Summertime and the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high . . . I don’t know about the fish in this hot weather, but, yes, the cotton is getting high. High for New York’s Hudson Valley, that is. My cotton is now about 10 inches high. The yellowing, old pages of […]
Entries by Lee A. Reich
[japanese beetle, hibiscus sawfly, maypop]
Today, June 30th, I saw my first couple of Japanese beetles of the season. They looked innocent enough, a single one on a grape leaf earlier in the day and then another one on a different grape leaf later in the day. I know they weren’t the same beetle because each one I saw […]
[Tomatoes for G, Healthy tomatoes, Pea problems]
My daughter Genevieve does not like to garden but does like good-tasting vegetables, especially tomatoes. So when she recently moved to the third floor of a rented house with access to some backyard space, I, of course, offered her some special tomato plants and help in planting them. No, this wasn’t necessarily going to […]
[, rain]
June 17, 2010 a gardener’s notebook by Lee Reich —————————————————- Last summer’s incessant rains and the late blight of tomato that the rains helped spread make this spring’s dry weather especially welcome. Dry weather does, of course, mean that watering is needed. The vegetables are under the care of battery operated timers and […]
[first strawberries, chickens fenced out]
This year’s berry season officially began, on May 22nd, with the first harvest of strawberries. As with everything else in this year’s garden, the strawberries are early. Looking over my records, I see that in years past, I had to wait until early or even the middle of June to pluck the first glistening, red […]
[trumpet honeysuckle on phone pole, tomato cabbage interplant
A telephone pole is just a telephone pole – unless you jazz it up and make it look prettier. And that’s what I’ve done to a couple of those unobtrusive at best, ugly at worst, brown columns of wood that support the electric and telephone wires that run along the street in front of my […]
(xanthocerus, plant corn, houseplants out)
With blossoms spent on forsythias, lilacs, fruit trees, and clove currants, spring’s flamboyant flower show had subsided – or so I thought. Pulling into my driveway, I was pleasantly startled by the profusion of orchid-like blossoms on the Chinese yellowhorn tree. And I let out an audible “Wow” as three fat, red blossoms, each the […]
[kelp, pawpaw flowers, south flower bed]
Today, with a nod to my ancestors, I’m going to spread dark green flakes over all the vegetable beds and beneath the fruit trees and bushes. That nod is not to my ancestors that came here from Poland, Austria, or Argentina, not even further back into the reaches of humanity from the savannahs of […]
(good king henry, black walnut, spruce pruning)
One thing that I like about gardening is that you get so much for your efforts; that said, it’s sometimes nice to get something for no effort. And that’s one thing I like about Good King Henry, a vegetable much like spinach. I’ve grown Good King Henry, which few people know or grow, for over […]
[surround, grnhs ladybugs, nematodes}
This evening my apple trees were suddenly shrouded in a ghost-like pallor. It was all my doing and all for their own good. The transformation was the result of my spraying the trees with a suspension of white, kaolin clay. That clay is a commercial product, marketed as Surround and made for organic control of […]
