Improvements at the ranch

I may be able to water the garden this summer. The S.O. succeeded in pulling the old point for our shallow well. In the photo he has succeeded in jacking the pipe up to where he's been able to remove two 5-foot sections and is close to having another section almost high enough to remove. 

The well is close to the Woman Cave and provided our drinking water back when we had a mobile home. It's also one of those wells that the Health Department freaks out over -- not particularly deep so could be prone to contamination. Never viewed it as an issue for us, though, not when we're perched close to the highest point around here and are sitting on glacial till. 

Even better, that glacial till was beachfront a few thousand years ago. What is now wetland on the lower half of our property is the remnant of a pothole lake formed when the glaciers retreated. Over millennia a whole lot of water soaked into the gravel under us. Our place has never lacked for water. The problem has been getting it out of the ground. Glacial till tends to have a lot of sand in it. Sand has a nasty habit of clogging the screens on well points as well as shredding the working parts of pumps. 

Which is what happened to the most recent well a couple years ago. The sand content in the water that made it through the pump seemed to get worse until it was more like the pump was sucking mud -- the last load of laundry done using that well water had so much sand in it for all intents it wasn't clean at all. We brilliantly figured out it was time to pull the point, clean the sand out or replace it, and hope the problem was solved for awhile.

Except the point did not want to come out of the ground. The well consisted of (as far as the S.O. could recall) four 5-foot lengths of drive pipe and the 3-foot point. One of the couplings on the pipe must have gotten wedged under a rock because it would come up maybe 6 inches and stop. He tried multiple times a couple summers ago, even had help in the attempt, and the pipe would not move. We did talk about simply buying more pipe and driving a point in a few inches away from where the old pipe was sticking out of the ground, but we'd already done that once. The sand has been an ongoing issue for decades. When we put the new point in this time it's going to be, as best I can recall, the fourth one since 1973. 

The original well on the property was a dug well, really shallow, farther down the hill and close to the sauna. It hadn't been used in years so when the S.O. and I set up housekeeping in the Shoebox in 1973 he decided to do a new well a few feet away from the old dug well. He excavated a hole so the pumphouse would be basically underground and protected from freezing in the winter, and then drove a point. I think that one went down maybe 15 feet. Only problem was that in the spring, the pumphouse tended to fill with water as the snow around it melted. So then he drove another point farther up the hill and built an above-ground pumphouse. That point worked fine for a few years, had amazing water pressure, and then things began slowing to a trickle. 

We brilliantly figured out the screen on the point was getting blocked. We tried a couple remedies, he tried pulling it with no luck, and then he drove Point Number 3. Which worked fine for a few years. . . and here we are getting ready to finish pushing Point Number 4 into the ground. At least this time it's a little easier getting the point back in -- he's just shoving it into the hole the Point Number 3 came out of. It had about two feet left to go when he quit for the day. Once it's down far enough to reconnect the pump, all  we have to do is hope the old pump still works after having humongous amounts of sand pass through it for a decade or two.    

Photo is of the point following its removal. It had a long split down one side and was packed two-thirds full of sand. Not much of a mystery any more just why it was pumping mud. 

I didn't bother with a garden last year because I figured out a long time ago I can not count on rain keeping things growing. This year, of course, when I will be able to run a sprinkler it'll turn out to be the wettest summer in 50 years. 

This well also supplies water to the guest cabin so if all goes the way it should, the next guest in the cabin will have cold water on tap again.

Adventures in silviculture

Behold a $30 apple. Back in 2015 I purchased a Wolf River dwarf apple tree. The tree did nothing the first year, of course, and then we had to move it the following summer so it wouldn't get smooshed by the well driller's rig. That meant it also did nothing the next summer. It took the summer of 2018 off, too.

Oh, it kept growing -- put out new branches, leafed out nicely, and looked reasonably healthy, although it did develop a distinct list to one side thanks to wind and snow. But that's all it did.

This spring it finally bloomed. There must have been a good dozen blossoms on the shrub. Who knows? I might have gotten lucky and harvested enough for a pie. No such luck.

