Spring

Wilkommen auf meiner Leser in Deutschland!  Wie gehts?   And hello to all of you here along the sodden U.S. east coast.

Since April 1 through May 19 of this year, rain has fallen on 24 days, or very nearly 50% of the time. I looked at my log from last year and the difference is amazing!  On May 22, 2010, we began picking strawberries and the snap peas had developed pods that would soon be picked. We are nowhwere close to that point this year. And, while it has been a difficult spring in the garden, Lancaster County has a huge agricultural industry that is very near disaster with millions of seedlings sitting in greenhouses waiting to be planted in fields that can't be worked.  There certainly will be no early sweet corn this year in a place that customarily sees those first ears on the 4th of July. You can't till fields of mud with a tractor or a mule team!

                                                Heading back to the barn

Our tomatoes are coming along in spite of the weather. We're trying out a red plastic "mulch" for the first time with these plants. The theory is that the red color tends to cause the tomatoes to ripen at a faster pace.  The sheet comes four feet wide, but we've folded it over due to a lack of space in a bed that's only eight feet wide. Watering through the slits in the plastic cut to accommodate the plant didn't seem practical, especially as the tomatoes mature. To insure an even watering, we've run a soaker hose under the plastic and on top of the compost around the plants. Not that we need to worry about water very much at this date!  We have six plants in the bed... two each of Better Boy, yellow, and Chianti Rose, plus a volunteer plant near the asparagus patch. The Better Boy shown in the picture below has a collar fashioned from a plastic 16 oz. water bottle, as do the others.  The hope is to keep the snails away from the plants now while small and tender, and also later as the fruit begins to ripen. The Chianti Rose is an heirloom variety that Lois picked up at Longwood Gardens.

                                          Better Boy tomato with a collar.

The pole beans are up and ready to begin reaching for the trellises. Only a few of the plants are shown in the picture below. These are also heirloom seeds from Longwood Gardens.

                                      Rattlesnake and Purple Pole beans

There's not much to be done in our county park plot, at least until the rainy season ends! I'll be back in a few days. I hope to see you then!

                                          Staring out the door at the rain!

More Good Gardening Week!

Welcome back! I'm glad you could stop by.

It's Monday evening (May 16) and  we're having tremendously heavy rain here in Lancaster, along with some lightning. I'm guessing that we've already received two inches of rain since 5:00 p.m. It's just about 6:00 p.m. now. Way more rain than we need, that's for sure. We'll have to go out and check the garden for damage after it stops. The sound of sirens is coming from all directions - thankfully, none are heading directly here, but there are clearly some serious problems happening in the city and surrounding areas.

The Tuesday morning newspaper confirms that we did have 2 inches of rain in a very short time last night. There was serious street flooding in Lancaster. Our garden is totally saturated and we may be on track to get another 2 - 3 inches of rain in the next few days. Most of the garden damage was minor - some well smashed radish plants and some broken iris flowers. For the most part, things are in pretty good shape. The picture above shows a street scene a few blocks from our home. (Credit Jaime Cruz, Lancaster Newspapers)

But, back to more pleasant things....like the good gardening weather we had last week. Some of our strawberries are beginning to ripen. For those of you who would like to grow strawberries, but don't have garden space, take heart. Strawberries grow well in containers. Some of the very largest strawberries we picked last year came from the plants in the container shown below.  They require very little care except for regular watering and feeding.

The beets loved last week's sunshine and continue to do well. A second batch we've planted is coming along a little more slowly due to the sun not reaching their area until about 11:00 a.m.. They remain in a sun field until sundown, however.

The blackberry plants have begun flowering.  We should be picking some large sweet fruit in early July.

One of the asparagus asparagus plants has escaped its "reservation" and jumped into bed with the sugar snap peas. I've been told that asparagus don't like competition, but perhaps that isn't true.

Silver maples may be large, beautiful, stately trees, (50' tall with 30' spread) but they are extremely messy in the spring. The picture below shows our neighbor's backyard parking pad, approximately 20' x 20'. You can see the number of seeds his tree has dropped in just two days....many thousands of them. The seeds extend out into the bright sunlight area of the picture and can be found all along that lane. All of the surrounding yards are well covered, too. Our yard and garden areas have thousands, as well, carried to us on just the slightest of breezes. We will be pulling the tree seedlings out of the soil for months.   Just something to remember if you're ever considering a silver maple.

I hope to see you again in a few days with more gardening updates!

A Good Gardening Week!

Hello again. Sorry for the delay in posting, but the past week has been exceptionally busy. In addition to tending our home garden and starting our county park garden, I've been helping out some friends with a non-gardening project that took up quite a few hours.

