Friends, it’s here: If not in the weather forecast, at least in our hearts - Summer! Can you feel it? At the end of last week, I turned in my final papers, presentations, and tests; the next two weeks stretch in front of me like an open road (my summer class begins June 1). Garden, here I come.
And there is so much promise in the garden right now. There’s not much to actually eat (this is the ‘hungry gap’ after all), but all the ingredients are there, and in a month we will be eating like kings.
Our bees swarmed twice in April (one of them was boxed up by my dad and given a new home in his backyard) and during Tom’s last hive check, he decided to take some honey, so at least we have several jars of that!
I dug out all the compost from the chicken pile and added it to the tomatoes, then clipped them to their growing strings. I harvested the garlic, which is now drying in the garage. I cleared the last of the peas and carrots and planted five varieties of winter squash, ten different kinds of basil, and several kinds of cucumbers. Oh yeah, and some pole beans. Gotta have beans.
I’ve been watching the fruit start to flower and form. We’re going to have berries - so many berries! - marionberries, and loganberries, and blackberries, and blueberries. We’re going to have apples - I made sure to prune our tree quite dramatically over the winter - and now we have what looks like a bumper crop on the way.
We’re going to have peppers - several serranos and a couple of bells have already formed nicely. We’re going to have cilantro and dill - volunteer plants have been coming up all over the place. Cosmos has likewise seeded everywhere as well as borage.
The gulf fritillary butterflies are going quite mad, and the passionvine is full of eggs and caterpillars and flowers. My new perennial pollinator garden is doing very well, with the grasses and coral bells flowering next to foothill penstemon and wooly blue curls.
Some of the soil in our raised beds was quite compacted, which I found mysterious as I add compost every year (and those beds produced a great crop of peas!). To improve it, I used the hunks of clover cover crop that I cut out of some other beds, and laid them down on the surface of the questionable soil. Soon we had worms coming up to work on it and simultaneously aerating the soil. Now pumpkin and cucumber seedlings are coming up through the dead and dying clover, and I’m thrilled. This was a good reminder for me to plant clover in ALL the beds, between ALL the veg in the winter. I really noticed a difference in the soil where it was growing.
You may remember the saga of the disastrous winter garden (I planted it up five times. FIVE TIMES! And still I had very little success. Just the aforementioned peas, some carrots, some arugula, and a little kohlrabi - not nearly the bumper crops we usually have over the winter). I was worried that this summer might just continue that trend, and I wondered if maybe my gardening luck had run out.
But so far, the summer garden is chugging along just as it should, so I’m breathing easier.
In other news, during my last week of school, we had a solar system installed. I’ll write in detail about that experience (spoiler alert - we are very happy with the entire process) as soon as I have some hard data to share with you. More soon!