The apple pictured is The Apple, the full extent of the tree's yield for this year. Considering that it was the only apple to make it through the summer, one would have expected it be a tad larger. It is perhaps the size of a tennis ball. After waiting through five summers for the tree to produce something that apple had better be edible.

On the positive side, it does come close to being a perfect apple. No blemishes and no sign that codling moth larvae have tried turning it into a condo. It looks good, albeit a tad lonely.

Wolf River, for those who are interested in such things, is a heritage variety. It dates back to the 1870's and is known for its cold hardiness and natural resistance to fire blight, mildew, and scab. I would have preferred to plant a standard size instead of a dwarf but when I spotted a Wolf River for sale at Shopko I grabbed it despite its diminutive stature.

Fantasy gardening

It's that time of year again. The S.O. tilled the garden space, I have starter plants and seeds, and of course I'm fantasizing about mega harvests.

What's actually going to happen, of course, is I'll be relatively ambitious for about two weeks. I'll get things planted, and then the weeds will arrive. And I'll weed, sort of, until I start noticing the damage from the chipmunks. That's when the lamb's quarter will overshadow everything else and if we're lucky I'll harvest half a dozen tomatoes sometime in late August. If we relied on the garden for survival, we'd be dead fairly quickly.

One thing that's probably going to happen is I'll have to fall back on Econo Foods again this year for tomatillos. I have a recipe for a salsa verde made with tomatillos so I decided to start some plants from seed. Not sure if I killed them through overwatering or if the wind has destroyed them when I have them outside during the day to harden. Whatever the cause, out of 16 seedlings, there's maybe only half a dozen left that might survive. Then again, tomatillos were never meant to be grown here on the tundra. They have a long growing season and need temperatures in the 70s just to germinate.

I've tried with tomatillos before. I think they're becoming my white whale of gardening. The S.O.'s fantasy used to be to grow watermelons from seed. He succeeded a few years ago. I did have some success with tomatillos when I bought starter plants from Shopko several summers ago. That was the one and only time I saw tomatillo plants for sale in the U.P. Since then I've been trying with seeds and failing. Maybe I'll get lucky this year, the six surviving plants will hang in there, and I'll get enough to produce one batch (six pints) of salsa.

The more likely scenario, however, is that the tomatillo plants will survive, they'll set fruit, and right about the time the tomatillos are ready to pick the chipmunks will discover that they, too, like salsa verde.

Marketing genius

It's gotten to that time of year where we're harvesting new potatoes from the garden. We didn't actually plant any potatoes this year -- what we're digging up are from feral spuds, plants that sprouted from potatoes we missed when we cleaned out the garden last year. There aren't a huge number of plants, but that's okay. We don't eat as many potatoes as we used to because we're supposed to be watching out potassium (one of the joys of aging is you start having to worry about stuff that not many years earlier you were blissfully unaware could ever be a problem). Usually two-thirds of the garden is potato plants; this year we've got a large section that's planted in clover and is going to be fallow for a year or two.

Anyway, because we're just digging up a plant or two at a time, I'm basically picking everything that looks big enough to count as an actual potato. You know, tubers that are bigger than marbles, although in some cases not by much. Picking those midget potatoes, the tiny stuff that if this was a normal year and I'd planted potatoes on purpose I'd be tossing over the fence for the chipmunks to enjoy, reminded me of an example of marketing genius we spotted at Econo Foods a few weeks ago.

Anyone who's ever grown potatoes know the little ones are a fact of life. Doesn't matter what variety of spud you're trying to grow, there are going to be some midget tubers when harvest time rolls around. Those used to be the ones that got shunted to one side to be fed to the cows or marketed to companies that process spuds into instant potatoes. They did not get sent to the supermarket to be sold to ordinary consumers. The assumption for decades was that people wanted potatoes big enough to actually look like potatoes, not marbles.

Then some genius decided, hey, how about if we quadruple the price over what ordinary potatoes sell for and give them a cute name? End result: what used to be the reject potatoes, the ones that were culled from the production line before the spuds on the belt got to the baggers, are now the high dollar specialty potatoes, the gourmet "gemstones," "baby" potatoes that merit being sold for $5.99 a pound. Or maybe a little more. According to the Melissa's Produce website, that tiny one-and-a-half pound sack of infant tubers goes for $11.99 online. Plus shipping, no doubt.

