squash art

Posted on Posted in projects

this is what happens when i spend the whole weekend in the garden—you guys get squash art for your monday post.

i might have mentioned a time or two that it’s been incredibly hot and dry here?

it hit a fairly serious level by the weekend—a couple of our new shrubs are now toast. david has been watering every day, but it only really gets the top wet and then evaporates in the sun. no matter how far down we dug in the garden, we were hitting dust. the fact that we hadn’t gotten all our mulch down yet was contributing to the problem, too. and there was a massive amount of weeding to be done before we could put that in. all that travel last month was coming back to haunt me . . .

so i circled saturday on my calendar and looked for ways to nurse the garden til then.

i picked a big basket of swiss chard on friday morning so it wouldn’t hog the water. we ate half of it sautéed with leftover roast potatoes and root vegetable soup; the other half, i put in the freezer—our first batch of freezer fodder for 2012.

saturday i was outside and working by 7 am (i KNOW—me!! but these days, you have to take advantage of the cooler hours). i had a morning knitting date with susie and debby, so when it starting lightening and spitting rain at 8:15, i went in to shower. i managed to get a bunch of marigold and nasturtium in the ground (companion plants that help control insects), in spots where i pulled out spinach last week. i also thinned the new erbette seedlings and transplanted those to some empty space. plus some weeding; not bad for just an hour . . .

i also took a walk around to see how everything was doing. our squash (knock wood) looks super healthy this year, growing into larger, sturdier plants than i’ve seen for a couple of years (foot added for scale).

i planted heavily around them with radishes, marigolds, and nasturtium to keep the bugs away—here’s hoping it works. they do remind me of the one successful summer we had with them four years ago . . .

there is something about the squash plants that keeps me glued to their progress, and devastated when they succumb to bugs or fungus. i just love watching every aspect of their growth, from seedling to flower to fruit.

maybe it’s that underneath, there is a whole world of shapes and formations to mine—if i get in close enough, i feel like my eyes are roaming canyons of space.

right now, they are at that perfect, shiny moment when there are no scars on the stems or tears in the leaves and every hair catches the light. they will be flowering any minute now—see the female flower buds with the tiny fruit attached?

if they’re pollinated, the fruit will grow; if not it will fall off. i do see male flowers on the plants and the garden is heavy with the buzz of bees, so we should be in business pretty soon.

of course the rain saturday morning amounted to nothing and by the time i got home that afternoon the sun was out, hotter than hades. my root vegetable patch had the worst weeds and the potatoes are getting so big that getting in among them is a challenge. i really wanted to get all that cleaned up so we could put mulch down and not bother with it again. i worked on it saturday evening til the insects drove me out—they sure do love hanging out around potato plants. meanwhile, david started mulching in another area that was already cleaned up.

on sunday, i got out there early again, before the sun was really even up over the trees—it rises later here than on the east coast, but right now it stays light til almost 10 pm. our tomatoes have grown about a foot in the last week and i noticed they needed pruning. most years they are well bushed out before we even get fruit and i’m glad that this year there is less foliage to maintain.

all of our plants have fruit now, so that helps tell me which branches can be discarded.

after taking care of that, i got back to work on weeding. somehow in just a week, the weeds had spread out into a carpet around everything. fortunately, it didn’t really take too much work to get rid of most them—or it didn’t feel like it anyway.

even when it is tedious, weeding gives me a chance to take a good, close look at everything so i can catch problems early, or just appreciate the growth of it all. and sometimes i discover that something is ready to eat, which is the best thing. those beets aren’t ready yet to pull, but the tops are almost ready to clip and eat. since i’m growing them mostly for the greens, i’ll leave them in the ground as long as i can.

the radishes and onions are popping right up out of the soil—in the case of the radishes, i don’t care that much because i planted them mainly for pest control; the bigger, the better. for the few we would eat, i can look for babies.

