It’s Tanglefoot time again. Actually, we’re late — really late! — due to this rainy, soggy summer. But better late than never, especially since I’ve begun to spy the first tent caterpillars of the 2017 season.
First a quick refresher. A little over a year ago I explained how to use Tanglefoot and I explained why holistic orcharding benefits from this goopy ritual.
It’s a messy installation process, but it seems to work pretty well… Applying Tanglefoot to fruit trees a messy but relatively straightforward task. Better instructors have already explained application, so I’ll defer to their able guidance rather than overlook something important. (Source: How to Use Tanglefoot (And Why Fruit Trees Need It))
That post includes the excellent advice of “better instructors”, but I wanted to follow up with a quick visual instructional to show you how to apply Tanglefoot. Consider it a supplement. Quick tips.
How to Apply Tanglefoot (Source: Geo Davis)
How to Apply Tanglefoot
In the previous post I discuss using plastic film to wrap the tree trunk, but four years into our Tanglefoot adventure, we’re still using paper/cardboard wraps like in the photo above. It’s simple, quick, biodegradable, and it seems to work perfectly. And it’s a little less plastic to use and put into a landfill!
After securing the cardboard wrap with a piece of hemp twine, the only challenge is to sear Tanglefoot around the circumference of the tree without getting it all over your hands…
Following is a quick video / slide show intended for orchardists, fruit tree hobbyists, or basically anybody who wants quick and easy instruction for how to apply Tanglefoot on young (i.e. slender trunk) trees. Many thanks to Jacob for letting me photograph his hands during installation.
I hope you find the video helpful. We’ve been extremely satisfied with the results year-after-year, and we’re happy to recommend Tanglefoot (and confident in our recommendation) for other fruit tree growers. And if you’re looking for a little broader perspective on why we use and recommend this somewhat unconventional pest prevention solution in our organic orchard, definitely check out my post, “How to Use Tanglefoot (And Why Fruit Trees Need It)“. I’m confident you’ll be pleased with the results. Good luck!
Springtime is tulip time, a dramatic chapter in gardners’ succession blooming cycles. With snow drops, hyacinth, and daffodils fading, colorful tulip blooms take center stage. And this year’s tulip time does not disappoint.
Tulip Time (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)
Signs of springtime are abundant lately. It’s asparagus time. Also ramps, apple blossoms, dandelions, fiddleheads, tulips, nettles,… And lily of the valley unfurling dramatically. An entire army of terpsichorean twirlers synchronized, slowly unfurling, mesmerizing. (Source: Lily of the Valley Unfurling )
With especial thanks to my bride Susan Bacot-Davis for her moody photos, I offer you three intimate portraits of our current tulip time. Like festive gala gowns these goblets of pigmented petals dazzle and dare us to imagine springtime maturing into sizzling summer soon…
Tulip Time (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)
So much confidence and coquetry in these precocious summertime previews. And yet these blooms are delicate, susceptible to swings in temperature and downpours.
Tulip Time (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)
The tulips make me want to paint, Something about the way they drop Their petals on the tabletop And do not wilt so much as faint… (Source: A.E. Stallings, “Tulips”, Poetry Foundation
Signs of springtime are abundant lately. It’s asparagus time. Also ramps, apple blossoms, dandelions, fiddleheads, tulips, nettles,… And lily of the valley unfurling dramatically. An entire army of terpsichorean twirlers synchronized, slowly unfurling, mesmerizing.
Lily of the Valley Unfurling (Photo: Geo Davis)
Lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis)… is a woodland flowering plant with sweetly scented, pendent, bell-shaped white flowers borne in sprays in spring. (Source: Wikipedia)
Lily of the Valley Unfurling (Photo: Geo Davis)
It’s still too early for the perfume that this ground cover will waft across the deck and into the screen porch, but anticipation smells almost as sweet! And the vibrant pageantry, Nature’s unsubtle choreography, is enchanting, even slightly hypnotic. Believe, these sylvan dervishes chant, believe and spring will swirl into summer once again.