As for just how large those gemstone spuds are, the first photo is of similarly sized babies I pulled out of our garden  the other day. Of course, the midgets were in the minority -- most of  our spuds were a respectable size instead of resembling dirt-covered marbles.

In any case, sheer genius on the part of Melissa, whoever she might be. Not only did her company figure out a way to use every single spud that came out of the ground no matter how tiny it might be, they figured out a way to charge more for what used to be the throwaways than for the normal sized potatoes. Only in America. . .

P. T. Barnum would be proud.

No winemaking this year

Concord grapevine reachng for the sky

Once again the deer are now doing a nice job of trimming the grapevines. Things have finally dried out enough that we've been able to do some weed whacking around the grapes and some other plants. It was immediately clear that the deer have not lost their taste for grape leaves. The vines are in no danger of dying, but they're also not likely to bloom and produce grapes.

Oh well. I can live without stomping my own grapes. And if I really want to make grape jelly from scratch I can always buy a few pounds of grapes from the fruit stand later this summer. They usually get some locally grown Concords in, although not a huge amount. The U.P. is not exactly Napa Valley. Summers are a tad too short here for grapes to do well. I may fantasize about getting some home-grown grape juice, but I'll be happy just manage to train the vines to grow along wires and form a natural-looking fence. The Concord doesn't seem to grasp that concept. It prefers to send a zillion vines rocketing off in all sorts of directions. Last summer we kind of lost control of it, and I swear it had decided to try blocking the driveway. It grows like crazy, but not in the way I'd like it to.

In other gardening news, the peonies are finally blooming. Yep, it's the second week in July and I have peonies. Every where else peonies are a late spring, early summer flower. Here they're midsummer. Or do they count as autumnal because it's after the 4th of July? They're doing the opposite of the grapevines. They're trying to kiss the ground. As soon as they're in full bloom, the stems decide the weight is just a little too much for them to bear and they flop over. What is the point of breeding flowers where the plants can't support their weight? I've got some daffodils that do the same thing -- they were bred to have amazing double blooms, but once they're in full bloom they flop over. It makes no sense. . . Unless plant breeders love slugs, because that's what blossoms attract as soon as they touch the ground.

 

Slugs may like peonies, but deer don't. The deer change their preferred browse every summer -- one year they love Asian lilies; the next summer they ignore them and eat phlox instead -- but they've never eaten peonies. They're also smart enough to avoid the foxglove, and have never shown any interest in annuals like snapdragons and petunias. 

 My mother used to have an amazing flower garden every year. She planted all sorts of old-fashioned stuff I can't find seeds for anymore: bachelor's buttons, baby's breath, nasturiums, ordinary pink cosmos. You can't even find the seeds for some of the old-fashioned flowers in catalogs, which strikes me as odd. Why would bachelor's buttons go out of fashion?

Native or Invasive?

Definitely native to Michigan: blue-eyed grass

One of my side projects at the museum involves creating a flower bed that will feature only flowering plants and shrubs native to Michigan. It's been a challenge. Many of the wildflowers we all take for granted and maybe even like a lot, like Queen Ann's Lace (aka chigger weed aka wild carrot), originated in Europe or Asia. Daisies were brought to North America from England. Even the lowly and ubiquitous hawkweed (aka devil's paintbrush) isn't native.

Hawkweed and daisies. Both were brought to New England from Europe to plant in colonial flower gardens.

At the library yesterday I spotted a guidebook to Michigan Wildflowers. Aha! thought I, That'll help me a lot as I plan for spring plantings.

Musk mallow. Super common throughout the U.P. Introduced from Asia.

Pshaw. No such luck. The book is a guide to stuff you and I might see growing wild in Michigan, but when it includes plants that give natural resource specialists heartburn, e.g. spotted knapweed and purple loosestrife, it's not exactly the guide book of my dreams. Including those invasives would not be a bad thing if the authors had at least noted they were invasive species, but they don't. The only nod they make to classifying flowers in any way other than by color is to note which ones, like trilliums and Indian pipe, are protected species.

Coreopsis. This is one I was sure was introduced but is actually native.

