A Gardener's Retreat

So many things are on the verge.  There are blooming beans and blooming zucchini and tiny green tomatoes on the vine.  Our carrots are growing underground while nearby the cabbages look like giant purple roses as they start to take shape.  The cucumbers are proving to be a bit slow this year but I think in two weeks we’ll be pickling cukes.  And our red lettuces (from the second crop of seeds that we thinned and transplanted) are looking fine and almost ready to start eating.  I hope the buttercrunch (a few weeks behind) do as well.

As our plants grow and make fruit, the grasses likewise grow. They grew between and among each carrot plant, throughout the lettuce beds, the cucumber and squash patch, and all around the herbs.  They grew abundantly despite the fact that I had just fully weeded those beds a few weeks before.  Grass is inexorable — it has great life spirit.  Says Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine:

“It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and mowers shattered to cereal flakes of rust.”

That said, we play our role in the annual battle between man and grass.  We weed.  I have learned that the best way to pull a grass plant from the ground (a little one, that is) is to grasp the stem firmly but gently and gently pull it out, roots and all.  This method feels slow but as soon as you speed up, you succeed only in ripping off their tops leaving roots intact and ready to send up more shoots.  So slow and steady wins the race with grass weeding.  And the result — weed-free beds with plenty of room for our vegetables to grow.

Knee-high by July

This weekend, we hit the garden ready to weed.  This was a good thing as we had plenty of volunteers to contend with, mostly tiny grass seedlings that love to spring up in colonies between carrot rows, in lettuce beds, and magically around the edges of everything.  We duly weeded, clearing maybe 2/3 of our plot of grass and lambs quarters.  I’m tolerating a few things, as always.  The clammy groundcherry would require me to dig up entire beds to remove it, something I’m not willing to do.  And there is a bladderwort that I’m letting be there, just because.  Red clover can stay if it wants but not the wild mustard which survives (imo) by impersonating radishes….

So what’s looking good this week — seedlings mostly.  I had to reseed the pickling cukes but they’re up now, along with the long green cucumbers, the pattypan squashes and the beans.  The carrots are growing in well too, now that they’re finally established.

Carrot tops

The tomatoes, peppers and basil that we put in last week are basically just sitting there.  I think it was a bit cool for them here in the early going.  But I’m hopeful that all this rain will help.  

Then there are the crops that we’ve already been getting:  The mesclun is still giving us lots of salads and greens but some of the plants, esp arugula, are starting to shoot to seed.  The first crop of radish is about gone by but we have a second crop coming along.  And in the last week, we’ve been able to enjoy small portions of snap peas which despite the puny size of the momma plants are still delicious and tasty.  I have a feeling they’d be taller if we’d fed them more but what the hey.  I wasn’t expecting much so anything we get is bonus.

And that’s it for the garden this week.  Overall, I think our plants are a bit small compared to other people’s and I think the difference is manure.  Most gardeners, I’ve noticed, seem to really pile on the manure.  We didn’t and our plants are definitely less lush.  I guess we’ll have to invest in a few extra buckets of the brown stuff and look into some of the other feeding methods so we can get our plants up to par, as it were.

C's Popcorn