Late Starts

Plans, plans, plans

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, dear reader, you know by now that doing things ahead of time is not my forte.

For you, it should come as no surprise that my veggie garden this year didn’t go in on time.

I had good excuses, of course. Most germane: I hatched a grand plan to achieve vegetable self-sufficiency while foiling rodent marauders (the Thumper tribe and Tamerlane the woodchuck). This meant putting in a fenced garden,

March 26

with hog wire fencing sunk 18” below soil surface,

April 8

April 26

and beds edged with cedar boards separated by wood-chip pathways.

Which meant waiting until my lawn guy had the time to do all that.

It also meant ordering organic soil in bulk (4893 pounds of it, to be exact) and then waiting weeks for its delivery.

Then there was my most longstanding hobby, procrastination. I won’t weigh you down with the excuses for that.

Time management?

In any case, I got an even later start than Kamala Harris. By mid-August, though, I had a new fenced-in garden, 25 by 25 feet, sitting in full sun. I had great plans, zillions of seeds, and 180 square feet of brand new, bare beds. But I rashly donated to Kamala, after which I spent a lot more time deleting election fundraising emails as they cascaded in. (Electoral candidates are like seed catalogs. For each one you donate to/ buy from, you get deluged with appeals from another ten or twenty. My spam folder ranneth over. And there were many more candidates than seed companies.) Then I started writing postcards to voters in Ohio and Nevada.

So of course I did what any sensible person would do under those circumstances: I went to the nearest garden center and stocked up on veggie starts.

Organic lettuce seedlings

Photographed by Marvin Bikolano (2017), Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

These would come nowhere near filling all those empty beds, but they’d provide at least the feeling that I’d done something about vegetable independence. Twelve lovely little lettuce starts went into the western part of the perimeter bed. A medley of cool-season youngsters went into a couple of other beds: broccoli, chard and arugula in the one long (15-foot!) raised bed, kale and chard into the neighboring lower bed. Gate closed against the marauders, I had nothing to do but water (rainless August, September, October even) and wait.

Volunteers

And deal with the weeds that had sprung up once more in the perennial/shrub beds.

Weeds seem not to require water, or any other form of encouragement. They creep along underground and pop up where you’d least expect. Or they float in on the breezes, or blow in on the blustery winds we got from time to time. Or they land with the poop of undiscerning birds that stoop to eating the berries of invasive vines.

Woodland Sunflower (Helianthus divaricatus)

John Phelan (2024), photographed in the Wopowog Wildlife Management Area, East Hampton CT. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Occasionally, an accidental flower pops up. This season, I got a tall, bushy native sunflower whose bright buttery blooms jostled the elderberry bushes, and a native lupine that apparently reserved its flowers for next year. The cornflower that started as one plant several years back has spread its progeny through a wide swath at the north side of the north bed. Barely visible until those cornflower-blue flowers burst forth. Mostly in spots you can’t get at to roust them out without performing contortions I associate with advanced yoga.

Overload

It felt like the Internet out there: things appeared all over the place, and you couldn’t tell where they came from or whether they were worth anything until they got too big to pull out. While the north bed got weeded, the south and east beds went rampant.

The only reason things didn’t get more overgrown was that the bunnies kept them trimmed back. Unfortunately, however, bunny tastes run to the expensive side. They ignored most of the weeds but gave the little asters in front of the house a late-season Chelsea chop, waited until the plants recovered and formed lots of buds, and then a rabbity un-Chelsea chomp finished off all the flowers before they even got fully opened.

The second-largest zucchinum I got.

If the veggies had gotten further along faster, I might not have noticed the damage at all. I had my hands full with the little I’d planted in the old exposed beds. The few pea and cucumber plants that had gone in in April and June, respectively, produced enough to keep me busy for a couple of weeks for each variety.

Pick and cook. Pick and pickle. Or pick and find some poor sucker to accept the surplus. When your peas produce by the grocery bag and your cukes burgeon by the bushel, who needs zucchini hills (July, in haste)? I did, however, harvest several small-to-large zucchini and one mega zucchinum (or whatever the singular is) that looked like the business end of a deep green baseball bat. And then there were, as I mentioned, all those voter postcards.

Harvest, sort of

As those of you in the Northeast know, we’ve had a ridiculously warm fall season. The lettuces and kale took off and are still going, even after several November frosts in the high 20s. I tucked the lettuces under a tiny net-and-hoop tunnel in late October to keep them cozy, but the kale stand naked. The broccoli plants have grown to about a foot high, but nary a broccolino has peeped out. The chards have dithered over whether to stick around; I begin to suspect the nays have it. All in all, mixed results. But it’s amazing how much has survived even past the election.

Mid-fall kale, obscuring the dithering chard

Where’s the lesson in here? Well, clearly, even with a late start you can make some progress. Naturally you need to have the sense not to plant the wrong stuff. No beans, no tomatoes. Even so, the harvest may be less than great. You try to celebrate the things that worked, and not repine over the ones that didn’t. Even if you do invariably repine.

And you get ready for the next round.  Thanks to my sister, who has been staying with me while getting herself settled into life in this area, a lot of those weeds got pulled. The garlic got planted in early November for next midsummer’s harvest. We’ve secreted new corms and bulbs hither, thither and yon. If the squirrels don’t get them, I’m trusting them to do their underground magic to emerge as crocuses and hyacinths and anemones in early spring, just when we need them most.

The gardening gurus beg us not to clear the dead growth in fall but leave it all for overwintering pollinators. So I’m leaving cleanup till March. But a few days ago, I finally pulled out the Harris – Walz yard sign. Clearly it would neither bear fruit nor host a pollinator.

All signs suggest the gardener’s winter this year will be mild. But we’re girding ourselves for what may be a long, hard political winter. That garlic could come in handy by July.

And now…

The sasanqua camellia is a little late this year, too!

Photo by Hillary Hutchinson (2024)

Faithful reader Hillary has once more contributed a Thanksgiving-time photo of her sasanqua camellia (Camellia sasanqua). As you can see, the bush is beginning to bust out in bright pink. Usually the shrub is slathered with flowers in late November in the South Carolina coastal climate. It, too, is behaving a little strangely this year, though. Already dropping petals but not yet covered in blossoms.

If you’re celebrating Thanksgiving this year, have a good one. Let’s worry later about what comes after.

Meanwhile, your turn!

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