cat and lilies

[ligularia]

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As of this writing, launch of the space shuttle Endeavour has been again delayed; here in the garden, though, the Rocket has been soaring for days. That’s Ligularia ‘The Rocket,’ a perennial with a whorl of dark green leaves at ground level from which shoot skyward 5-foot-high vertical spikes lined with small, yellow flowers. The flowers open from the base up so each spike is streamlined by being more slender and less colorful as you look up the spike. Sort of like a rocket. In contrast to the Endeavour, Ligularia ‘The Rocket” doesn’t need bright, sunny days to launch. In fact, leaves…
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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 my Farmer’s Encyclopedia of Agriculture, published in 1914, states that cotton “is successfully cultivated in the United States as far north as Southern Virginia.” I’m banking on today’s hotter and longer summers for a cotton harvest this far north. Not that I’ve invested much in my crop; only 4 plants,…
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[japanese beetle, hibiscus sawfly, maypop]

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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 I wrapped in its resident leaf and squeezed hard. Ruthless? Perhaps. But any beetles now could be -- probably will be -- forerunners of hoards to come. What’s more, the more beetles that show up, the more new beetles will be attracted. And last summer’s wet weather provided good conditions for the beetles’…
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[Tomatoes for G, Healthy tomatoes, Pea problems]

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  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 be a garden, but 9 tomato plants bearing fruits of minimal labor. The plants -- the varieties Anna Russian, Amish Paste, Sungold, Carmello, and Valencia -- went into the ground at the end of May. I brought along, besides the 9 plants, some building paper (“rosin paper”),…
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[, rain]

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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 drip irrigation lines. Water drips out the lines for a total of 20 minutes each day, spread over intervals during daylight hours. That might seem like lots of water, but it’s not; at each watering, water…
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[first strawberries, chickens fenced out]

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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 orbs of the season. Those first berries are particularly welcome. First of all, they are the first fresh fruit from the garden. (Not that I haven’t been eating berries: We still have plenty of blueberries, still frozen and, when thawed, still delectable, from last summer.)…
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[trumpet honeysuckle on phone pole, tomato cabbage interplant

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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 house. Telephone poles can be even worse than just big, dead pieces of wood stuck in the ground. Those poles sometimes need guy wires for lateral support. To keep anyone from tripping over such wires, their lower 10 foot sections are usually girdled in bright yellow, hard plastic sheaths. Very functional…
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(xanthocerus, plant corn, houseplants out)

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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 size of a dinner plate, stared back at me from my tree peony as I stepped onto my terrace. Both plants originate in Asia. Both plants are easy to grow. Both plants have an unfortunate short bloom period which, if this heat keeps up, will be even shorter…
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[kelp, pawpaw flowers, south flower bed]

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  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 Africa. No, I’m referencing my – all of our – ancestors that first crept or waddled forth from the seas. The dark, green flakes are kelp, a kind of seaweed; if the sea nourished our flippered progenitors, I figure it might also provide something nutritive to today’s iPod-appendaged humans.…
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