I missed my mark — Earth Day, April 22, 2023 — with this post extolling the poetry of earth. It was germinal then, and it remains germinal today (albeit marginally more mature?)
Sometimes a seed germinates with exuberance, practically exploding into existence as if overcome with the glory of imminent bloom and fruit. Other times a seed lingers dormant — cautious or reticent or simply, inexplicably vigorless — for so long that its potential is overlooked, obscured by the foliage and flowers and harvest of its neighbors.
And through it all nature’s song endures. Just when we are lulled into torpid tranquility it swells in symphonic crescendo.
“The poetry of earth is never dead.” — John Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (Source: Poetry Foundation)
Poetry of Earth, May 2, 2010 (Photo: Geo Davis)
Often a blog post is sketched out with a few simple strokes that distill the essence for what I expect to write about. A mini map yo I de ate my route. As I develop the post, filling in the voids, perhaps adding texture and color and context, I approach the anticipated narrative scope. Upon arriving at my destination I publish and share. But exploring a preliminary sketch or fleshing out a rough outline sometimes occasionally renders surprises. Wayward adventures lurk in the most unlikely places. I plan to take journey A, but I end up taking journey B.
And then there are the posts that linger dormant. A seed is planted, but it doesn’t leap to life. Perhaps the ground is still too cold, the earth isn’t sufficiently fertile, or the rain and sun remain elusive. A sketch, an outline, a map. Perhaps even a journey — or several journeys — but they are abbreviated and fruitless. False starts.
It is wise on these occasions to move on. Maybe circle back in the future. Try again. Or compost the effort that it might fertilize another seed. For this is the wisdom of nature and the gardener. This is the poetry of earth.
My mind meanders from Pollyanna printemps — nature reaching and bursting, reinvigorating all that withered and laid dormant these frosty days and nights of winter — to autumn’s harvest. Symphonic crescendo and resounding applause. Such success and such succession. Sweet reward and bitter decline. Decadence and decay.
This seasonal swan song’s poignance is the marriage of expiry and infinity, waning and immortality.
As when winter succumbs to spring’s tender caresses, thawing and refreezing, thawing and refreezing, melting into muddy mess, then gathering composure, turning etiolated tendril toward the sun begins to warm, to green, toward foliage and flower and fruit and… fall.
The poetry of earth is a consoling refrain. It is a reminder that beginnings end and endings seed new beginnings. Out of the mud, a sprout. From the sprout a life full of wonder and another generation of seeds.
“The poetry of earth is ceasing never…” — John Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (Source: Poetry Foundation)
Keats’ poem delivers where I have come up short. Perhaps grasshoppers and crickets and birds lend themselves more willingly to the poetry of nature. Perhaps not. Perhaps this still muddled effort is destined for the compost where it’s decomposition will enrich a subsequent effort to compose this song of seasonality that so far eludes me. To convey the tragic beauty, and the profoundly consoling inspiration of the poetry of nature…
Start over. Reboot. Reawaken. Rehabilitate. Revitalize… Peppering the pages of Rosslyn Redux, these references to revival and new beginnings are woven intricately into the DNA of this peculiar project.
Start Over (Photo: Herbert Goetsch, Remix: Geo Davis)
Juan Aballe opens Country Fictions up(as featured in Panorama,) by declaring that for years he has searched and imagined a “future in better places where we could start over.” His haunting photographs transport us to remote, rural “regions of the Iberian Peninsula.” Far from Essex, New York.
These words accompany his exhibition.
We leave the city behind travelling for miles and miles, driven by hopes and dreams.
[…]
We pursue a fiction, that of a peaceful rural life. We search for beauty in a landscape where we do not belong, where time seems to have stopped still.
We live our own transition, our fragile utopia, trying to understand what we are doing here and who we are.” Juan Aballe via Panorama
He was inspired, he explains, when friends began to exchange urban for countryside lifestyles. He wondered if under taking the same transition might catalyze for him a chance to start over: “a new life closer to nature.”