It also doesn't bother to mention that seeing some flowers blooming apparently wild can actually be a good sign that location used to be a home site, i.e., is the location of an abandoned farm or someone's house. There are some plants, like day lilies (which are in this particular wildflower guide), that simply do not spread particularly well on their own. If you see a patch of day lilies, odds are that someone planted them.

Day lilies. Neither native nor wild. Not even feral.

Oh well, at least I now have a nice visual guide to help me identify the wildflowers I'd forgotten the names of, like cinquefoil. I used to be a bit of an expert on wildflowers -- I did Wildflowers as a 4-H project for a couple of years -- but the only ones I remember really well these days are the ones I never see, like turk's cap lilies and turtleheads, or the super common ones like goldenrod and Joe Pye weed.

Asters and goldenrod, both native to Michigan

Now that it's September I need to start collecting seeds so I can try starting some plants that way. I'll just have to hope the chipmunks and field mice don't beat me to all of them. I was waiting to collect the seed pods off the nodding trilliums growing under one of our apple trees but when I checked the other day there was nothing there -- the chipmunks beat me to them.

Gardening

Potato plant

I finally managed to get into the garden to do some serious weeding yesterday. I started off by pulling the remaining radishes -- they're going to seed so it's time to remove them -- and then went looking for the cucumber plants. The weeds had gotten tall enough to pretty much hide the vines, but turned out they are there, growing fairly vigorously, and starting to bloom. I may actually get enough cukes to make pickles without having to resort to buying some from the fruit stand this year.

It would be nice -- last year the chipmunks wiped out most of the plants just as they started to sprout, and the year before that I think it was drought. Or maybe poor soil. We have one area in the garden where it seems like no matter what we do to it -- compost worked in, commercial fertilizer, treatments to correct the pH, you name it -- nothing wants to grow particularly well. I'm thinking seriously about marking that space off, planting clover there, and letting it stay fallow for a couple years.

I also finally got my baby rhubarb plants set out. Last summer I saved a lot of rhubarb seeds just for the heck of it. You know, almost no one grows rhubarb from seed. The usual method is to divide up an existing clump. That's how all of our rhubarb wound up where it is. We either transplanted existing rhubarb or bought live plants. But when one of the rhubarb plants bloomed last year, I decided to let it go all the way. Usually we cut the flower stalks off, the theory being that you always want the plant to put its energy into its roots and not into seeding, but last year I ignored the nascent stalks, let them flower and seeds form, and then bagged a bunch of the seeds.

Back in May, I planted about a dozen seeds in peat pots with two seeds to a pot. Of all the stuff I started from seed, the rhubarb took the longest to sprout and had the lowest germination rate: only two pots had any seedlings appear. In contrast, when I started zucchini, the rate was 6 out of 6. This helps explain why although the rhubarb plants will have a gazillion seeds, all of which look like they'd travel on the wind pretty good, a person doesn't look around and see our yard being taken over by rhubarb the way oregano and chives have overrun everything (every time we mow the lawn by the Woman Cave I find myself craving Italian food).

Oregano in bloom. Bees love it.

In any case, there was an empty space in our row of rhubarb so yesterday I planted the two little tiny baby rhubarb plants in that area. Rain was predicted so I figured it would be good to get them in the ground before it rained, not after. I put a marker by each so we won't accidentally smother them when we mulch around the other plants. Now all I have to do is hope they survive. Because we have both kinds of rhubarb in the garden -- red and green -- and both kinds flowered, I'm a little curious to see what the plants end up being. With cross pollination, either is possible.

Rhubarb seeds

The rhubarb, incidentally, is our one gardening success story. Back when the S.O. was young, the rhubarb was in the orchard, and that's where it stayed for many years. It seemed to be fading into nothingness there, though, so we tried moving it a couple times. It did a little better, but not by much. Finally, maybe 10 years or so ago, we moved it to its present location. It loves it there. We went from feeling lucky if we got enough to bake one pie to having enough of a surplus that I can give quite a bit away and still have a dozen quarts or more of frozen rhubarb stashed for use throughout the year. If the rest of the garden ever did as well as the rhubarb does, I'd be a happy camper.

