Spring becomes summer
Except for last
weekend's Dogwood Winter, we seem to have skipped right
over spring and moved on to summer. The pollinator
haze on the
peach is starting to die down as the flowers pass their prime and
leaves pop out. Our other fruit trees --- like this pear --- are
following suit.
The blueberry bushes are
coated in flower buds, and I keep having to
remind myself not to count my berries until the frost free date.
I considered rabbiteye
blueberries an
experiment here in zone 6, but
they seem to be happy and healthy. We only lost one --- the
large, older plant my friends threw into the order so that Mark and I
would get to sample blueberries the first year. The loss is a
handy reminder that older woody plants tend to transplant badly and
often do
worse than a youngster of the same species.
Despite all of the
promise, the beginning of summer brings trials and tribulations.
This year's abnormally hot,
dry spring led to low germination rates in my spinach and swiss chard,
and I can't seem to find a single onion seedling. I know that I
should just plant some onion sets, but sets don't produce good storage
onions (and cost so much that it's barely worth your while to grow
them.) Instead, I'm going to be nutty and replant the onion seeds
in a shady corner, hoping for a miracle.
Our asparagus also
breaks my heart. Last year's asparagus
beetle
infestation killed back the fronds by early summer, and the spears now
poking up out of the ground are far thinner than they should be as
three year old plants. The calendar says that we should be able
to eat asparagus this year,
but I suspect the right thing to do is give the plants another year to
recover...assuming I can keep the asparagus beetles at bay. I've
already squashed a few and had better come up with a solution fast!
But the rest of the
garden is growing like gangbusters. I meant to go back and add
some mulch under the nectarine, but the comfrey has done that for me.
Of course, the real clue
that it's summer came when I turned on the sprinklers. I should have done
that two weeks ago --- it might have saved my seed onions!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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