There is something universal perhaps in the rural utopian longing, the optimism that exiting a complex urban existence and germinating a fresh beginning in the bucolic countryside will permit us to start over. Then again, perhaps it is not universal. But it is familiar to me. We too longed for renewal, revitalization, a total reboot. That was 2004, 2005, 2006. That was 2004, 2005, 2006. A decade, and a half later we are still rebooting. Perhaps we have become addicted to starting over. Likely my passion for gardening and our appetite for architectural rehabilitation are proof that we live for renewal. Rehab ad infinitum…
Enclosing, I am grateful to Herbert Goetsch, for the dramatic photograph of a dandelion that gave birth to my image at the top of this post. You may find his original photograph here, and you may see his work on Unsplash and Alter Vista.
Over the last two weeks I’ve observed two young Pixie Crunch apple trees in our orchard succumbing to cedar-apple rust. Or so I suspect.
I’m no plant pathology expert. And I’m an eager but admittedly amateur pomologist. So my hypothesis that dread cedar-apple rust has infiltrated Rosslyn’s orchard may be premature and far off target. (Do you detect my optimism?) Perhaps one of my astute readers will be able to help sort this one out.
Is this cedar-apple rust on Rosslyn’s apple trees?
July delivered the heaviest pressure from Japanese beetles that we have experienced since arriving in Essex, and some of the fruit trees have been largely defoliated by the hungry visitors. (The iridescent buggers are especially fond of stone fruit.) But they don’t seem to be the culprits in the case of the colorfully mottled apple trees.
It’s worth noting that the Pixie Crunch are the only apple trees affected. I plant a diverse mix of fruit trees with usually no more than a couple of each individual variety. This seems to be a blessing because none of the other orchard trees appear to be affected. So far.
It’s also worth noting that the affliction doesn’t seem to kill the trees. It damages the lower leaves but allows new growth higher on the trees. While it is possible that the blight is slowly advancing upward, it does not appear to have spread further up the trees, only to have become more pronounced on the lower portions.
I’m hoping that the condition is not terminal, that it will not spread to other trees in the orchard, and – this is my my most ambitious pipe dream – that I’ve misdiagnosed the affliction as cedar-apple rust. After all, it is actually quite a beautiful coloring. Multicolored polka-dots, yellows and oranges against summer green. A new fashion trend?
But Pollyanna fancies aside, I’d like to identify it as soon as possible so that I can attempt to treat it so that the apple trees can recover and focus their energy on new growth instead of combating the disease. Or, worst case scenario, if it turns out to be something that is slowly killing the trees (and may infect other apple trees,) I’m inclined to remove the Pixie Crunch trees now and replace them this fall.
I welcome your feedback, and I will do my best to keep you posted as I learn more and try to resolve the problem.
So what do you think? Cedar-apple rust? Something else? Although I dread admitting it, I’m fairly convinced that we’re battling a light invasion of cedar-apple rust which has undoubtedly evolved quite happily, unimpeded in the old meadows, volleying back and forth between the native cedars and old abandoned apple trees.
To brace myself, I’m digging into the nitty-gritty details. Anticipate a more in-depth look at cedar-apple rust soon as it appears the most likely suspect, especially since we have several Eastern Red Cedars (Juniperus virginiana) nearby upon which I’ve frequently witnessed (and photographed) the telltale galls…
It’s that time of year again when we put the vegetable garden to sleep.
I’ve been asked if it isn’t bittersweet ripping out limp, frosted tomato plants and tilling under the rotting stems of zucchini and cantaloupe.
The leaves are gone and frost is frequent, but Rosslyn’s veggie patch is no crying matter. Far from it!
And you know, it really isn’t bittersweet. It’s a celebration of another bountiful summer, eating delicious, fresh produce harvested from a small plot of dirt a short walk from my kitchen. And it’s a celebration of the bounty yet to come. I know that sounds sort of “woo-woo” Pollyanna-ish, but I genuinely mean it. Putting this summer’s garden to bed is actually a way of starting on next summer’s vegetable garden.
