Weekend Garden Update

Saturday morning was nice and sunny, with temper atures quickly rising into the 80s, as I listened to reports on the Weather Channel of big storms approaching Manhattan and also sliding across the state in our general direction.

As you can see, the corn in the Three Sisters garden is doing quite nicely, even tho it is shaded in the very earliest part of the day. I've never had such success with as I have this year and it's lots of fun to watch as it grows taller all the time.

The pole beans are merrily twining up the vines, according to plan and at the feet of all that, the zucchini plants are blooming heartily. So that's all working out pretty nicely.


Couldn't resist a few more morning glory shots for you, as I know much you enjoy them. These two, with a few drops on them from the morning watering were especially sweet looking.


More cherry tomatoes are ripening every day and they are a nice addition to my morning breakfast routine.


There must be twenty or more house sparrows (and a few catbirds) who call the great mass of tree and shrubs next to the Three Sisters garden home. Some mornings, I don't see a single one, but can hear a great chattering and tweeting from inside. Other times, I walk near and they all fly off at once...which is a little startling, but pretty cool.



Here's another one of those evening primrose blossoms. Every morning, I see a few new ones, freshly opened from the previous night's dusk. Every now and then, I come out in the morning to find they are sparkling bright yellow all up and down the plant stalks.


Similarly, a few more sulphur cosmos are blooming every morning. With the evening primrose, they are working together to levitate the colors of the various marigolds which are blooming down below.


And the Queen Anne's lace is delightfully out of hand.

By evening, the storms had arrived for us and we saw some nice heavy rains, which had tapered off by the time I was leaving work.


This morning, this little bunny was munching in the grass when I came out the front door. He turned to move away and stopped for a moment, surveying the garden to see if he could find a way through the border. Eventually, he opted to dash off to the side yard, instead.


Today, we attended the birthday celebration of our friend Sebastian's eighth birthday. I forgot to take a photo of the birthday boy, but I did capture this shot of the delightfully big and squishy ugly rubber bugs I found as a gift for him. (That's a standard sized highlighter included in the shot for perspective.) He was thrilled.

I was a little concerned that his Mom and Grandma might not share his enthusiasm, but by the time the party was over, they both had designs on using them to have some fun with unsuspecting friends and co-workers.

On the way home, I spotted these wonderful clouds over the bay, and stopped briefly at Rock Harbor to capture this shot of the cloud-obscured sunset.

Her Own Affairs

It appears that my timing in rearranging the morning glories was quite good. Today was the heaviest blooming I've yet seen from them.

As you can see, it was delightful, and probably just a prelude of things to come. I also noticed that one of the several strands of three vines I'd untangled from around the bigger flag had already re-wrapped itself, loosely, around the flag again.

But just look at these guys. How can you fault that kind of enthusiasm?
(Oh, Java love, it occurs to me I forgot to mention not to fertilize those morning glories we were discussing. That'll actually give you tons of beautiful leaves, but fewer blossoms.)

I'm a little sorry that I never got around to picking up one or two of those pale blue morning glory vines this spring, only because their flowers are, I think, a little bigger, and it would've been fun to see that color cavorting with some of these others.

Ah, well...there's always room for a few more morning glory seedlings in the garden budget for next year! And while I'm at it, I have always wanted to try those red Scarlett O'Haras, which would be fun, too, I'm sure.

Fiddle dee dee.


Moonflowers would've been fun, too...especially if they were blooming alongside the Casa Blanca lilies, which are gleaming in the moonless night tonight, their seductive scent wafting amongst the many vines and stems all along the fence.


In the Three Sisters garden, all of the zucchini plants began flowering heavily today. I swear, I like the vegetable well enough (especially in tomato sauce with gooey Mozzarella cheese...), but damn, I just love growing the vines for their fantastic blossoms.

One year we had a pumpkin vine (the off-spring of the previous autumn's jack-o-lantern, actually), which joined a vineful of blue morning glories to climb up the front of the house and over the front door. It was quite a site.