in the case of the onions, though, i’m not sure—is this a bad thing or is it ok? we mulched them over so they’d be protected; soon the tops will die back and they’ll need to be pulled, but overall, i’m afraid we’re in for another underwhelming year for onions. i don’t think we have any that are bigger than a couple inches.

elsewhere, our garlic has completely died back and is ready to be pulled; it’s very early for that, but our friend jeff already harvested his, so we plan to pull ours this week.

the green bean plants are getting bushy and starting to show flowers—looks like we are right on time to be picking green beans in a week or two.

the eggplant are also especially happy this year—so far, they seem to be resisting the insects that make lace of their leaves, one pinpoint hole at a time. again, i planted heavily in between with radishes, marigold, and nasturtium, so maybe it’s working. if so, i like this method a LOT.

back in the potato patch, i got rid of bucketfuls of big purslane weeds and crabgrass—big, but not plentiful, so it made for much faster work than i anticipated. while i was scratching around the plants, i unearthed a few new potatoes, which are already 1.5 inches/3 cm in diameter. hmmm, maybe that’s what’ll be for dinner next.

by noon on sunday, everything was weeded, pruned, wet down, and ready for mulch. also, my legs were crying uncle and the sun felt ferociously hot, so i quit to go inside, shower and knit for a while. HA! almost as soon as i got settled in my knitting chair, i fell asleep. which was fine—i had a good nap til about 5 pm and then headed back outside where david was already putting down newspaper and straw at the back of the big garden.

i got to work on the small garden and enjoyed the cooling air. pretty soon it became obvious that we were going to get some kind of storm—maybe just dry thunder and lightening as in the last few days, maybe not. just in case, we stepped it up and by 8 pm when the first light rain started, we were done.

oh, and how it rained, FINALLY. we did have good amount come down, thank goodness. we could use a week of that, but we’ll take whatever nature will give us. we watched it rain from the porch where we ate a nice supper of pasta puttanesca, using the very last of the 2011 tomatoes from the freezer, along with handfuls of fresh basil and oregano from this year.

this morning, everything was cool, damp, and clean—it felt wonderful. it’s nice to look out and see the garden finally put in order; i hate feeling it’s neglected. i can’t get over how much bigger it is this year than last year on the same day—i knew we increased it, of course, but seeing it from above makes me realize how much.

i probably put in a good fifteen hours over the weekend on garden work—it needed it if we were ever going to catch up. but it’s a good thing—now we can let things grow for a while and begin tasting the first crops. soon enough, we’ll be feverishly picking and putting things by for winter.

 

11 thoughts on “squash art

  1. The garden looks great-I’m glad you got some rain. We had a bad front spring up yesterday and are without power for the time being. I think it will be another hot night for sleeping. Thankfully our neighbor has a generator, so our fridge remains active…

  2. The garden is looking great! I wish we had a bit of your warmth. It is so grey and miserable here, it’s hard to believe it’s the summer! Seeing your sunshine lifts the spirits no end!

  3. I like that ‘foot is included for scale’. I think I’ll use that the next time I wind up with my thumb in a picture. ;^) I know you meant it, in my case it shall be a fib.

  4. Water your garden after dark during hot spells – that way there’s less chance of evaporation before the plants can drink up. Tip learned from life in a dry-summer climate!

  5. Do you have a compost corner? How did you get it started, and how do you maintain it? I have a townhouse-sized yard, so I’m starting small, using and old planter box. I’m thinking of getting one of the stacks I saw at the nursery but I need to find out how much it costs.

  6. Oh, my, you guys did put in the work on the garden.
    And it shows! ! ! Love the over view of the garden.
    From the pics you’ll be eating fresh from the garden for a while.
    Don’t know where you get all the energy.

  7. I love the title of this post & your garden looks great. Not much gardening here as it’s winter.

  8. I can’t help but drool over the potential fresh bounty you will be harvesting from your garden, but at least we have the farmer’s markets here. But it’s not the same, is it, to shop versus getting your hands in the dirt- maybe I’ll try growing something in a large pot next year…

    Random question: do you use anchovies in your puttanesca?

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