I love composting almost as much as gardening!
Besides, there’s still so much happening in the garden. Shortly we’ll begin harvesting leeks and that’ll continue through Thanksgiving, maybe even Christmas if the ground doesn’t freeze.
I’ve stripped the Brussels sprouts in the hopes of fattening their frost-sweetened treats.
And I’ve just finished knocking most of the foliage off of our Brussels sprouts so they can continue to fill out. I’m about a month late, so it may not have as much effect as it would’ve otherwise. Under the best of circumstances this practice helps fatten up the sprouts.
The artichokes provide the only bittersweet harmony in my veggie patch lullaby. Out of a dozen plants, only six survived the swampy May and June early season. Plants that thrive in the sandy, dry, relatively temperate Monterey Peninsula struggle in clay soil flooded by rain after rain after rain. And of the six plants that survived, they developed slowly and bore no chokes. Three of the plants are at prime July first condition today! I’ve accepted that we won’t be eating any homegrown artichokes this year, but I’m not giving up hope for next year.
The Imperial Star artichokes remain healthy, but they failed to produce even a single choke this summer.
Given the decent artichoke crop me managed two summers ago and the outstanding bumper crop last year, I’m going to continue growing artichokes at Rosslyn. In fact, I’m going to undertake a bold experiment.
Ever since discovering that Imperial Star Artichokes can be grown successfully in our abbreviated norther season, I’ve been tempted to defy conventional wisdom.
Although artichokes in more forgiving climes can be grown as perennials, severe North Country winters and a short season require transplanting healthy, established juvenile artichokes and accepting that the crop will not endure from season to season.
It’s time to start harvesting the leeks, perfect timing for outside grilling and soup.
Annual artichokes are certainly better than no artichokes, but given our fruitless season I’ve decided to see if I can’t successfully overwinter our plants.
I plan to cut them back almost to their base once they’ve actually stopped growing and become dormant. And then, before we get any deep frosts or snow, I’ll bury the plants in straw, leaves and organic mulch to try and insulate them over the winter.
Nothing lost in trying!
November greens (and purples) that continue to nourish us.
And I’ve overlooked the still productive raised bed, still flush with greens. Although some of the spinach has browned off, and most of the kale is gone (some pest really did a number on it late this fall), the beets, beet “purples”, Swiss chard and lettuce continue to feed us.
So you see, the veggie patch lullaby is a happy, hopeful tune!
How do you feel when it’s time to put your veggie patch to bed for the winter?
Septembering: grapes sweetening in the vineyard (Source: Geo Davis)
September 1 should logically be indistinguishable from August 31. But it’s not. Seasonality along the Adirondack Coast is irrefutable, and possibly no season-to-season transition more apparent than the one we’re now experiencing. “Septembering” is neither sly nor subtle. Hot and humid yesterday. Crisp and chilly today. There are nuances aplenty to anticipate and enjoy in the weeks ahead, but this moment is our reminder. Summer is in retreat. Autumn is advancing.
Septembering: grapes sweetening in the vineyard (Source: Geo Davis)
Septembering Haikus
There’s something ineffable about Septembering, but anyone who’s dwelled a spell in the North Country is familiar with this shift. Temperature and barometric shift are obviously part of it, but it’s also the changing light, daylight duration, and the abundant harvest. So much colorful harvest to tempt us. And that magical sweetening of fruit in the orchard and the vineyard. Best step aside and let sparse haiku convey what I’m stumbling over.
•:•
Seasonal surreal:
autumnal art, alchemy,
tart transformation.
— Geo Davis
•:•
Dusky zinnias,
harvest-ready to welcome
arriving houseguests.
