[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 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.)
The first strawberries of the season also are particularly welcome because they are always the biggest. Every strawberry stem ends in a single flower, which is the first one to open. About thirty days after opening, if all goes well, that flower has been transformed into a ripe strawberry.
Every strawberry stem also has two branches and each of these also terminates in a flower. Secondary flowers open after the first flower. Those secondary stems likewise each has two branches terminating by a flower, opening even later. There might even be a fourth set of branches, with flowers, on these last stems.
If you were to dissect strawberry flowers under a microscope, you’d find that that there are most female flower parts, which are what swell to comprise each juicy berry, in that first flower, fewer in the two secondary flowers, and so forth, so the berries generally get smaller as the season progresses.
Opening first, the biggest flower is also most susceptible to late frost injury. Fortunately, I remembered to throw a blanket over the strawberry bed to protect the flowers during the two frosty nights earlier in May.
Now it’s time to throw a net over the bed to fend off birds. Those metal hoops that covered some vegetable beds to support clear plastic for cold protection also work well as supports for netting. That first harvest of the 22nd was only two strawberries. Just a few days later, we were, and are, picking bowlfuls of berries, which the birds won’t want to share.
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I’ve previously praised backyard chickens for their eggs, for their patrolling of the grounds to keep insect pests in check, and for their decorative effect on the landscape. Benefits aside, I do spend some effort corralling them into or keeping them out of parts of the yard.
Chickens scratch for food, in so doing generally messing up planted ground, even damaging some plants as they keep scratching soil away from their bases. Hence, chickens are never allowed in my vegetable gardens, something they seem to appreciate even though they could easily fly over the 3-foot-high fence around one of the gardens. The chicken’s scratchings are also limited by their being “bantam chickens,” never taller than a foot or so and thus limited in their scratchabilities.
All unfenced ground beyond the vegetable gardens – it’s chicken’s delight. Flower beds, berry beds, mixed beds with herbs, berries, and flowers. The chickens enjoy scratching around in the loose soil and mulch of those beds. In their scratching, they even toss some of the soil and mulch outside beds, so I have to every once in a while rake soil and mulch back into the beds. “Ah, fresh, loose soil and mulch,” no doubt think the chickens, who go back right into the beds to scratch around again, and again toss out some soil and mulch.
Just a little fencing dissuades chickens – my chickens, at least – from entering an area. Bamboo stakes (another use for my bamboo) three inches apart and sticking a foot-and-a-half out of the ground decoratively and effectively have kept the birds out of one portion of the garden for years. This fencing only lasts a couple of years and becomes tedious to replace over a large area, though.
I’ve upgrading chicken fencing now to “welded wire” fencing with 2 by 4 inch openings. I cut a 36 inch wide roll in half for 18 inch high fencing, which I support with a bamboo stake every few feet. So far, after a few weeks, the chickens have only gazed longingly within but never hopped over it. Over the past couple of weeks, 7 baby chicks have hatched. The chicks have no trouble strolling right through the openings of this new fencing. Their scratchings are inconsequential.
[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 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 and very ugly.
One day a few years ago I looked upon telephone poles and their guy wires in a new light: trellises! I’m frequently building arbors and trellises to support various vining plants, and here was a ready-made trellis just waiting to be clothed.
So I went to work planting. On one guyed pole, I removed the yellow plastic sheath and planted trumpet honeysuckle where the guy wire entered the ground. On an unguyed pole I loosely stapled a girdle of chicken wire, then planted the base of this pole with another trumpet honeysuckle.
The poles and wires look beautiful now, both dripping with the scarlet blossoms which are now at their peak color that will continue, with lesser force, all summer long. Clematis would be another vine suitable for dressing up a telephone pole or its guy wire, as would hardy kiwifruit, trumpet vine, and silver fleece vine.
Note: Don’t try this at home. I was recently informed that, as owner of the telephone poles and guy wires, the electric company decrees that nothing should be trained on them. (How about just planting at the base of a pole or wire and letting Mother Nature take her course?)