The Chipmunk Wars have begun

I managed to finish planting the vegetable garden yesterday. For a change, I'd calculated things close to perfectly -- no wasted space and no seed packets left sitting there unopened. So what's the first thing I see after I stand up to look around? A chipmunk. He was sitting on the pump house roof, no doubt scouting the garden and figuring out where to dig first.

The little furry bastards did a number on the garden last year. They dug seeds up before they could sprout, they started harvesting potatoes long before we could, and in general had me thinking dark thoughts about importing weasels. This year I'm firing the first volley -- I invested in a canister of something called Critter Ridder, a mix of various natural ingredients that will supposedly discourage varmints from eating anything that's been dusted with it. As far as I can tell, it's basically a mix of hot peppers. It felt like I was seasoning the soil as I wandered up and down the rows liberally dusting everything with a hot pepper mix. Now the only question is whether or not it will work.

I am moderately hopeful that the chipmunks won't be as much of a nuisance this year. I'm not seeing as many around so maybe weasels did wipe out a bunch over the winter. I hope so. Last summer was the first year they'd ever been a problem. In fact, until last summer I'd never noticed any in the garden at all. They'd always seemed perfectly happy subsisting on stuff that fell outside the fence, like spruce cones and chokecherries. Somehow I'd never pictured them as being interested in potatoes. Live and learn.

I have a vague sense of being slightly late on finishing up planting stuff, but considering that we had a late frost it's just as well that the beans didn't go into the ground until yesterday. Our growing season is so short even in a good year that just about everything that goes into the garden now comes in seed packets that promise less than 2 months from planting to harvest. Either that, or it's a root vegetable like carrots and parsnips. I do have tomato plants in the garden, but I also know that when it gets to be late summer I'm going to end up picking most of them green and letting them ripen in the house. It actually amazes me that people (myself included) are willing to put so much time and effort into gardening, both vegetables and flowers, when we're lucky if we get to enjoy three full months of stuff growing and blooming.

Divots, divots everywhere

I decided it was time to get serious about attacking the Canadian thistles growing in the yard. So I dug out the Claw from the gardening shed.

I tend to think of the Claw as a miracle tool. It does an amazing job of ripping weeds out of the lawn. The downside, of course, is that it leaves a noticeable hole behind.  Now multiply that hole by a gazillion. I knew there were thistles in the yard. I didn't realize just how many there were, though, until I got serious about ripping them out. Big chunks of the yard are now looking like they were attacked by a really bad golfer.

I'm not actually sure why I do worry about ripping out the thistles. They're the only weed that doesn't make the cut for being ignored. We've never been the type of people who lust after a patch of grass that looks a lot like a putting green. When it comes to the lawn, such as it is, everything that's not a thistle -- creeping charlie, dog tooth violets, dandelions, you name it -- gets left alone under the rationale of "Who cares if some people think it's a weed, it's green so it's better than bare dirt." I even ignore the burdock that keeps wanting to pop up next to the front porch.

Then again, burdock and dandelions are edible. Thistles are just annoying. So I'll keep ripping them out. Although I am wondering just wondering how many cubic yards of fill dirt I'm going to need to patch those divots.

Death to chipmunks!

The little furry bastards managed to wipe out half my cucumbers before they sprouted, dug up all the Afghan melon and lemon squash seeds, did a number on the snow pea seeds, and now that stuff is finally actually growing they're working on harvesting new potatoes.

I used to think they were cute.

Where are the weasels when we really need them? I know we have weasels around here -- I see them in the winter. So where are they now? Do they estivate? There are an incredible number of chipmunks running around -- where are the predators, the weasels, the foxes, the feral cats, and whatever else might consider Chip or Dale a tasty snack? My fat cat Cleo isn't any help. She's old enough that she's not particularly ambitious. When she goes out, she pretty much limits her excursions to walking from the back door to the front door -- she's not going to amble the 400 feet or so from the house to the vegetable garden. I suppose one solution to rodent control would be to relocate the garden to a site closer to the house -- it's where it is now because it was close to where our mobile home (aka The Shoebox) was set up -- but having spent a couple of decades adding manure and compost to the garden to convert glacial till into soil where something will actually grow, I'm not real enthusiastic about starting that process over again.