— Geo Davis
This time of year we harvest fresh bouquets of garden-to-vase blooms to welcome our guests to ADK Oasis, our lakeside vacation rental. These colorful zinnias offered this afternoon’s new arrivals a cheerful invitation to unwind and revitalize! There’s something almost garish about zinnias, the decadence of color, the abundance of petals. They are the quintessential child’s illustration of a flower in my opinion. An explosion of colorful petals to balance the creeping autumn umber.
Septembering: grapes sweetening in the vineyard (Source: Geo Davis)
Grapevines too offer a sweet is slightly surreal portrait of seasonality. Days ago these bursting fruit were too tart too eat. I’ve been tasting. And puckering. But cool night catalyze the sugars as if awakening deep memories of what grapes might taste like. This morning I ate dozens of grapes. The perfect play of tart and sweet.
Septembering: grapes sweetening in the vineyard (Source: Geo Davis)
There is much to admire in a mulberry tree. The handsome habit and height. The luxurious leaves. The shady canopy. The concentrated blackberry-esque burst of inky sweetness.
While you may have a fuzzy notion about mulberry wine, there’s a fairly good chance you haven’t actually spied — up close and personal — a mulberry tree or mulberries. So I find when I walk family and friends through Rosslyn’s orchard this time of year, stopping to point out the ripening fruit. If ripe enough to eat, and lately the mulberries have been perfect, almost everyone who tastes the fruit loves the taste. And yet these delicious tree-grown raspberry impersonators are unfamiliar. I wonder why…
I’d like to revisit this perplexing situation in in the future. But now a look at our three trees and a mindful mulberry meditation of sorts. First let’s stand a while beneath one of the mulberry trees, and lifting our gaze up into the shady foliage, our eyes will begin to spy the mulberries hanging like miniature clusters of grapes.
Although I shared this Instagram post yesterday, most of those photos actually date back a couple of weeks. Now the third and last of our mulberry trees is ripening. And it’s raining. So I harken back to sunnier days.
The first two Hardy Mulberry (Morus nigra) trees ripened roughly concurrently. Their fruit is slightly smaller than the Illinois Everbearing Mulberry (Morus rubra) which we (and the birds!) are harvesting now. Despite some potential color confusion with Morus nigra (aka black mulberry), Morus rubra (aka red mulberry), and Morus alba (aka white mulberry, common mulberry, or silkworm mulberry), both of our varieties are ripe when they appear shiny black. The juice within is actually somewhere between scarlet, violet, and midnight. Lips and fingers quickly stain dramatically and persistently, so don’t expect to sneak a snack without getting caught!
Mulberry Meditation (Source: Geo Davis)
Carley, our year-plus old Labrador retriever manages to stealthily Hoover fallen fruit from the grass, at once an efficient and stain free means of harvesting. I’ve yet to master this technique myself, so my fingertips often belie my gluttony for the rest of the day.
Mulberry Maturation
Our mulberry trees are about nine or ten years old at this point, and they’re growing tall enough to actually evoke treeness rather than nursery stock or dwarf stock. As the trees have aged they’ve set heavier and heavier crops of fruit each summer. Given the approximately 15-18′ height of all three trees, the birds are the primary beneficiaries. We harvest what we can reach and leave the rest to our avian neighbors.
When the fruit first emerge from the mulberry flowers, they are green and covered in small black “threads” left from the blooms. These fall off as the mulberries ripen first to white, then pink, then red, then purple, and finally a deep lavendar-black. At this point they are plump, glossy, and 100% ready to eat!
It’s time for my mulberry meditation, but first a gallery (in case the Instagram post isn’t working.)
Mulberry Meditation (Source: Geo Davis)
Mulberry Meditation (Source: Geo Davis)
Mulberry Meditation (Source: Geo Davis)
Mulberry Meditation (Source: Geo Davis)
Mulberry Meditation (Source: Geo Davis)
Mulberry Meditation (Source: Geo Davis)
Mulberry Meditation (Source: Geo Davis)
Mulberry Meditation
At the outset I mentioned a mindful mulberry meditation, and I hinted at the vague familiarity that I and others might have with wine fermented from the juice of this beneficent tree. That time has come.