This is the first year I've grow so many of them, and I can finally allow myself to imagine this concept of fried squash blossoms (With fewer plants in the past, I've always hesitated to sacrifice the fruit.). I'll have to look around for a recipe. I imagine a simple light batter would do the trick...but of course, I know little of those, except where cookies and cake are concerned.

The Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes are also ripening up en masse now. I'm sure it'd be nice to clip the whole little vine branch when they are ripe...but I've already munched up half of them. They are delightfully sweet...and I just couldn't resist a few as I examined the rest of the garden's offerings for the day.
All things in mode ration, of course. I've heard tell of stomach acid imbal ances from too many all at once. It's easy to see how that could happen, really, they are so tasty. But there's only the two plants here, so the danger is not so great.

I just love the gradation of color on these guys, from the dark green of the newly formed to the perfectly red of the fabulously-ready.

Heh...of course, since uploading the pic from my camera onto the computer...they are all green and yellow to me, as the monitor is still, as they say, uncooperative. As they also say, dying.

Hey, but check out this newly-opened sunflower, ready to welcome the first day of August.

It's funny how it seems to happen all at once, but it's August 1st and the roads around here today were suddenly JAMMED with cars full of impatient people who have appointments with the beach. Hey buddy, you honkin the horn like that isn't gonna make the sun shine.

Patrick, is there anyone else left in Manhattan besides you, or have you been charged with shutting the door and turning down the lights when you wing off for home?

But August also brings the sulphur cosmos and today, the wind had subsided enough to allow me to catch this nice cosmos porn shot.

More of them are appearing all along the fence, since I also planted these guys in two successive waves. They should bloom merrily well into September, unless Mother Nature has other plans.

Their cosmos cousins, the seashell blossom variety, grow taller by the minute, but have yet to begun producing flower buds. I continue to expect them any moment. I haven't grown this variety, so you may note with assurance I'm a little eager to see how they turn out.

The zinnia seedlings are substantial enough to mention now, and only a little shorter than the ones I saw beginning to bloom in a roadside garden on the way to the bank this morning.

These are the California Giants, and really get to growing quite tall and flowering abundantly as August comes and goes. I very much look forward to that.



The bachelor buttons continue to charm and delight me, as they flower a little more heavily each day or so.

Daisies are reblooming, the Queen Anne's lace holds forth, embracing all of its neighbors in its elegantly wild chaos.



"Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way, she better understands her own affairs than we."

-- Michel Evquem de Montaigne

Summer Days

Well, the days certainly slip by quickly here in July. I never got around to posting yesterday. My computer sort of reminded me recently that there are other things to summertime life besides blogging. You see, I have this CD burner that is usually pretty reasonable, but every now and then, the software that came with it doesn't recognize the burner...and the best bit is that it usually decides not to see the hardware exactly the week that my photo files start to clog things up and need to be burned to disc. The Laws of Murphy are strong in this one.

Finally, after much futzing, I got the burner working and spent some time burning discs--two of them for the first three quarters of June!!! Anyway, now my hard drive's all freed up and running a little more smoothly...but between this issue and the connectivity thing, I found myself with that time I was looking for to dive head-first into the Wind in the Willows, as inspired by both Cooper and Patrick...and I just never want to stop reading it now!! Blogging, what's that?

I can't remember when I read this book, but it was a terribly long time ago, and so this feels like a brand new thing for me, while also an old friend. You know, you read a book as a child and you take it in on a much simpler level...and then you come back to it later, and you see a completely new pleasure, informed by the years you've lived, experiences you've had, knowledge gained and people you've known. I don't think my pal Bob would mind or disagree with the assessment that he is not unlike Toad in many ways, for example.

I find it's a difficult book to read late at night, not only because it keeps hitting me in the face when I fall asleep, but also because, when I'm not tired from a long day, I'm laughing right out loud almost constantly and I'm a little concerned I'll wake everyone up laughing so heartily. Anyway, if you haven't read this book recently, get a copy, read it for yourself. Read it to your kids. You won't be sorry.