The good news, such as it is, is that the wee beasties ignored the green beans when I planted them so we have plenty of beans coming along. They're also ignoring the zucchini, although with zucchini one is never sure if that's good news or bad.

In other gardening news, I've discovered another plant that bolts straight to seed when planted here: Chinese cabbage. The seeds were a bonus from Jung's this year; I was intrigued. Planted them, and despite our relatively cool weather, I swear they went from just barely out of the ground to flowering even faster than spinach does. Supposedly the plants form heads, but it's hard to picture it when they were flowering within a month of the seeds going in the ground. 

Life's simple pleasures

A cordless weed whacker. I'll confess that when the S.O. started talking about buying one a few months ago after seeing one advertised by Home Depot, I was skeptical. I viewed it as yet another unnecessary gadget he wanted to add to his collection of Ryobi cordless toys, which at that point included a circular saw, a drill or two, and several other items, all of which run off the same type of 18 volt battery. I tend to see the cordless tools as being the male equivalent of a Barbie Dream House: once you've purchased one cordless drill, the list of other stuff you suddenly realize you need never stops growing.

I was wrong. Unlike some of the other weirdness Ryobi markets, the cordless weed whacker is a vital weapon in any home owner's arsenal. We bought one yesterday, and now I'm wondering why it took us so long. Not only does the lack of a cord mean you're not limited in how far out you can range from the nearest outlet, it also means greater flexibility. No tripping over the cord, no having it wrap itself around your ankles like a skinny orange anaconda, no trying to maneuver in a way that lets you keep weed whacking without destroying the peonies by garroting them.

For sure the one thing I'm pysched about is the increased range. Our property isn't some tiny city lot that gets measured in square footage; we've got 37 acres of brush and swamp. I refer to our front yard as "the calf pasture" because that's what it used to be. I haven't gotten too carried away with landscaping, but we do have some areas that fall just beyond the reach of the extension cord, like the stretch paralleling the driveway where there are some day lilies and grape vines planted. We can't use a lawn mower in the area between the plants and the driveway because it's a ditch with pretty steep sides. The cordless weed whacker is going to make it much, much easier to knock the weeds down.

Gardening

I finished putting in the vegetable garden yesterday. Other than the potatoes, it's the usual craps shoot. It all depends on the weather. Our short, short summers make it a challenge. There's some stuff that I flat out cannot grow up here because by the time the snow is gone and we can actually plant, we've jumped straight from Spring to Summer. Spinach, for example, is a cool weather crop so you'd think it would be perfect for our northern climate. Nope, bolts straight to seed in record time because our spell of cool, Spring weather is usually only about a week long. Like this year. We had several inches of snow on May 19, but less than a week later were having highs in the low 80s. So I've given up on spinach. If I want greens similar to spinach, I should just learn to pick lamb's quarters. That's a weed that's related to spinach, is totally edible, and grows like. . . well, like a weed.

For some reason I've been thinking about edible weeds a lot this week. Maybe it's because pop-ups for broad-leaf plantain as some sort of miracle plant keep showing up as I go wandering around the Internet. Good to know that if we get desperate for green, leafy vegetables, we can always graze on the lawn. Ditto the dandelions. I know dandelions are edible. The plants are, after all, an invasive species. They were brought to North America by European colonists to plant for salad greens. They kind of got away, and now they're the bane of lawn fanatics everywhere. There's nothing like a plant demonstrating it doesn't need our help to get it moved on to the "we don't want it around" list. The only problem with dandelion greens is that you've got to remember to pick them when they're first starting to grow; leaves from a mature dandelion plant are pretty bitter.

Dandelion flowers are edible, too, if you dip them in a coating batter and deep-fat fry them. Then again, just about everything becomes edible once it's been dipped in batter and deep-fat fried, especially if there's a good dipping sauce on the side.

In any case, the garden is in. I set out tomato plants and tomatillos, planted a gazillion green beans, am optimistically hoping to get picking cucumbers after planting them from seed -- it's not likely to happen, but you never know  -- and am trying something new this year: kohlrabi. I finally learned what that stuff is good for so decided, what the heck, I'll try planting some and see what happens.

