The 'Hurry Up' Season

It seems like just a few weeks ago, I was starting to rake leaves out of dormant perennial and shrub beds around our property.  I would clean one bed per day and feel I was doing a good, thorough job of getting my garden in shape.  Over several days I cut back the grasses that had provided winter structure.  Each time I completed an area I would step back and admire my handiwork.

I did not know it, but those were the good old days.

A hundred square feet of lawn
disappeared as part of the
"Hurry Up" season

This past weekend, Betty and I re-established the edge of our shrub bed and moved multiple cubic yards of mulch into it.  We stripped off a hundred square feet of grass out to the drip line of a nicely maturing Forest Pansy Redbud, we trimmed winter kill from a dozen shrubs, and we put up 140 linear feet of fencing around our vegetable garden.  And all that was just on Saturday.

This morning, the epimedium have
burst into bloom... and so need
to be mulched

Welcome to the Hurry-Up Season.  Spring in New England takes its time appearing.  There were still patches of snow on our lawn in mid-April.  Then, in very quick succession came snowdrops, squill, daffodils, forsythia, hyacinths, magnolias and, just this morning, epimedium and bluebells.  Spring is suddenly racing ahead at a full gallop.

Ten days ago, two mountains of
mulch appeared at either end of
our driveway.  Half of it is gone.

Hosta is making its appearance known, thrusting up little spikes that, in a few weeks, will become giant leaves.  And, as soon as the sixty-plus hostas in our ‘hosta walk’ have shown themselves, it will be time to sink down the soaker hoses that keep the garden lush through the summer months.  There is a second mountain of mulch in our driveway that could not be spread until the perennials made their presence known.  Now, with salvia, columbine, coreopsis, brunnera, dicentra, and a dozen other plants in our borders staking out their spaces in the garden, that mulch needs to be carefully placed in beds for weed control.  Oh, and those same returning perennials need to be reined in so as not to intrude on their neighbors; and the peonies – now growing an inch a day – need to be staked.

Did I forget to mention our lawn?  Once the last of the snow melted, the grass was properly raked to get it ready for the new season and remove the accumulation of winter debris.  The grass greened up nicely and now it is starting to grow.  I have added ‘sharpen the lawn mower blade’ to my to-do list.  There is also a smattering of dandelions in our lawn.  We don’t use broad-leaf herbicides to get rid of them (it would also kill off the beneficial clover and nice-to-look-at squill and violets that help give the lawn a lush, exotic look).  Instead, each afternoon I survey the lawn for dots of yellow, and then pry out the offending dandelion, root and all, with a screwdriver.

All winter long, we piled up brush
from winter storm damage...

All winter long we piled brush from storms in one spot.  In March and early April, we cut down damaged trees and pruned ornamentals, adding to the pile.  By mid-April, the brush pile was ten feet high.  Last week, it took eight loads in a pickup truck to get it to our town’s transfer station.

...Eight truckloads later, the debris
was gone; all in a day's work

The vegetable garden looms large on the horizon.  As soon as the fence was up, the ‘cold weather’ crops were planted.  Now, each week in May will mean another clutch of seed packages that beckon to be put in the ground (and then thinned, watered and weeded).  The ‘benefit’ of the garden – fresh vegetables – is weeks away.  For now, it is all work and postponed enjoyment.

You can pack a lot of plants into a
Prius.  This was our haul on
Sunday from Andrews' Greenhouse
in Amherst.

Sometime during the month of May, dozens of container gardens will also come to life.  To make that possible, containers need to be brought out of the basement (a few weigh up to fifty pounds each), assessed for damage and cleaned.  Then will come multiple shopping expeditions at garden centers to find exactly the right mix of annuals (and a few perennials) to give each container a distinct personality.  Planting each container can consume an hour.  The 16 flats of annuals shown at right were purchased Sunday morning.  They'll be used in Betty's container gardening programs during May.