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I know that I’m allowed to plant anything – well, almost anything – in my vegetable garden. How about the lowly cabbage?
If you read the instructions on a packet of cabbage seeds, you’ll be directed to eventually space plants 2 feet apart in rows 3 feet apart. That’s a lot of space for one plant, so I’m breaking that “rule.”
My vegetable garden has beds, each 3 feet wide, rather than rows. Eighteen-inch-wide paths flank each bed. A bed of recently planted tomatoes has two rows of tomato transplants about 2 feet apart, with each transplant is spaced about 18 inches apart in the row. (That’s a close spacing but the tomatoes are each going to be growing up their own stake and pruned to only a single stem, which gives less tomatoes per plant but more tomatoes per garden area than tomatoes allowed to sprawl.)
Those tomato transplants are still small and I hate to see such an expanse of bare real estate in the middle of the bed. So that’s where I plunked down cabbage transplants, 18 inches apart. I figure that the staked tomatoes will be growing up while the cabbages are growing wide. By the time tomatoes begin to shade the whole bed and everything gets crowded, the cabbages will have made it into salads, slaw, and sauerkraut.
(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 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 than usual. Fortunately, both plants also are attractive, though more sedately, even after their blossoms fade.
The tree peonies have such a weird growth habit. I had read that they were very slow to grow so was quite pleased, years ago, when each of the branches on my new plant extended its reach more than a foot by the end of its first growing season. Tree peony is a small shrub; at that rate mine would be full size within a very few years. Or so I imagined.
The tree peony still grows that much every year. But every year many stems also die back about a foot, more following cold winters. No matter, though, because every May giant silky, red flowers unfold from the remaining fat buds along the stem.
I originally planted Chinese yellowhorn not for its flowers but the fruits that follow the flowers. Each fruit is a dry capsule that later in summer starts to split open to reveal within a clutch of shiny, brown, macadamia-sized nuts. The edible nuts were billed as having macadamia-like flavor also. Not true. In fact, the nuts don’t even taste good to me.
Still, those blossoms make yellowhorn well worth growing. And after the blossoms fade, this small tree is adorned with shiny, lacy leaves. Much like the tree peony, this plant grows many new stems each year, and many of the stems die back, not necessarily from winter cold but because they’re seemingly deciduous. I tidied the tree up last week by pruning off all the dead stems.
In keeping with blossoms on other plants around the garden, the tree peony and yellowhorn blossoms have showed up almost two weeks earlier this year than in most previous years.
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Gardening requires a lot of rational actions. You shouldn’t for instance, plant out tomatoes just because one day in April, or even a few days in April, are exceptionally warm. So I rely on calendar dates rather than daily weather for when to plant various seeds and transplants. I’ve garnered these dates learning how much cold plants tolerate and how warm temperatures develop, averaged over the years, in spring.
This year I may not be able to restrain myself. It’s hard to imagine that temperatures could – should, in fact – plummet below freezing at least one night sometime in the couple of weeks. I ignored that “should” and today moved houseplants outdoors and sowed seeds of sweet corn.
Why the rush? First of all, houseplants enjoy growing outdoors more than growing indoors. Outside, breezes rustling leaves and stems make for stronger, stockier growth and rain showering the leaves washes off from them a winter’s accumulation of dirt and grime. After a winter indoors, the plants do need to acclimate to these conditions, which is why they start their outdoor vacation on the terrace on the north side of the house, which blocks wind and, for part of the day, sunlight.
I also urged the plants outdoors because populations of aphid and scale insects were outgrowing the appetites of the ladybugs crawling up and down the stems. Outside, I can spritz the plants down to knock off pests and spray soap or summer oil to kill them without worrying about getting spray or oil on windows, walls, or furniture.
As for the sweet corn, kinky as it sounds, I planted early because I’m anxious to sink my teeth into a freshly picked ear.