My other experiment is Afghan melons. A few months ago a friend told me about Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company. They specialize in heritage and rare seeds. I spotted a type of honeydew melon that is grown in the mountains of Afghanistan near Kabul. I figured that if it can in the rather nasty climate Afghanistan enjoys, maybe it'll grow here. We shall see. My tomatillo seeds also came from Baker Creek. They're a variety grown in some remote area in Guatemala. I started the tomatillos in the house so they'd have a bit of a head start. The plants aren't real big yet but at least they're surviving. I grew tomatillos last summer so know they will grow here. The big question is will they grow fast enough to yield anything harvestable before Labor Day.

As I was planting the garden, I found myself remembering some of the advice I've read over the years, tips on companion planting, i.e., if you plant some plants right next to other plants they'll do better and be sure to avoid planting other things too close to each other because they don't get along. You're also not supposed to plant the same things in the same spaces each year. And, as usual, I found myself wondering just how a person is supposed to follow that advice. Unless you're practicing slash-and-burn agriculture, your garden is going to be in the same space year after year. If it's in the same space every year, no matter how you figure out a rotation pattern, eventually everything you grow is going to end up in a space where it was planted before. It's a mystery.

I did do an upside down tomato again this year, but don't know how many more summers I'll bother. The upside down tomato planter is beginning to show signs of age; once it gets to where it's not re-usable, I won't bother buying another one. I've also got a few tomato plants in more conventional containers; I figured as long as I have the big planters, I might as well use them.

Feeling the urge to get creative in the garden

It's May, the snow is gone, the hummingbirds are back, and once again I'm indulging in the Water Feature Fantasy. Back when I first discovered BBC America, that channel carried a lot of shows that were popular in Great Britain: "Cash in the Attic," "Changing Rooms," "Ground Force," and a number of others with names I've forgotten. I loved "Ground Force." The team would go in to someone's minuscule back yard, which is always referred to as a "garden" in Britain, even when it's a patch of bare dirt with not even a weed to be seen, and turn it into something lovely in what seemed like record time and without huge expenditures of money. Every so often they'd incorporate a water feature.

Not quite what I've got in mind, but close. 

Well, "Ground Force" is long gone -- the BBC cancelled the series almost ten years ago -- but the memories of the water features linger on. The fantasy went dormant during the Omaha and Atlanta years, but it's back now. Our yard slopes, which makes a water feature a little easier to design. I had been thinking about various possibilities, but then this weekend I spotted something that might be the perfect vessel: an old cast iron sink that we used back in the '70s as a feed trough in the pig pen. The pen is long gone, and I thought the sink was too -- a lot of the old iron that had built up through 90 years of frugal Finlanders never throwing anything away did get picked up and sold as scrap metal a few years ago. I was a little surprised that sink got missed, but it was. And now the Water Feature Fantasy is back. An old kitchen sink, a broken pitcher pump, . . . the possibilities are definitely there. Now all I have to do is find the ambition to follow through on them.

We go Green Bay

We spent a few days in Green Bay, Wisconsin, recently. The attraction for the S.O. was the annual Packers shareholders' meeting; I just kind of tagged along. I did discover, however, that Green Bay has a really nifty botanical garden.

It covers 43 acres and has a nice network of paths, walkways, and hiking trails that allow a person to amble through a variety of settings and over varied terrain. There are one or two small formal gardens, but overall the plantings were more along the lines of what I'd label as a cottage garden.

I believe this what people mean when they say "formal" or "Italian" garden: wide pathways and foliage tightly controlled.

I much prefer the informal:

Among other things, it's a lot easier to skimp on weeding when you have masses of plants jostling up against each other. I'm  not a particularly ambitious gardener, so seeing that sow thistle had managed to sneak in amidst the bee balm and lilies was oddly reassuring. I'm definitely not the only person who misses stuff when pulling weeds.  

A few more photos:

There's even a folly. 

Unbelievably gaudy (and ugly) frog in the children's garden area.

There some amazing oriental lilies. The plants were the tallest I've ever seen and the blossoms were huge.