The good news is that in early June the pell-mell rush slows to a more stately pace of garden maintenance.  There will be time to actually sit back and enjoy what we have done.

That’s the pleasure of gardening in New England.  When you finally see your handiwork in its full, joyous bloom, your mind miraculously wipes clean the aches and sweat that are the hallmark of May.  You sip a beverage of choice and enjoy a breeze perfumed by nature.  You admire what you have wrought and think to yourself, ‘this is why we did it.’

Why Vegetable Gardeners Are Optimists

Vegetable gardeners are optimists.  They have to be because, otherwise, they’d never lift a hoe again after they saw their first tomato hornworm.  

We have a plot at a community vegetable garden in our town.  It’s a sunny, 1200-square-foot space that has some of the richest soil in New England.  Because we also ‘run’ the garden (we thought we were joining a committee but it turned out no one else was on it), we field all the questions and problems from our fifty-plus fellow gardeners.  As you read on, please keep in mind that this is a good year for vegetable gardening.

This is a cucumber beetle.  It can make
a plant disappear overnight.

·         Everyone is coping with an infestation of cucumber beetles.  The comments started in mid-May that cucumber vine leaves had little holes in them.  By mid-June, plants were disappearing overnight.  By now, any squash, cucumber, or soybean plant that isn’t being grown under a row cover is an endangered species.

·         Also, the first of the Mexican bean beetles have been spotted.  This charming pest chomps on green beans and anything that looks like a green bean (the bugs are apparently far-sighted), including mung beans, soybeans and alfalfa.  You know you have a Mexican bean beetle infestation because, one day, you come out to your garden and all you have are skeletons of leaves.  Again, row covers are the lone salvation unless you’re not averse to dowsing your vegetables with exceedingly non-organic bug killers.

And this is a squash borer.  One of
the nastiest pests in the garden.

·         Yesterday, someone asked Betty about the cute little orange and gray moths on her squash plants.  Betty patiently explained that they are the adult manifestations of Melitta curcurbitae, otherwise known as the squash vine borer.  When two adults get together and make whoopee, they’ll lay a mass of eggs under a summer or winter squash vine.  Two few weeks later, there go the zucchini, butternut squash, and melons.
·         Two weeks ago, it was reported that a nemesis called late blight had been found as close as Pennsylvania.  Late blight, which is endemic in the South, can kill a tomato plant in a few days.  This morning, I learned that it has been spotted in two towns less than ten miles away.  There is no 'cure' for late blight.  If the fungus spores reach our garden, our tomatoes are goners.

Because of the threat of these pests, our garden this year looks like a Red Cross aid station.  White row covers shield our green beans, zucchini, yellow squash and a couple of other things that have been cloaked so long that I’ve forgotten what’s underneath them.

Our floating row covers keep susceptible vegetables safe
from pests.  It also makes our garden look like a Red
Cross first aid station.

Yet, despite the alarming reports noted above, this is turning out to be a great year for vegetables.  Not just ‘knee-high by the Fourth of July’, our early corn already shows tassels and we’ll likely pick our first ears before the end of July.  The cooler-than-normal May and June means that our lettuce and arugula haven’t bolted and are producing prolifically.  Our peas produce pods by the gazillion and we’ve pulled beets that have reached the size of softballs without turning woody.  Our basil is dark green and already redolent of the citral that gives it that wonderful scent.  Rainfall has been well-spaced and the heat blasts have been of short duration.

Of course, all of this can change overnight.  Our ten tomato plants look perfect right now, but Late Blight – a scourge that wiped out virtually the entire Northeast tomato crop in 2010 – has been found as close as Pennsylvania.  Fungus could discover the basil and corn borers could lay waste to our crop.

The only way to keep your sanity when you grow vegetables is to assume the best.  We plant, we weed, we pick off the bad bugs, we water and we fertilize.  We cross our fingers and imagine the taste of that first tomato and fresh-picked sweet corn.  Gardeners count their wins, not their losses.