2018 Garden Planner
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May continued to be on the cool and wet side of the seasonal average as Mother's Day was followed by multiple rainy periods culminating in one of the wettest Mays on record, tallying over seven inches of precipitation at the official gauges at O'Hare International Airport. The breaks between the rainy days were undeniably Spring like, pleasant and perfect.

The brief bliss of Midwestern spring turned quickly to Summer during the short week preceding Memorial Day, with the hatching of the year's first mosquitoes, this massive brood born on the still waters of tens-of-thousands of acres of flooded bottomland. The heat then rose up out of the Gulf basin, like unwanted relatives from Louisiana, sending the mercury into the nineties. The air conditioner in the house quit, just to make drama, on cue with the holiday weekend.

While the mornings were still unseasonably cool and the rains were unrelenting, the summer squash and cucumbers sulked in the ground. The spinach, though, grew gloriously. I had gotten four harvests of sweet and tender savoyed leaves, filling the bottom tier of the fridge. Even in the ninety degree heat, the superior bolt-resistance of the Tyee spinach was evident. Only now, on the fourth consecutive day of 90+ heat, are the leaves starting to transform, growing thin, pointy and arrow shaped. Soon I shall sow two rows of shelling beans between the rows of spinach, and let the spinach go to seed to collect in the fall.

The pea shoots grew tall as well and have flowered. Pods have started to develop and I suspect that they will mature the weekend in which I am going to be at a Roller Derby tournament in Milwaukee

The onion plants also thrived in the rain. I hoed away weed seedings the triple rows several times and now the plants have rewarded my efforts by growing green and firm upon their shallow little roots.

Potato shoots have emerged and have thrived now that the summer warmth has come. The garlic plants are massive and the rye I let stand has begun to overtake them. Already, rye heads have emerged with little green tubular flowers trailing little puffs of pollen when the breeze comes. The hairy vetch has also thrived where I have allowed it and have taken to climbing up the tall sturdy rye, as intended. The double rows of little purple flowers that the bumble bees love have yet to emerge.

Also beginning to thrive in the summer heat are the sunflowers, which are now several inches tall, and the popcorn. I thinned these on Memorial Day morning leaving a plant to stand every 12 inches apart (more or less). I think I might have been a bit aggressive in thinning the popcorn.

The peach tree has nearly no surviving flowers and will have a year without fruit. Even though much of the second-year canes of the raspberry plants seemed not to have survived, all of the root stocks have healthy new first-year canes growing. The Strawberry garden is a riot of growth. While I may have a scarcity of raspberries, however, the strawberry beds will not have me wanting for fresh fruit. All the June bearing varieties have grown into a single massive canopy studded with white flowers. These are now fading and the promise of more strawberries than I will know what to do with is close at hand!

Saturday and Sunday, I toiled in the water garden. The water loving yellow flag irises (which are now blooming) have been foraying farther and farther out towards the center of the pond for many years, growing massive. The water loving plants abandoned the land in favor of the upper level of the pond but now much of that layer is a sludgy mass of decayed matter. The living rhizomes on the plants have grown out into open water dangling masses of roots down into the deeper second level. An underwater living forest on either side of the skimmer is now a rich biosphere, the top of which the goldfish and bullfrogs are now the apex predators.

With my bare hands (tools could tear the liner), I labored to remove the river stones and masses of decay and root from the upper levels, uncovering a few square plastic mesh baskets that hadn't seen the light of day in who-knows-when. When I was finished, I had two little rivers, so to speak, that the fish can now get to. Or the irises are now islands, whichever way one chooses to look at it.

The boxelder tree that shades the pond is slowly dying. More sunlight reaches the pond now than since when we built it and the tree was smaller. The water lilies are now starting to revitalize. For years they have languished in the deep of the second layer, where originally they were in wide pots upon cinder blocks. The large koi would rummage around in these pots, disturbing the gravel and freeing the lily rhizomes, which would then float away into the skimmer box. Now that we are koi-less again, I have replanted the rhizomes into smaller pots and put these upon the cinder block halves once again. Hopefully, with the greater sunlight they will begin to grow again and may even get flowers once more. If not, I might be inspired to buy new ones.

The vegetable garden is also a benefactor of my pond clean-out. I stirred the muck into many gallons of muddy slurry in a wheelbarrow, rich beyond what money can buy in nutrients, with which I irrigated all my crops by the bucket full.

My mother's tomato plants, which she meticulously raised to two or three feet tall, are doing well in the heat and have started to flower. One of them, probably a Fourth-Of-July, has a small fruit and may exceed expectations to deliver mature tomatoes before its namesake holiday. Two of the three cherry tomatoes are growing as well but the third, in the shadier SE quarter of the garden along with the summer squash, is still looking miserly.

The slower growing okra is doing well, but is not yet mature enough to thin out. Green bean plants are thriving. Remaining kale and broccoli plants are doing well enough but the later has yet to make any heads, a testimony to the long cold spring which has become as a distant memory forgotten in the early heat of summer.

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