Work hard, play hard, garden in between

I feel as if I have been away for a long time.  There is so much going on as we use every hour of our summer as a precious commodity.  Work has kept me busy for more hours than usual.  Play has taken me away from the computer.

Play has been the best part.  My husband and I made a trip out to the western half of Wisconsin and enjoyed some time along the rivers.  Part of our vacation is the quest for dairy products, namely cheese and ice cream.  We had to look pretty hard for this in a zone that was not dotted with dairies on the Wisconsin cheese map.  (Yep, we really have one!)  Nelson Creamery did not disappoint us.  I enjoyed an ice cream on a 90+ degree day and filled up half of our cooler with cheese.  The place had such a charm about it, I had to share a picture from the building even if it isn't related to the usual stuff I write about.  I do love old buildings.  They are talking about replacing the basketball arena in Milwaukee because it is (gasp!) over 20 years old and so outdated.  Give me a break!  

We also took a long weekend away to spend some time on Lake Winnebago with my husband's side of the family.  They have a nice size boat, so they met us on the lake where we were able to camp.  The weather looked like this on Friday with wind and waves and stayed that way the entire weekend.  We never did leave the dock, but still had a nice time anyway.  I wasn't looking for it, but I found a very new and very cool goat dairy in Pipe, WI.  They sell the best cheeses from other dairies, Kelly's Creamery ice cream (butter pecan was soooo good!), and Wisconsin wines, beers and other beverages.  I would like to go back and enjoy some more of everything.

Back home the garden is starting to kick in gear.  The beans are coming in in almost all my plantings now.  It is so fun having 4 foot rows of each variety.  I am enjoying the filet type beans the most.  So slender and tender in all three varieties I have going.  I will have to look them up later to refresh my memory on what I put in.  Cukes are doing well in the tomato patch but struggling elsewhere.  I would like to put in more pickling vines next year, possibly behind my flower bed with a soaker hose running by them.  I have had my first tomatoes from the 4th of July bush.  They are small but satisfying.  The Sun golds are starting to turn yellow.

Most all the squash and pumpkins have set at least one fruit each.  I am still waiting on the Kiwano melon to even flower.  I have nipped the tips and am thinking it will need some fertilizer with less N and more PK to help it along.  

The peach has several fruits on it and some of them are starting to turn yellow from the hard green state they have been in.  I have heard peaches need aggressive pruning so I will have to do some research on that one.  The Honey gold apple set one fruit which is more than I expected for a new tree.  I wonder if I will enjoy it or if the squirrels we be there first.

My third crop of lettuce is coming along nicely considering the heat wave we went through right after planting.  I have pulled a few radishes from my last sowing.  I think the shade cloth and the soaker hose made the difference with this mid summer sowing.  I continue to mound the soil around the stems to help them bulb rather than stretch.  Kohlrabi is growing but not expanding at the waist yet.  The beds with soaker hoses are fairing much better than those without.  I think I will look for end of season deals on some as there are some that are starting to show their age with some cracking.  I would not garden without them.  My daughter did a fantastic job keeping things moist through our absence wherever she was able to let them run on their own.  Quick connects on each one also helped to make the job easier.

Well, it is time to sit back and seriously enjoy the mojito in my hand.  A mojito mint was definitely a good buy! Check out last year's post on making a mojito yourself.

New veggies coming in

Bringing in the first picks of the season is always exciting to me.  The first radishes and lettuce are like manna from heaven.  I enjoy the sweet, little Alpine strawberries each day as they produce just enough to satisfy the taste buds.  The peas are producing and are even starting to show the signs of decline with the warmer weather.  These are my "quick" crops which I can have two or even three rounds of crops before the summer produce starts rolling in.

My 4th of July tomato has only green fruit on it.  The cabbage is not quite full headed.  The green beans have been blooming and are now bearing tiny little beans on my first crop of bush beans (I planted three bush bean varieties two weeks apart from each other to space the crops out for fresh eating).  The 8 ball zucchini are the size of large marbles.  I plucked several pickling cucumbers off the vine for the first real picking this year.  A few warm, sunny days will push many of these to full ripeness.  Of course, I will probably miss them while on a camping trip.  Like a working mother missing her babies first steps, I will enjoy my first beans as the first beans that I get to eat.  I will probably have more than enough zucchini to eat and then some.  The cucumbers will be there, too.  I will miss that first vine ripe tomato, though, as that is like tapping the keg on the new beer of the season.  I shall survive.

My daughter will be my caretaker while I enjoy some much needed time off work.  She has been working in a garden center at a big box hardware store this season.  After years of scooping custard, she was ready for a change.  She has been trained to water and care for plants from a stern teacher, someone other than myself.  It is fun to think that I don't have to rely on the careful eye of experienced gardeners in the neighborhood with my daughter on the job.   