Comfort station

The gardens also had a wonderful assortment of day lilies and hostas. Neither is my favorite type of ornamental plant, but both are nicely reassuring in that once they're planted, nothing seems to kill them. Even deer ignore day lilies. It's good to know that there really are a gazillion varieties, which means that even if nothing else will grow, you can still have some variety in the flower beds.

Trying again

I am trying again with the upside down tomato. The past two summers my efforts fizzled (sizzled?) in the Georgia heat. This year I'm hoping the plant lives at least long enough to produce a blossom or two.

I'm not sure what's going to happen with the rest of the garden, the stuff that was actually planted in a traditional fashion and is being allowed to have its roots go down and its stalks go up without any manipulation. We had so many weeks of unseasonably hot and dry weather that the cool weather crops that were planted in May are bolting straight to seed, and the stuff that went into the ground more recently has been slow to sprout, despite irrigation. We finally got some real rain, so at this point it does look like -- if nothing else -- we will have those old reliables, green beans and potatoes.

This year's variety in the upside down planter is something called "Celebrity." It's a tomato I'd never heard of before, although it did get good reviews on the Burpee's web site. (That's not where I bought it; my plants came from Pamida.)

Playing in the dirt

I haven't felt much like blogging lately -- the unseasonably warm weather in May has kept me busy indulging in fantasies about the amazing garden we'll have this year. It's a fantasy, I know, because right about the time everything has popped out of the ground and is looking good, we'll get one of the U.P.'s infamous Flag Day frosts or 4th of July snowstorms, but for now I'm enjoying thinking that this will be the year we get more than one ear of sweet corn. Either that, or the battery will go dead on the fence charger, we won't realize it immediately, and deer will mow everything down to ground level.

Gardening here has always been a challenge. The growing season is short (theoretically Memorial Day to Labor Day, or a little over 90 days) and our soil is marginal. It's glacial till: sand, gravel, and lots and lots of rocks. Little rocks, big rocks, in-between size rocks. We pulled this one out a few years ago:

We've been building up the soil now for multiple summers through the usual methods -- compost, manure, and planting clover that gets tilled under. It's finally reaching the point where the dirt looks like topsoil instead of a child's sand box, and the permanent plantings (rhubarb, asparagus) are starting to yield more than a lonely stalk or two.

On the positive side, it's always had really good drainage.

Not exactly an urban homesteader

It's almost harvest time on the patio, and about all I can say about this year's results is it's a good thing we don't have to rely on our container gardening for survival. I managed to kill most of the plants by going on vacation for a little too long ("mummified" would be an apt description for what greeted me when I returned from Michigan in June), and the sole pepper plant to survive has managed to produce a grand total of six, count'em, six peppers to date. It bloomed a lot, but all the polinators were apparently far too busy up in the mimosa to bother with a mere pepper plant at ground level.

The black thumb strikes again

I managed to kill another plant this week. I bought some potted zinnias a few days ago at Home Depot, thought they looked really cheerful on the plant stand next to the front door, have been remembering to water them reasonably often -- I do know things dry out fast when the temps are pushing 100 -- but came home today to something that looks mummified.

Maybe I should just concede defeat and invest in gnomes instead of trying to keep something green alive in Atlanta.  Hokie, Hokie, Hokie, Hi!

The upside down tomato

This year's acrobatic Rutgers:

We've tried this before, once here in Atlanta and a couple summers ago at the retirement bunker. The first time in Atlanta it failed miserably -- our old patio received so little direct sunshine that the tomato plant died fairly quickly. The experiment up north worked out better. Did that one the low budget way, in old milk jugs, and got quite a few tomatoes by summer's end. Because the patio for our current abode gets more light, I'm hoping that this year's experiment works out a little better than the first attempt.

The garden is in

Meet Mr. Stripey:

And his acrobatic cousin, Rutgers:

In addition to the two tomato plants, there are 3 other Rutgers in pots on the patio, 2 peppers, and a bush cucumber.

Mr. Stripey is an heirloom variety purchased solely because I could not resist the name.

Update: Just looked at this at work and noticed a photo vanished. It was there last night. Very strange. I did one Rutgers as an upside-down plant, which is why it's described as acrobatic.