Tag: b has a garden

The equinox is just a few days away. The garden is in shade for most of the morning now. Yesterday I cut what remained of the basil, which I probably should have done two weeks ago, and made one last batch of pesto.

In containers, the peas are delighted by the cooler weather this past week. The chard wants fertilizer. The mint has bounced back from high summer’s wilt (I’m going to try making some extract from it this fall), but the lavender isn’t going to make it. The marigolds I planted late are enormous now, but there’s no sign of flowers.

At the plot, there are a few tomatoes still hoping to achieve ripeness, and a butternut squash that might do likewise. The zucchini, indefatigable, continues to flower, along with an optimistic pepper plant that spent most of the summer in zucchini shade. The trend is clear, however; week by week, things are getting quiet.

Every morning lately I ride my bike over to the garden and see what’s going on. These tomatoes are from just the past few days, so I think our first year is going pretty well! Today I pulled up what was left of the first lettuce planting; it was looking bedraggled after last week’s heat wave. I’ll be a little more restrained in the amount I plant next time. The zucchini continues to produce ebulliently, and our one butternut squash vine has so many flowers I am almost alarmed by the prospect. The only total failure has been the cucumbers.

The driveway pots have taken a back seat this year, although I planted a second crop of peas in there a few days back. The pots have surprised me a couple of times recently. Last week one of the small ones spontaneously produced a tiny basil plant, which I have been hovering over in delight ever since it sprouted. One of the bigger pots I had planted with chard early in the year. A squirrel got into it and messed everything up, and I wrote it off and didn’t plant anything else in there, as I was already too busy with other things by that point in the spring. Well, the seeds were apparently still in there, and now are coming up like they were never bothered at all. The strawberry plant I bought on impulse after a really irritating morning is not only still alive and occasionally flowering, but putting out runners into the neighboring pots.

Honestly the only problem with this whole gardening thing is that now I never want to do anything else.

Our very first grape tomatoes are alllllmost ripe today, and there are a hundred more ready to follow after them. I picked a couple of jalapeno peppers and made plans for pesto upon realizing how much my basil has grown. Did not spy any more zucchini hiding among the shadows, but it’s a bit of a jungle in there — I honestly had no idea how large some of these plants would get. Only the cucumbers look unhappy; they did flower, so we’ll see how they do. Might just be that it’s been so dry this summer, despite near-daily watering. I wasn’t sure I would like having a garden? But this is amazing. I go over there and don’t want to leave. I love watching the bees in the flowers, and looking at the plants and how they are growing. I love weeding.

It has been a very outdoor-intensive weekend. On Saturday I was out with the Friends of the Fells for a few hours, cutting down invasive Japanese knotweed. This morning my hiking group went out to Revere Beach for an early walk. I hadn’t been over there in ages–wow, has it changed! Lots of new buildings along the water. Then over to the garden this afternoon. This is how summer ought to be spent, I think.

Last weekend I went for two hikes. It was glorious, although very warm. This morning I biked over to the garden before work so I could catch up on the weeding before it rains today. I am over the moon about what a change six weeks makes! Everything is growing happily, and there are flowers and even tiny fruits to be seen on most of the plants.

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Bracing myself to eat nothing but tomatoes for all of August, and very grateful for my little spot in this community.