Garden 2024: Despite it all...

 Sweet Gum Hill

Gardens of 2024: Despite it all...

And here we have "Honeycrisp Hump," the highest point on Sweet Gum Hill, way back there behind the bench.  

Over the past 10 years, that circle of boulders (i.e. "Honeycrisp Hump")  has been filled in with rich loam and composted kitchen waste. Now it is ready for apple trees!  Yesterday we planted several honeycrisp bare root semi-dwarf grafts and will begin a long summer of weekly watering and tender loving care.  At last count we have 9 apple trees of seven varieties on the property.  There are also 4 cherry trees, 25 peach trees, 6 plum trees, 5 pear trees, and a dozen grape vines. So April is a stressful month when many of these have already broken bud and yet there may still be some damaging freezes in store. Fingers crossed!

Despite it all...

Anyone who knows me realizes it has been quite a year. I certainly appreciate all of the support, encouragement, and positive energy flows.  Since our last garden in 2022, there have been many kinds of challenge: from the wonderful opportunities of international travel, to deceased relatives, then, more recently, a host of medical procedures. Now that the "human condition" seems to be beginning to settle down, I look out on the gardens and see mostly work to be caught up.  Some of it will be difficult, but always, it is best to get started.  Truthfully, I am itching to get underway. Who'm I kidding? I am already at it. 

Here are some photographs from late March and the first week of April in 2024:

Cool cycle: great for grapes and fruit trees. We need these long hours of temps between 32 F and 50 F for the buds and fruit to set properly.  Here you can see the grapes have not yet budded.  Underneath the grapes, note the thick bed of tiny iris shoots.  It will be some year for irises!

Five varieties of plum line the northern wall of the asparagus beds. On March 29, bees were already buzzing on the trees! Some of the plums appear to be in bud break, a vulnerable season since we still have the entire month of April to get through. A deep freeze after bud break might destroy the crop for the year.  Here at the end of March, there is still nothing out of the asparagus beds yet. 

Above on April 2:    We're locked in a wonderful cool cycle now, warmish wet days and cool nights. 

What to do with this soggy springtime?  This is the time of year to get our potato beds in shape, to plant some more bare root fruit trees, to do some roto-tilling of what will be this year's bean garden and to wander around marveling at the profusion of flowers that are already beginning to blossom. So far, the crocuses, daffodils, and hyacinths have made their way into blossom.  Next up, the plum and peach trees are bursting bud a bit earlier than we'd hoped. But so far the weather is cooperating.  Promising a banner year in summer perennial flowers, the Irises and Lilies are pushing out of their beds. I'll have to think of a narrative foundation for this year's "Parade," if I have the time. Most important, this will have to be a year of spreading the irises into expanded beds! Perhaps the narrative of a new "Parade" will have to wait for next year. Maybe the _Mahabharata_ ?   One way to look at this might be to think, "work unending." But when you think about it, there are few things a fellow would rather be doing.

A peach orchard in early springtime is a magical place.  Just thought any reader of this blog might want to see what I mean. The above was taken on an otherwise cold and dreary day, the middle of a flood watch on April 2, 2024. It had been raining all day and the thermometer stood at 42 F. As more of the peach trees break bud, this view will only get better over the next couple of weeks...unless, of course, we have a hard freeze.

Bud break on a peach tree: April 2, 2024. 

Above:    April 2nd bud break on a pear tree...the blossom is not so spectacular. But just wait for these sweet moonglow pears. 

Above:  Most apple trees are still in their dormancy. But April 2 bud break on some of the early apples begins.  Not so dramatic. But in September, a year or two from now,  a nice juicy, sweet, crispy Gala from this tree will be a fantastic second breakfast. 

Above:   Cherries have not yet broken bud on April 2.  Let's give them a few days and the earliest ones will begin to blossom.  

 

                              Potato bed as seen from the south, looking north: nine trenches 30 ft long each. 

Potato beds still being dug.  Our last bean garden occupied this plot. In the late fall we buried a few inches of oak and maple leaves in a rolling trench. Those leaves have now moulded into a rich, black soil supplement, about 2 inches thick and 4 inches below the soil's surface.  Last week we did some light roto-tilling. Today I began shoveling it into 30 foot trenches.  Sometime before mid-April, we'll begin planting the seed potatoes. With two of these larger plots rotating between beans and potatoes each year, coupled with the augmentation of the leaf mould, the soil (which when we started was dry cracked red clay,) and its resulting potato yields, have gotten better with each season. We'll be planting three varieties of potato this year: Yukon Gold, Pontiac Red, and White Kennebec. 