I held off on publishing this post until after vacation for various reasons.  The garden came through great, very few fatalities considering an 18 year old was facing her first time alone and managing mom's garden.  This was compounded by the fact that we had no rain and the temps hit 103 degrees one day.  She has a full-time job working in a garden center (she's a newbie at this), but she came home and took care of business here as well.

I picked the first 4th of July tomato on July 21st.  The rest of the tomatoes were just buds when I left, but the heat and sun have set so much fruit that they didn't look like the same plants.  The onions were mostly fallen over so the tops have all been pushed over as well (see onion harvesting and other).  The beans that I thought would be ready got picked, but there was a whole bunch more ready for picking on my pole beans which became part of a post-camping supper.  

Since there is dill coming in, I may have to do some dilly beans which I posted the recipe for in the same link as onions (above).  I saved some dill before vacation in a jar with white vinegar in the frig.  This technique worked very well last year to preserve the dill until the vegetables were also ready.  My vines of everything else are going everywhere!  I am spending some time to separate and nip the tips to control where some of them are going.  Lots of flowers but no fruit yet. The pickling cukes are also doing well, the window box cukes hated the heat, the ones I nestle against the wall by the tomatoes are also starting to form very nice fruits.  I had to pick and slide the first one out between the wire trellis and the wall.  Any bigger and it wouldn't have made it out.  

This is truly the time of the garden race.  Enjoy the fruits of yours.

Soaker hose brigade and other thoughts

My plants are growing well.  The tomatoes are three times the size than they were in this photo taken shortly after planting just a month ago.  Even though you can't see them under the brown paper "mulch", I have a series of loops of soaker hose running back and forth around each side of my tomato rows.  I added an extra row this year because I couldn't restrain myself and planted too many varieties for the area I have.  The back rows are in the traditional cages but the front row is a series of stakes that I have started weaving with sisal twine around each stake and plant.  It worked so well on the Roma tomatoes last year that I am trying it again and also doing the Celebrity tomatoes as well.  I used the longest hose I had to accommodate the extra row of plants.  

One variety of cucumbers are also in the back row of this area and are climbing nicely with small fruits forming on the vines.  I also planted another variety in my window box tower and a pickling variety is in my back garden trellising its way up a old section of chain link fence.  I have several things going in the vertical direction including melons, pumpkins, and squash.  The jury is still out on how successful these will all be.

I planted another crop of lettuce, a heat tolerant variety pack.  I started the seeds indoors and transplanted them out before moving them to the garden under some shade cloth yesterday.  There is just one small row of lettuce left after cutting all the older plants for salad.  The ground has had no rest as I have moved from one crop to the next.

My coworkers have been enjoying the shelling peas.  My family has had a couple stir fry nights with the sugar pods.  They took a long time to mature with the cooler temperatures, but are starting to show signs of yellowing with the recent heat.  The vines are between my rows of peppers, so I am sure the ancho peppers will be happy to get the sunlight the peas have been using.

With the exception of my onion beds, I have wound soaker hoses through the whole garden.  The beans and vines are on a loop with the apple tree and kiwi vines.  I even had enough to go through one of my flower beds which gets the most sun and is also raised, hence, it will need the most water.  I found a local source of landscape pins at the hardware store and bought a box of 100-6 inch pins.  The are good for positioning hoses and holding down landscape fabric or shade cloth.  At $14 a box, they were a bargain in my book, as I never have enough and am taking them from different areas as the hoses hold their shape.

I use quick connects in the garden.  They are a huge time saver when switching up what line is hooked up next.  Most have a shut off on the connecting end so you don't have to shut off the main source to move the water hose to the next soaker hose.  One word of advice:  Buy a bunch of compatible pieces right away.  Brands switch up the male and female ends and then you are stuck with mismatched  sets.  Not sure what I am talking about?  Just ask at the hardware store or garden center and they will point you in the right direction.  Some people take some getting used to them, but you can even put a quick-connect on your watering wands and switch off watering tools easily.

We didn't water our gardens much when I was a kid.  We had a well, which provided plenty of water, but Dad did not like to hear the pump running so much.  Nature took care of most of the garden's needs.  We didn't vegetable garden much during most of my child hood memory with the exception of the year we took over planting and harvesting Hanson's garden plot.  We went from zero square feet of vegetable garden to thousands.  We had so much room that we were even allowed to plant corn, the garden hog that never grew in our own small back yard.  Since that was the summer Dad was diagnosed with cancer, the work fell to us at home while they were back and forth to hospitals. 