“I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I’m sorry to tell you I can’t describe.”
John Hurt
“Huzzah!” I’m grateful indeed to Mr. Hurt for bundling up such creative cleverness. Both bacchanalian and theatrical, Dionysian and persistently mysterious… I’m struck by the many ways this metaphorical explanation approximates the whimsical adventure of redacting Rosslyn. I’ve turned often enough to my own compost and gardening metaphors to obliquely and insufficiently describe my own process. I’m essaying — albeit in unpredictable fits and starts — to distill our wonder-filled fifteen year affair with Rosslyn into the sort of package that might be handed on to others.
What in the world do I mean?
Good question. And if the answer were as good, as tidy and clear, I’d have wrapped up and ventured on to a new quest long ago. I haven’t. Not yet.
However I am feeling closer to clarity, closer to a tidy conclusion in recent years. Even recent months.
There’s much to unpack here (to borrow a euphemism from contemporary talking heads), and I’m doubling down on my resolve to package Rosslyn and pass her on. The property. The experience. The story.
It’s premature to say more now, but know that Susan and I have begun to wonder and daydream about a future in which Rosslyn has been fully fledged. It’s complicated. It’s bittersweet. And it’s still premature.
We’re not quite ready to say goodbye to her yet, far from it actually, so our leave-taking is not imminent. But it’s out there on the horizon, and together we’re brainstorming and beginning the process of letting go, of passing her on. Some day. Concurrently I’m revisiting the images and notes and sketches and letters and poems, allowing them to ferment and hopefully made a decent wine from a decade and a half of life and memories and artifacts.
Before my words wander too far afield, I will close this wayward reflection with my mulberry backstory.
A long, long time ago, at least four decades, maybe more, I first tasted mulberries at an auction. It was midsummer, just like now, and my family was attending an outdoor auction on an old farm that might or might not have been abandoned at the time. I don’t recall for certain, but I suspect the property had been vacant for a while.
I actually don’t remember much about the day except that I came across a grade school classmate who lived in the town nearby. She introduced me to mulberries.
A towering tree stood at the gabled end of an ancient barn, and the ground beneath was covered with fallen fruit. In short order we’d climbed up into the branches to feast on ripe mulberries. We spent the rest of the afternoon high in the mulberry tree savoring (to the point of achy stomachs) the jammy black mulberry deliciousness. With the auctioneer’s singsong soundtrack and enough mulberries to bloat our bellies and stain our clothes, the hours melted deliciously into the sort of nostalgic motherlode that still brings me contentment in midlife.
My decision to plant mulberry trees at Rosslyn half a lifetime later was rooted in that sweet syrupy memory.
Whether hummingbirds or butterflies or honey bees or bats or scores of other pollinators accidentally doing the work of fertilizing flowers from generation to generation, the appetite for nectar powers progeny. A sweet song of perpetuity. A dulcet dance engendering poppies aplenty.
Papaver Bee-ing, Haiku
By coincidence a poppy pollinator, the bee nectaring.
I wonder, in our quest for mythological nectar, if we ungainly landlubbers might inadvertently be pollinating poppies. Occasionally. Let’s hope so.
Rain, rain, rain. That was the main melody this spring, and all of that rain delayed planting vegetables. But as Lake Champlain‘s devastating flood of 2011 begins to subside, I shift my attention to the garden. The latest video update takes a look at what’s been planted in the garden including lots of tomatoes: Beaverlodge 6808, Cherry Buzz, Cuore Di Bue, Green Zebra, Kellogg’s Breakfast, Sweet Seedless Hybrid, Fourth Of July, Tye-Dye Hybrid, Brandy Boy, Orange Wellington and Steak Sandwich.
In addition to the organic and heirloom tomatoes, Rosslyn’s 2011 vegetable garden includes Casper Eggplant, Prosperosa Eggplant, Millionaire Hybrid Eggplant and Fairy Tale Organic Eggplant.