                   Potato beds looking west.  Note some of the pear trees back there, just beginning to bud. 

                                                     Potato beds still being dug, looking south. 

April 10 Update

The fruit trees continue to buzz with the sounds of at least four kinds of bee, including some honeybees, which must be coming from wild hives in the woods since none of the neighbors raise bees. 

                   Peaches, Cherries, Apples, Pears, Plums all in blossom. Bees in ecstasy. 

April 17 Update:    Around here, about half  our year's gardening efforts are accomplished in cold, wet weather we call Springtime.: numb toes in socks that you can't ever keep dry. But your compensation, if you live here, comes during the rest of the gardening season. By May 15 and afterwards, it will be hot and dry, "too daggone hot" is the local nomenclature for when the sun oppresses and the clay soil bakes into a cracked dry substance that can not be shoveled, rototilled, or otherwise managed. Then, best you can do is to get out a hoe and try to fight back the weeds. 

Still, there are several high points to spring gardening. Most important, you can still imagine that all of what you plant will come up and produce beautiful and bountiful crops.  One of the most satisfying ideas you can contemplate is a crop of potatoes which will feed you and the neighborhood for next winter, spring and summer. And potatoes from the garden really do taste much better than potatoes from the grocery store. 

So we love to grow potatoes.  We usually grow three varieties; "Pontiac," a red potato with a creamy white flesh, "Kennebec," a thin skinned white potato that is apparently vital for authentic German potato salad (a summertime staple here), and "Yukon Gold," a thin skinned potato with buttery flavor and a yellow flesh that we use in mashed, smashed, baked, and fried potato dishes as well as potato dumplings that one MUST have to go alongside any pork roast. 

So join us as we close our eyes and imagine wheelbarrows full of potatoes, dug during the last few days before first frost.  

Behold Potatoes In:  This is what 50 lbs. of seed potatoes look like after most of the work is done. Once they have germinated, we will put down straw, add another layer of soil, and pull some weeds. 

Also April 17:  Most of the blossoming on fruit trees is finished. Cross fingers now and hope for weather that does not dip below freezing. 

                                         The last of the peach blossoms for the year. 

April 28

Καλλιόπη ("Calliope" in the fallen tongue), finally emerges.  This flower is always the first of our irises to blossom each year, and the invocation begins the song we call the annual Parade of Irises. It may be among the smallest of the irises we have up here, perhaps four inches tall plus a blossom of about 3", but the color combination and length of its blossoming cycle make this one our favorites.  Or perhaps it is just the first, and happens to be known, around these parts, by the name of the Muse of Epic Poetry. 

Maybe a coincidence,  today we also feature the first harvest of asparagus!  Tonight, we're having fresh asparagus in a sage risotto. Below is what they look like right now.  Probst!

April 30

Calliope's Invocation, The Second Morning

Below: A whole bed of blossoming Calliope on May 7:

You can understand, I just hate to waste a beautiful iris on a lousy human being, a war criminal who would rather kill thirteen innocent kids than to be seen as "soft on the enemy."  He probably thought of his tactic as "shock and awe," or demoralizing the supporting population, or something equally as brutal and unworkable. And if you can imagine, there are people out there who still believe Achilles, son of Paleos, to have been Homer's hero of the poem. I disagree, and find him to be the anti-hero for many reasons.  But still, we had to have an iris with half white and half purple to represent the genetics as described by Homer.  The son of a river goddess, and therefore the white in the beard and an Achaean/Greek, the son of one of the foremost heroes among the prior generation of Myrmidon troops with Jason, and hence the purple. And so there are only a few irises that might work. Below, blooming on May 7, 2024, are a couple specimens of Achilles.  Take the meaning of the character as you will. The iris is a beauty.

May 9, Hephaestus blossoms (below).  Is it beige or pink?  In any case, it is certainly godly. 

Odysseus blooms this year on May 9 (Below).  Note the similarity to Achilles, but a deeper purple and with a cleft in the white beard.  Much more Ithacan than Myrmidon.