We had other gardens, but that is the most memorable of them all.  I learned how potatoes grow and how much dirt has to be moved to hill them.  Mom also shared her childhood memories of their own gardens.  Picking potato bugs by hand and putting them in cans of kerosene was a story I will never forget.  The whole family participated in the ritual to save their winter storage crop.  Funny that this memory came up as I got a message from a friend that their crop is affected right now.  I just hadn't finished this post to publish before hand.  A google search brings up lots of opinions and since I do not grow potatoes myself (space issues), I will share some links.  University of Kentucky had the different classes of insecticides as well as the biology of the beetle (know your enemy) and this guy was just down to earth on how to kill potato bugs.

So get out the hose and help your plants beat the heat.  Next year, invest in the soaker hoses and forget the sprinkler unless you like to run through it.

Fine summer morning

I was up later today (6 am is sleeping in) as we have off for a furlough day from work.  The weather is fine. As good as a summer morning can get.  I opened up the downstairs windows and let in the cool breeze and the sound of birds.  These kind of mornings remind me of growing up in the north woods.  Everything was quiet and calm.  I was always an early riser so these days bring back memories from deep in my being.

I have the first load of laundry in the machine.  It will go out on the line to dry today.  I started dusting and straightening up the house so I can get the floors washed and feeling good again.  Open windows make staying in to do these tasks so much easier.

Quiet mornings like this can make it feel like you really don't live in the city.  I can close my eyes and easily imagine that I am sitting outside the camper with my first cup of coffee.  That first trip is so close, and a morning like this makes that vacation seem within reach.  I can get through another tough week at work with my system in recharge mode.

Yesterday was the 4th of July.  Our neighborhood walks together in a parade complete with marching band to Jackson Park.  We have ice cream provided by Cedar Crest (it is the best you can buy in the grocery store in Wisconsin).  After the flag goes up, I walk home.  It is still early in the day, enough time to get together food for a family cookout and still be able to sit in the shade of the backyard enjoying each other's company.  My kids are grown so they also enjoy the lack of activity with me.  The day stretched on forever.  At night, we went to one of the several fireworks shows within a few miles of our home.  The day lengthened out with the shadows and the breeze felt good.  Even the fireworks went off in a slow, easy fashion that made me sleepy and relaxed.

We make so many decision in the course of a day.  Sometimes we get overwhelmed by the amount of things that need to be done.  Rushing to and fro seems the only way to accomplish all that HAS to be done.  I need to remind myself more that working towards a vacation is not any way to live life.  I have to take the moments that life gives me each day to get from it the good things that are there all along.

A reprieve from weeds

I have this kind of crazy job that keeps me very busy from spring to fall.  I have to tell other people to cut their grass, trim their bushes, and take care of their dead and dangerous trees.  It is crazy to me because I love to garden on a scale much more than mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges.  I spend A LOT of hours going through properties that would make you shudder.  It is obvious how quickly a city would disappear in the foliage if humans disappeared from the planet.  Some homes are consumed in just a few short years before falling to the backhoe.

Each year I pull hundreds of unwanted seedlings from my yard and my adopted footage of neglected public lands.  I go through on hands and knees yanking out buck thorn, box elder, maples, garlic mustard, thistles, burdock....you get the picture.  If I didn't do it in short order, my yard and the lilac border would be over-run with these rogue plants put there by wind and rain.  I just keep the wild grapevine (which has never had grapes) in check as there are a couple of ethnic populations that harvest the leaves for grape-leaf wrapped meals.  Talk about making lemonade out of lemons.  I take this task on as a stewardship to the land that I share with thousands of others.  It gives us all something worth having.

 I have said it before and I will say it again:  Attitude is everything.  If you approach a task as distasteful, overwhelming, or beneath you it will become just that.  If you approach a task as a worthy endeavor which is not a waste of your time, efforts, or intellect, it can become a more pleasant activity.  The choice is yours.

There are bright spots in my crazy job.  I meet people who really want to learn to garden.  I meet people who have a real interest in making the community a better place to live.  I get to see a slice of life that most people pass by or don't get anywhere near it.  Somethings can really make me smile.  A flower may poke up through a tangle of thistle.  A chicken may be perch on a picnic table.  Chihuahuas may be running the streets.  It can take you by surprise what beauty is hidden in unexpected places.  I get to travel among historic neighborhoods that are seeing new life breathed into them.  I pass under the shadow of some beautiful churches and even one basilica.   Street venders offer up a smile when I pause to get a frozen treat from their push cart.  Sometimes, there are children that benefit from a couple spare dollars in my pocket on a hot day.  The smile I get in return is payment enough.

On bad days I have to refocus on the little things that make my job interesting.  I have to think about the people that have learned a little bit about what are weeds and how to start a garden.  Sometimes these days seems too far apart to matter.  I just have to remember to stop and put it all into perspective.