Ahem. Okay, hopping down from my Read a Book soapbox, let me show you this beautiful evening primrose that's starting to strut this week. I didn't plant these guys, though I may have transported the seed in soil from the old garden.

They are sort of wild and weedy in these parts, but I find them pretty well behaved (and easy enough to yank up if you don't like the spot they've chosen) a wonderful bit of height and color in the summer garden, so I'm happy when they show up here and there.

As the name suggests, the new flowers open up as the sun is setting. Yesterday morning there was one, but I noticed around 10 or so last night (by flashlight beam) that these four had opened, sending their scent out across the night air, teasing night time bugs and moths to come taste...which in turn brings the bats out to swoop around.

Ah, nature.

In the interests of full disclosure, not all of the photos to follow were taken today, but rather, they represent a melange of garden activity during the last thirty-six hours. Like you care.

I don't know about you, but I can't look at these portulaca flowers enough. Each day there's a new array of assorted colors. I'm so glad I didn't end up with the pack of all one kind of flower that was originally in my hand at the nursery. I'd much rather have all these colors in a random collection.

I'm also sort of tickled to point out a small hedge of about four cleome seedlings in the background, still fairly small, which were born of a second seeding with the remainder of the packet somewhere around mid-June.

While the first flush have yet to actually bloom yet, it's nice to know this second wave will be coming along to bloom much later in the season, possibly as the early guys begin to fade. I've always enjoyed this plant, but haven't had the conditions to grow it well for a few years. It's nice to have it around again.

On the Produce of the Future scene, the Three Sisters experiment is going quite nicely. Here's one of the best hills, featuring a good balance of corn, beans and squash all growing together. You may also note that I should spend some time this weekend doing some weeding around these guys.

You may recall I was eight days late after the Full Corn Moon planting my corn seeds this spring...so it shouldn't be any surprise that it was five or six days after the Fourth when my corn plants began to reach that knee-high benchmark you're supposed to have hit according to the old saw about corn growth, Knee-High by the Fourth of July.

Also, while the title seems a shade dubious, the "Early Girl" tomato is making some promises for a first harvest of fruit sometime fairly soon...but not really early by most measurements.

Now, I try to be good about admitting mistakes, and I am reasonably assured that this lovely red rose which I've been touting as the return of the often-dead Mister Lincoln tea rose, is not at all that plant.

You see, in Spring of 2007, I bought two rose bushes rather inexpensively at the Ocean State Job Lot. One of them died over the summer, but the other did pretty well, though never bloomed to cement it in memory.

This is that second plant, which I think may have been called Proud Nation, or Proud Land, or something like that, and if I recall(or stumble across the label, which I did tuck into some book or other for safe-keeping. Hopefully it was actually a garden related book.), it's actually supposed to grow into a serious bush of such blooms. This would be wonderful, as right now it is rather small.

Now, not only did I recently recall that purchase and the survival of the rose, but also Wednesday, this other, smaller red tea rose began to bloom down at the other end of the fence garden, and I realized that this, indeed, was the real Mister Lincoln standing up.

But sadly, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

I found this lovely purple hydrangea blooming under a tangled clutch of bindweed this evening, which I tore out by the handfuls to reveal this lovely flowerhead. This plant is badly crowded by an azalea and a juniper bush and needs to be transplanted to a location where it can thrive a little better.

Also, it's past time to address the bindweed, which is a little seductive with its pink flowers, but will wrap itself around me and my coffee cup, if I sit for too long in one place. It weaves through all the foundation plantings around the house and will probably completely cover the house one day if left unchecked.

Check out this massive spidery-looking sunflower head. This plant is now just a little taller than my five foot and eleven inch height. I just love the crazy way it looks. This is definitely one of the Russian Gray "giants" who love to get so very tall. Can't wait to see how high we can go with these!

Along the inside of the fence, another shade of African marigold has begun to bloom. These guys (there are also some in a canary yellow color in the cleome bud photo earlier this week) will eventually get to be about three feet tall themselves.

