fall is here

The pumpkins are harvested.

The leaves are changing.

And now I’m knitting more than gardening.

I’ve cleaned out half of the garden, clearing out what was left of the green beans, the soybeans, the pumpkins, and the zucchini. We have a few cherry tomatoes left to ripen, but soon the tomato jungle will be history.

Upcoming plans: Next year’s garden will be bigger–I plan to double the size, and my husband will build a proper fence for it (with a real gate, as opposed to a wire mesh gate). Also, I’ll plant more sugar snap peas and tomatoes, but I’ll give them enough space this time!

Still to work out: how to keep the deer out of the garden. They demolished many of the tomato plants and ate all the leaves off the grapevine and most of the leaves off the hop vines. I want to plant more raspberries, but they’ll be in a prime spot for deer munching. I’ll have to mull this one over during the winter months…

Courtesy of wordle.net

a word cloud, based on this blog…

mid-August garden

We’re having fall-like weather, with crisp mornings and warm afternoons. Back in my Texas days, I would have been utterly thrilled to have a crisp morning in August (when, rumor has it, it’s so hot you could fry an egg on the pavement). Here, however, crisp fall days are followed by months and months of winter. I can wait for fall. Really I can.

But the garden is still producing. The tomato plants are going nuts, producing pounds and pounds of baby tomatoes, though I wonder how many will ever ripen with this cool weather.

Sweet 100s. Sweet millions, more like it.

The peas and beans are done (I foolishly planted them all at once, so they ended all at once). The soybeans are nearly ready, as the pods are fattening up. We love soybeans around here…

But the stars of the garden this year are the pumpkins. Remember the pumpkin flower with the delicate baby bump? Look at her now!

Looks like she swallowed a basketball. Then again, so did I when I was expecting…

We now have three big pumpkins growing, with a fourth one that I just pollinated today. I hope there’s enough warm weather left to get these babies to ripen!

We also have quite a number of jack-be-little gourds growing. I have always loved these, and now that I know how easy they are to grow, I’ll grow them every year.

The one in the back was pollinated just yesterday by my eldest son, the undergardener.

But there is more of interest than just vegetables. Lots of textures developing, like the spiky centers of purple coneflowers and the spiky seed pods of the angel’s trumpet.

Bees like to crawl around on this pincushion. Ouch!

Spikes protect these seeds until they’re ready to leave the mother plant.

We’re also going to get a second blooming on our David Austin “Wise Portia” rose. The first blooming was cut short, because I bought it in full bloom and the shock of transplanting it made the poor thing drop its blossoms too soon. Glad to see that it’s recovered. These blooms are magnificent–peony-like and very fragrant. Nice name, too.

A few more blooms to come.

The birds and the bees, pumpkin style

Once upon a time, there was a baby pumpkin plant.

Baby is so little, she needs propping up in a Bumbo.

This baby plant was brought home with great excitement by my son, who had planted the pumpkin seed himself in kindergarten. In the beginning, we greeted each new leaf with joy and amazement.

And then the pumpkin plant consumed our garden.

(Okay, I’ll admit it didn’t consume the WHOLE garden, just about a third of it, but that’s only because I trimmed it back. Unfettered, it would consume the entire Finger Lakes region, surely….)

Back to the story. The pumpkin plant grew and grew, and made flowers and more flowers, but no pumpkins. I was utterly bewildered. We have bees. We have other insects that buzz from flower to flower. Why wasn’t our pumpkin plant making babies?

And then I did some research and realized that pumpkin plants can be a bit shy and may need a little help in matters of the heart. First of all, you have to recognize that a pumpkin plant has male flowers and female flowers. The male flowers arrive first at the dance and stand about awkwardly, waiting for the females to arrive.

Where are all the girls?

If you look closely at a male flower, you’ll see that he’s, um, a little happy to be here.

It’s hard to tell in the picture, but he is standing to attention…

After a long long wait, the female flowers finally show up to the dance. You can tell the girls from the boys in two ways. First of all, the girls have hips, the boys do not.

Female: check out the childbearing hips on this one!

Male: no hips

The difference is even clearer when you look inside. The male flower has a single stamen that, ahem, stands to attention. The female flower has a pistil with several lobes. In my garden, the bees go nuts over the female flowers and show less attention to the males. (I don’t know why–the males are the ones producing the pollen!)

male flower inside: stamen

female flower inside: multi-lobed pistil

Now, if you’re lucky, the bees will do all the work for you. I wasn’t about to leave this to chance, so I gave nature a hand. Here’s an image of fertility treatment in progress (avert the eyes of the young):

To do this, I picked a male flower and removed the petals to expose the stamen, then rubbed it all over each lobe of the pistil to make sure pollination took place. As an added measure, I left the stamen there, so that any bees or other insects that might crawl around inside would continue to pollinate this flower until the flower closes up.