So, I'll start with the county garden plot.  That's been quite an experience, to say the least!  The ground was plowed back in early March and the plots were allowed to be used as of March 15. Of course, the rainfall after the Ides of March was fairly continuous and the temperatures seasonably cool. By the beginning of May, as skies began to brighten, the sun popped out on a few very warm days and baked the muddy soil into the hardness of adobe brick. It also has a fairly large amount of broken quartz rock. We watched in awe as a neighboring gardener tried to get a roto tiller through his plot. It was hard to tell whether he was pushing the tiller or the tiller was pulling him along as it lurched in fits and starts through the hard soil.

Thankfully, our plan didn't require a deep digging of the entire plot. We are only putting in five plants: butternut squash, delicata squash, acorn squash, pumpkin, and gourds.  All are "winter" vegetables - those that will not be harvested until September and October. And, they all are plants that will take up large amounts of space. We fully expect that by mid-summer, the plot will be jammed with large leafed vines taking up the entire space. You may remember the butternut we grew last year that spread throughout much of our home garden space.

While I was putting up some critter fencing, Lois began laying out layers of newspaper that would soon be covered by a weed control mat.

When finished (in the next day or so),  260 square feet will be covered with the weed mat.  The center space (140 square feet from left to right) will be covered in a mulch and will contain the plants in a staggered manner with three toward the back and 2 to the front.

The home garden is full with plantings now. I'll be back here tomorrow or Monday with updates. I hope to see you then!

Plants Starts on a Sunny Day!

Hello again! I'm glad you stopped by.

Last weekend and into early this week we were spreading the freshen up mulch over the paths and the garden area.With just a few cloudy days this week and some nice sunshine today, we were able to get some of the peat pots into the garden. It seems pretty much like forever when the seeds were first put into the pots! We also got out to our favorite greenhouse operation (located in Rothsville, PA) to get our hanging baskets for the courtyard area.

And we got two for the deck area out near the vegetable garden as seen in the picture below.

And of course the zucchini's and cucumbers are getting acclimated to the garden. The zuke is in the forefront. The white collar below the leaves is a plastic plant container with the bottom cut out. I use them to ward of snails and slugs, as well as to keep squirrels from uprooting them. The collar in the back ground protects the cucumber which is still to small to be seen at this angle. I'll use similar containers to protect tomato plants from cutworms. There are two more zucchinis and another cucumber further along in the bed.  Tomatoes will go in as soon as I can get them out there...probably tomorrow.

And below are a few of the lettuce plants we started with the seeds we got from Longwood Gardens. This is the second planting of lettuce and spinach. Lois is making quick work of the first planting with a nice garden fresh salad every night now.

Hopefully, we'll soon get a few dry days to start the Lancaster County Park plot we rented back in March. The plants below are anxiously awaiting that day.

I hope to see you again soon. Happy Cinco de Mayo & happy gardening!

New Beginning!

Hello again. Glad you could stop by.

Well, like many good things, my plans didn't work out exactly as I had in mind this weekend.  The idea was to get the mulch down, do loads of cleanup, prepare the baskets and containers &  plant 72 impatiens (other plants are scheduled for next week), and get our vegetable peat pots in the ground. Hmmmmm. That may have been a bit overly ambitious! 

Saturday was a very good day - not to hot, but pretty clear with sunshine. So I went about doing the plan.  First was a stop at the garden center for pine bark mulch to freshen things up after a long winter. (All winters are long as far as I can tell!) The three cubic foot bags of pine bark mini-nuggets mulch always have a little moisture with them, which, of course, makes them pretty darn heavy. So I got three of them....that's all that will fit in the trunk of our car.  Bought the plants. Then headed home and unloaded the mulch. Oh! What was that twinge I felt in my lower back? Never mind.

                                 Garden in progress late Sunday afternoon.

After 5 hours, it was just time to quit for the day!  And start again on Sunday......with a trip for three more bags of mulch for the "walking" areas - those areas that are not garden. In case you didn't know, or just forgot, all of our garden area rests on a solid foundation of 6 to 8  inches of concrete. Sunday was pretty much a repeat of Saturday, except that much of it was spent in the courtyard area, as well. Lois was a huge help getting the bags of mulch in and using her talent to decorate the courtyard walls and deck.  So, we're close to being done!  But not a single vegetable plant has been moved out to the bed where it will spend the summer!

With wet weather predicted for much of the week, it will probably be next weekend that we get the "official" start of the garden season! And it will start with a trip to get just three more bags of  mulch...

I hope to see you later in the week!