I like this color. It's not that pale bright yellow, but it's not the neon orange. It's a nice golden cross between the two...and a real bridge between all the other shades of marigolds in the garden.

Here's one of the gardens down around the bend here on Wisteria Lane. It sort of amuses me, as I think from a distance that this is a statue of Saint Francis, who welcomed all the animals of the world to him. And the garden in his honor, properly fenced to keep the animals out.

I wonder if this bunny was thinking something similar.

I think I'll post this picture over at BugGuide.net, to see if it's clear enough for anyone to identify the species of pollinator seen here. I don't think there are bees with green heads. It would be a real lesson for me to accept the evil Greenhead Flies (of the painful bite) as beneficial to the garden in the absence of more bees.

[EDIT, 7/12/08: First response to my posting at BugGuide suggests this is a halictid bee...which I'd never heard of before. They are also called sweat bees, which I have heard of previously. Other photos I've now seen indicate their entire bodies are green, sometimes. Join me, won't you, in a brief education on the subject (and some much better photos) here.]

I did see a nice group of honeybees flitting about the roses outside the bank in Eastham the other day and that was a bit of a relief for me. I've still not seen a single honeybee in Harwich. Have you seen this? (Thanks, Curt!)

Invasions

At first I took it for the wet roof of a house, but one flash following another showed it to be in swift rolling movement. It was an elusive vision—a moment of bewildering darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine trees, and this problematical object came out clear and sharp and bright.

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer.

Well, no. Actually, that's just the water tower here in Harwich, and those words are worshipfully lifted from Chapter 10 of H.G. Wells' sci-fi classic, The War of the Worlds, always good summertime reading. But with July 4th coming this Friday, we on the Cape are dealing with an invasion of another sort.

It's true that ever-rising gas prices have had their impact on the sheer numbers of people visiting Cape Cod, but things are still busier here than a few weeks ago. There's longer lines in stores and more cars on the highway. Wailing sirens fill the air, both day and night.

We haven't lived this far up-Cape before, so it's a little hard to judge just how much the economy has impacted things, but you can see the difference at the restaurant. We've not yet seen those crazy nights where there's a waiting line for hours. Surely that will come soon, though...probably as soon as the weekend.

Still, the other day, as I waited at the end of the on-ramp to the highway while a long line of cars passed by, a red car came dashing up beside me, doing close to 50, slipped around me and inserted itself into the flow of traffic, expertly fitting between two cars there was barely enough room to fit. It seemed carefully choreographed, but it was clear to me: the idiots always find the money to go away on vacation. If only they could leave their fast-paced lives behind them, instead of treating a day at the beach like another business appointment.

Here's some of those lychnis flowers I keep talking about. I've got a few of these plants now and I see plenty in the neighborhood. They are one of those plants that likes to sow itself around with impunity and so once you've got one, you seemingly always have it.

I wanted to show off this pair of toymaker gnomes /elves, who are nestled into a bed of holly along the walk into our backyard. Granny painted and fired these at her ceramics class in Florida not too many years ago, shipping first one and then the other to us. They've stood sentinel in several of our gardens now.

My most sincere thanks to all of you, who have expressed your concern, offered your comforting words, good wishes, thoughts and prayers to us and for Granny. We wouldn't be at all surprised to see her make a good recovery from this--that's just the kind of person she's always shown herself to be--but it's become clear this week that it will be perhaps a bigger challenge than she's faced previously.

Dad's flying down there tomorrow and I have no doubt that the sight of her Number One Son's smiling face and the warmth of his hand in hers will go a long way toward bolstering her spirits.

Here's one of those spectacular shasta daisies, about as tall as the top rail of the fence. Others are even taller. More of them open each day and some of them are showing lots of side shoots, so we should see a nice, long-ish show from them this year.

Also notable here is the fly who's doing some pollinator work on the daisy. Notable because these are the pollinators I'm seeing most in the garden this year. There have been some of those round black and yellow bumblebees, though none I've yet managed to photograph...and honestly, they were mostly brought to the yard by the sweet smell of honeysuckle and took little interest in the rest of the border.