So, yesterday I helped pollinate a female flower, and today, we have an expectant mother!

She just conceived yesterday, and already she’s showing.

Now comes the hardest part—the long wait…

Hope springs eternal

Just treated my entire garden with milky spore. Am keeping all fingers crossed that this will eventually reduce my Japanese beetle problem….

Japanese BASTARDS–I mean, BEETLES

One thing that should never surprise a gardener is that there is always something new to be learned. I’ve been gardening for 17 years now. I’ve gardened in four different cold-hardiness zones. I’ve gardened in the land of the fire ants and the killer bees, so you’d think that the insect world wouldn’t take me by surprise.

And then I met the Japanese beetle.

(Pause for several minutes of obscenities until I regain my composure.)

Those @#$%& Japanese @#$%& bastards beetles are sucking the life out of my garden! What are these sadistic creatures?? They spend their oh-too-long lives eating my grapes and my beans and f@#%ing each other senseless, only to pop out another generation of these monsters for next year, I’m sure. Oh, they’re bastards all right. BASTARDS!

I’m doing my love-the-earth, organic-gardening best to get rid of these BASTARDS in a way that won’t load up my garden with toxic chemicals and kill all the ladybugs, but my patience is wearing thin. The traps I’ve set out have caught millions of these Japanese BASTARDS, but even still, enough are living to turn my newly-planted grapes into lacework. (As a knitter, I should embrace lace, but not on my plants!) Tomorrow, I’m driving as fast as my little Mini can get me to the local Agway to beg and plead them to give me some hope that I can do something to keep this BASTARD population under control.

Now, I’ve always taken a really laid-back approach to bugs in the garden. I’ve always planted a bit more than I need, figuring I’ll sacrifice some to the bugs and there will still be enough for me. But I never met a Japanese beetle, I mean BASTARD, before. DAMN! If fire ants in Texas couldn’t make me abandon organic gardening, I thought nothing could.  GODDAM-JAPANESE-BEETLE-BASTARDS!!!!!!!

Rant over.

The garden, midsummer

Just a few pictures of the garden at midsummer.

Angels’ trumpet flower, just before unfurling.

One zucchini plant is all we’ll ever need.

Evening primrose, also known as buttercups in my family. These are weeds on the Texas prairie but carefully cultivated garden plants here in upstate New York. My favorite flower of all time.

Gazania–wild and intense colors.

Himrod grapes. How could we live in New York’s wine country without trying to grow grapes?

…but we’re fond of beer, too, so we’ve started a baby hops vine. Next year, we’ll need a more substantial support for it. I understand they grow to 18 feet tall!

Some sort of weed. Don’t have a clue what it is, but I thought the flower was bizarre and photo-worthy.

Happy 4th of July!

We had a tiny harvest of strawberries this year (we’re still just establishing our strawberry bed, so there wasn’t much fruit). But here’s a little strawberry-and-blueberry deliciousness to celebrate the day. have a happy 4th!

Home grown lunch

Yum…lunch straight from the garden! A little mesclun mix and the last two strawberries from our very small strawberry harvest. Can’t wait for the rest of the garden to start producing!

taking shape

Slowly but surely, the garden is beginning to take shape. After several weekends of hard labor, the flower bed near the driveway is mostly planted. This area was a real challenge, because until last year, it was home to some seriously overgrown shrubs. The shrubs nearly filled the planting area with roots—in fact, the roots were so thick that they began pushing the stone wall toward the driveway. The shrubs were cut down last fall, but the stumps haven’t begun to rot out yet. Lots of work digging out as much as we could get out, and working around what we couldn’t.

Eventually, we plan to have this wall rebuilt, so I decided to plant annuals in this bed, so that we won’t disturb the plantings when it comes time for the rebuilding. This gives me the opportunity to get some instant color in the garden.

I did plant a clematis along the trellis that my husband made. My hope is that one day the clematis grows tall enough to meet the clematis coming from the other side of our entryway. Won’t that be beautiful…one day?

As for the garden out back, there is much progress. Remember the mountain of firewood? It has been magically transformed by my hard-working husband into an oasis of peace and tranquillity.

Not only do we now have a lovely, woodsy privacy fence between us and the neighbors, as well as a little wall to enclose the hot tub, but we can use it to keep warm this winter!

The beans have finally emerged from the cool earth:

The rhododendron is in full bloom:

But all is not well in the garden chez nous. We’ve had some nocturnal visitors to our garden. Here are our roses. What’s wrong with this picture, you may ask. Take a look, a good look.

Notice that there aren’t any flower buds. If you look carefully, you can see that they’ve all been nipped off. Hmmm, a tasty midnight snack for a deer or two, I suppose.