On to the peppers: Felicity Pepper, Pizza Pepper, Créme Brulée Pepper; Ancho Magnifico Pepper, Ascent Pepper and California Wonder 300 Pepper.
Then there are the melons: Fastbreak Cantaloupe, Petite Treat Watermelon and Ruby Watermelon.
Last but not least there are Franklin Brussels Sprouts and Dimitri Hybrid Brussels Sprouts.
But that’s just the new transplants. Onions, radishes, peas and Swiss chard are already underway! And many more seeds will be planted over the next couple of weeks including zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, pumpkins, lettuce and beans…
With some Champlain Valley residents being evacuated by boat and the Wesport Marina totally flooded, we’re feeling fortunate that a submerged boathouse and waterfront is the extent of our flooding problems.
Although we have our work cut our for us when Lake Champlain water levels drop, another short-term challenge is the super saturated soil. Tilling the vegetable garden has been out of the question, planting more grape vines, fruit trees and shrubs likewise has been suspended lest we drown the roots. Last year, I planted spinach and French Breakfast Radishes in the garden in mid-March, and my bride and I had been gorging on succulent baby spinach for weeks by this point. Not so this year. Some onions and leeks wintered over, but nothing new has been planted in the vegetable garden yet.
I received a call from Mr. Murphy, the gentleman who — with his son and sometimes his grandson — has done an unbelievable job of maintaining our lawns for the last two years. He wanted to know when to start mowing lawns for the season. He agreed that the ground was far too saturated and suggested we wait a couple of weeks. I agreed.
Frankly, I’ve agreed with almost every decision Mr. Murphy has made over the last two years. He’s a lawn master. And a weather master. He keeps track of the forecast and works around it, advancing or pushing back our lawn mowing each week per the rain forecast. And so far we’ve never once had an unmowed lawn for the weekend! And he’s nice as can be, always smiling, always ready to let me in on an amusing story or anecdote. He’s famous in these parts for his tomato plants. He raises many hundreds of plants and then sells them to friends and neighbors, donating the profits to the local animal shelter.
In short, I’m a big fan of Mr. Murphy, and when he told me that his greenhouse was flooded, I was sympathetic as only a sunken boathouse owner could be.
Water, water everywhere! We’re all ready for a drought…
Hyacinth perfume the air outside our breakfast room
Actually, today I took matters into my own hands. Despite the notion that a couple of dry weeks would be needed to till and plant, I jumped the gun. Rising lake water had gotten its talons into my spirit, so I decided to ignore the flood and enjoy the first balmy spring day in a while gardening, pruning, landscaping. And you know what? It worked! I only wish I’d tried this approach a few days ago. Maybe Lake Champlain wouldn’t have risen so high.
Doug and I spent part of the morning changing over the tractor from snow plow to backhoe, and then proceeded to rip out a lumber retaining wall at the southeast corner of the old clay tennis court. I suspected that the area contained objectionable refuse (a battery and part of a garden hose had floated to the surface) and the wall had been built altogether too close to the carriage barn resulting in sill and framing rot. I’ll tell the story of what we discovered in another post.
Then we tilled the garden under for the second time, adding plenty of sphagnum moss to help lighten the soil. We were premature. The tines clogged repeatedly, but we made it through which will help the soil dry out. Tomorrow I’m hoping to make another pass and possibly — I dare not pronounce my wish lest I tempt the rain fates — just possibly I’ll be able to plant some spinach and kale. I’d hoped to have the vegetable garden so much further along by now because of some ambitious plans. We’re relocating the asparagus patch from south of the carriage barn to back by the vegetable garden. The strawberry beds will also be moved. And the rhubarb. And blueberries, raspberries and blackberries are arriving in a couple of weeks to be planted. None of these beds have been prepared yet.
But today marked the first major step forward in preparing the vegetable and fruit gardens. And tomorrow, weather permitting, I intend to continue full steam ahead! Fingers crossed…