I haven't seen a single honeybee this year.


The zucchini seedlings are now almost all sprouted and doing pretty nicely, completing the trio of plants which comprise the Three Sisters garden. I look forward to watching them trail and ramble around, covering the ground and trying to take over.

A warning to you all: now's the time to arrange to rent a guard dog for your front yard, to fortify the locks on your doors, or boost your virus protection: one way or the other, I suspect I'll be trying to sneak great sacks of the slender green vegetables into your life come August.

Here's that yellow rose, now fully in bloom. I still can't quite fathom that the Victorians designated this flower to represent jealousy (did they forget the whole "green with envy" thing? Or did we come to that notion later, when money became so very important?), although I suppose, if you have it growing so delightfully in your yard, there's a possibility your lesser gardening neighbors could hate you for it.

Em and I saw a hawk (I'm pretty sure it was a hawk, anyway, but considering the speed with which everything was happening, I suppose I ought not rule out an osprey) down at the end of Not Wisteria Lane last night, stirring up trouble with a host of smaller birds, who were all ganging up to drive him away from their homes and young ones. Troubling for all those other birds, but still, hawks are so darned cool to see close up, and this one was not far overhead. Of course, the camera was far behind me, back at the house.

Obviously, I did no posting last evening--jeez, I gotta take a break sometime. I did manage to get a little weeding done and edged the beds in advance of Kelly and Carol's visit later today, but I was also on the phone with Mom and Dad for a while and the day's heat lingered into the evening. It took only a minor camera battery SNAFU to encourage me to check email, surf some blogs and then to YouTube (we can make anything a verb, eh?)for a little while instead, before heading off to bed.

Here's another look at the ever-lovely verbena bonariensis, soaring over the rest of the garden bed. Woo hoo...is that a pretty color or what?

That Magical Light

There is much written about the quality of light here on Cape Cod. Because we are surrounded on three sides by water, there's an extra reflected light that plays across everything. This is particularly evident in Provincetown, where the water is so close on every side.

It was this light, after all, that inspired the modern impressionist painting movement that took place in PTown in the early days of the last century, which in turn was one of several factors that transformed that fishing village at the very tip of the Cape into an artist colony.

Every now and then, I come across a bit of this magical light and it seems to transform every image I capture with the camera into something almost unreal, too beautiful.

My photographs end up looking more like paintings than more realistic depictions of the world around me. It's pretty amazing.

Today was one of those days, morning and evening, when the light was just incredible and I was a little dumbstruck at some of what I found on my camera's memory card at day's end. You get the best effect when you enlarge the images, so go ahead and click 'em.

By the very nature of it being June, there's tons going on out there in the garden. Although that blasted "witch grass" is staging a massive comeback almost everywhere, there are also plenty of other seedlings taking hold.

Every morning I spend at least a few minutes carefully teasing at some of the grass, trying to get rid of it. It will clearly be an ongoing project.

Meanwhile, here's one of a number of bachelor button seedlings I am seeing here and there. I've tried to be extra careful about weeding out the grass too fervently, as these guys are a little thin and strappy in their early stages, and I've been known to accidentally weed all but a few out in early June purges in past years.

In the past two days, I've noticed that some of the snapdragon plants have doubled in height, surpassing that lower fence rail as flower buds appear at the top of their stalks. It will be interesting to see which color is going to bloom first. I suspect it will be the yellow ones, but the next few days will tell.

In addition to a few more milkweed seedlings, I've also spotted a few rosettes of evening primrose foliage. It's sort of weedy around these parts, growing wild here and there. Last year I had some good luck with chopping it back fairly hard to get it to branch out more, so I'll try to remember to do that sometime in the next day or so. I've noted the oregano plants are ready for that, too.

On the chosen fence posts, the morning glory seedlings are doing quite nicely, making some nice headway in their climb toward the sun.

In the bedroom window are a last six or seven of them, started later for a second wave of bloom as the summer progresses, which are ready to be planted out adjacent to these.

On the side of Mount Dump-It (that lumpy little hill in our backyard that houses the septic system), several massive clumps of tickseed are thriving, their golden flowers glowing in the bright morning sunshine, bobbing easily on the gentle breeze.

In another part of the forest, more of these red roses open every day. I'm just thrilled with the way this rose bush has responded to being trained along the fence. I've mostly read about working/playing with roses and rarely had the conditions to really see what they could do, which makes this season kind of exciting to me.

Also, between these and those ubiquitous little white roses, the air is so strongly perfumed this week that it almost makes me a bit giddy to walk out into the front yard, morning or night. Isn't it fascinating how this product of attracting pollinators in turn makes us all a little gah-gah, too?

The season of love, indeed.

If you enlarge that shot above, you can see in the background some big shiny leaves just above the top rail of the fence...which would be the sunflower seedlings. They are really too big now to be reasonably considered "seedlings", but they are still my babies.

Monday morning I took a photo of them to show you they had almost come level with that top cross rail...but by the time I got home in the evening, the photo had become obsolete, as the seedlings were by then several inches taller than the rail of the fence!

Don't get too close!


Not far from that rose, in the shade of a clump of shasta daisies creeps this itty-bitty (it's maybe a quarter of an inch in diameter, if that)orange flower.

Somewhere, I have an old wildflower guide book from the 1950's, which has been pretty helpful for me in the past, in identifying the tiny blossoms like these, which are often a little too obscure for other more general plant guides.

However, that old book is MIA just now, likely displaced during last winter's move and not yet resurfaced. I'll have to dig around, though--I'm pretty sure it'd help me name this one.

On one of the five mounds which are home to the Three Sisters garden project, the first bean seedling burst out of the ground this morning. I noticed by flashlight this evening that several others came out during the course of the day.

It makes me happy to see this coming along so nicely. Once a few more of those have emerged, it'll be time to add the squash seeds...and then the game will be truly afoot.

It bums me out just a little that the peonies won't be blooming this year, due - I believe - to the trauma of moving. They would be making their own heady additions to the perfumey air this week, if they were, their hot pink flowerheads lolling and bobbing on the breezes.


Another aspect of June has things a little busier at work, but fortunately, I'm still able to steal the odd moment here or there to wander into the garden and catch a few images of the magic happening there.

The purple irises have never been more prolific than they are this spring, it seems. Actually, I'm hearing from a variety of people that irises are having a particularly stellar spring. But still, their time will have fled before too long, as they clear the stage for other flowers to have their moment in the spotlight and I couldn't let that go without another look at them.

Here you might note some of that rose grandiflora (I think that's the name of those little white guys I keep talking about, though it could be multiflora), and this particular plant is a good indicator of how vigorous they are.

I've worked at the restaurant for seven years now. When I started there, this particular plant--now better than two feet high, equally wide and smothered in blossoms--didn't exist there, but has arrived via the birds and taken hold rather quickly. Kept in check, it's not a bad addition to the garden.

Did I mention the fragrance?? I do hope you are all seeking out some nicely scented roses to thrust your noses into this week.

It's also fun to realize how much this spirea has grown in that time. I'm wondering if it is the same variety as the ones I have along the fence at home, which are not quite blooming yet.

Those, if memory serves, are a little darker than these, though they have also grown in some high shade areas in recent years. Their colors might've been a little richer for that. We'll see how they do in this year's full sun.

I transplanted these wild daisy plants at the base of the pond wall about four years ago, and they have filled in the whole area quite nicely.

This is their first wave of flowers, but with deadheading, they'll continue to blossom right through the summer. Who could ask for anything more?

I took a longer route home this evening, allowing me to pass by the overlook of Wychmere Harbor, not far from our house. I knew the full moon was low in the sky and was hoping for some decent reflection to play with from the water. I hadn't thought to be lucky enough to find things so nicely lit.

There was also some sort of celebration going on down by the water, with the happy, lively sounds of people and their merriment echoing brightly across the harbor in the dark.

The golden power of the sun, the heart-tripping scent of roses and the goony glow of the moon, could there be anything more magical?