The days are just packed! And we’re still getting more than 16 hours of daylight.
Lady’s Mantle, elecampne, and willow fences line the path into the garden.
Little green apples beginning to form on the “Westfield Seek No Further”. The tree is covered with them – good work by the bees.
“Portland” roses from the Flanagan house in Portland with angelica in the background.
Fedco’s “Beneficial Insects” mix is in full bloom.
The bees are busy hoarding pollen, nectar and sunlight.
Over the last three years I’ve really let the Stanley plum tree get out of hand. It is normally a well-behaved, productive tree that doesn’t require a lot of urgent care. I have other trees that are real divas by comparison. Unfortunately it has been in close contact with the cherry tree which has a chronic case of black rot. I thought cutting down the big spruce at the front of the lot would help both trees overcome the disease, and perhaps it has, but they are still showing symptoms. We had a wet, cool spring and the plum tree put on a lot of new growth that began to show stress and damage as soon as the weather turned hot and dry.
As you can see, there are areas of the tree that have grown thick and dark and there is a great deal of vertical growth in the middle top section. Vertical branches are a problem on a fruit tree: the ripening fruit hangs against the branch and is easily damaged or loosened.
My priorities were to remove anything that had been affected by rot, open up the interior of the tree to sunlight, and save as many of this season’s plums while still making the tree MUCH smaller. I hate picking fruit from ladders. This is the result.
Below are the same photos side by side. Three days and a rainstorm later the tree is putting out new leaves and the remaining fruit is still developing. We’ll see what the rest of the season brings. .
We have rain in the forecast for the next three weeks, East Coast people. The corn is only 4″ tall but the lettuce – I could sell lettuce in gross tonnage. I took these photos last night and each one seemed to make a statement about the colors coming out in all this moisture and darkness.
Permanent violet deep – one of my least favorite colors in a tube of paint, but it looks good on the Purple Royalty smokebush growing by the driveway. Winter 2010-11 was the first year this shrub wasn’t mangled down to 3′ by being run over by the plow truck. Evidently the fix was to put a giant slap of granite in front of it.
Soon the orange honeysuckle will be in bloom and ruin the monochrome effect, but for now violet Dame’s Rocket, chives, and the bluer of the two pink tree peonies fill the dooryard to the northeast.
The little flame azalea is nearly engulfed in sweetgrass. Truly wonderful neighbors gave me this for babysitting their wonderful child, and I think of them every time I see it.
And green – very in with gardens in the area this summer. Even the weedy grass along the roadside is verdant right now, but we’ll see what July will bring.
I’m not fond of azaleas as a foundation planting – my husband refers to that practice as needing a “shrubbectomy” – but coming across one gone wild in the woods is a truly wonderful experience.
This is a view of the south side of the garden circa 1994. We built the house in ’93 and by June of 94 I had portioned out the land that we cleared to put in a well into garden space. My four-year-old son and I built the little compost bin out of scrap pieces of boarding boards from the house construction, and that’s the same wheelbarrow I used this afternoon, albeit a brighter blue back then. Those are our neighbor’s geese running into the woods that we took down in 2010.
I took this photo earlier today trying to find a like vantage point but not quite getting there because now there’s a cherry tree in the way. I’ve accumulated some plant life over the years but the path is almost in the same place it was twenty years ago. It won’t be there in 2013 – I plan to do that part of the garden over into keyhole beds using Hugelkultur.
Hugelkultur is the practice of building garden beds with rotting wood. How this has escaped me till now I have no idea – I have rotting wood everywhere in my garden, I should own stock.
This is not Hugelkultur, this is a failed burn-pile. I meant to clean it up last fall, but a dry October led to a droughty November and December brought a lot of snow and I never had a free day at the right time. Come to think of it, there might be some debris in there from 2009. . .
Burning brush here is an all-day affair that begins with a trip to the village for a burn permit. Mount Desert Island has a long history of burning down, most notably the Great Fire of ’47. Bar Harbor took the threat seriously and, unlike many small towns who are staffed by volunteers, employs a professional fire department. On a still Saturday morning in early spring or late fall I often meet my neighbors in the dispatchers office. We read off our phone numbers and Fire Lanes to the genial folks in uniform, vow to have shovels and rakes, hoses and at least two adults on hand at all times, and if the air is still and there aren’t too many requests in already we can go off and burn our cornstalks and apple tree prunings. Its a good system, and they do follow-up too - it’s not unusual to see a fire truck cruise down our narrow gravel road just at sunset, making sure we’re out for the night.
Once organized and lit, bonfires are all very romantic and tiring. These days I have an Adirondack chair and a book to spend the afternoon watching the flames die down, but when my son was small he and his friends would make a day of experiments, orange-tipped apple branches making smoke signals and water pistols making steam.
That said, I’m not going to miss the big pile of carbon blazing into heat energy and drifting off toward entropy. I’m going to collect every scrap of downed tree and woody stalk and use its slow decay to build soil and grow things. I can’t find specifics on the process, which is fine – I’ll bet that it’s just that simple. I’ve started to pile up the debris in the photo on a marshy peninsula of reeds and willow in the swamp. I’m going to keep a record of how it settles (or doesn’t) over the course of a year and make a stab at “best practices” in 2012.
Thank you, Herr Holzer, for the inspiration. If I had the room, I would totally be saving up for a frontloader.
There's been a bumper crop of everything after 6 straight days of rain.
"La Ratte" potatoes win the race for showing green shoots above a foot of soil and another foot of mulch. I'll add more hay this weekend.
Those serrated leaves in the middle of this photo are horseradish sprouts. They're a long way from the horseradish bed.
Future strawberries! A good crop of dandelions, valerian and allium as well.
The lettuces love this weather. Mulching the tatsoi with seaweed seems to cut down on the flea beetles.
Everyone I know has chickens, or is thinking about getting chickens, or belongs to a chicken time-share (a concept which should be awarded a prize for efficiency and cunning), or is otherwise involved in a relationship with poultry. The really far-out folks have turkeys, runner ducks or guinea fowl, but the fact is I can’t barter with anyone on the island these days without getting eggs. (Going rates for the following: formulae on a spreadsheet = 1 a piece, virus clean-up = a dozen, spyware infestation is at least two dozen, brown.)
I have nothing against chickens but I already have domesticated (sort of) insects, a day job, and a gallery. Chickens are work. They require housing in this climate, and housing with wiring for heat and lights if you want any eggs 6 months out of the year, water, water heaters, food, grit and medication. If one of my 100,000 bees gets in an accident or comes down with something and shudders off this mortal coil a little early, I don’t notice. Chickens are big enough that it bothers me when one gets ill. Or depressed. Or goes missing – we have coyotes, fishers, fox, and German Shepards in the neighborhood so that’s a real possibility. Somehow all these issues distilled during our dinnertime conversation into the perfect solution for the problem we weren’t having – wood ducks.
Wood ducks are beautiful wildfowl that are native to this area. Their name translates to “waterfowl in a wedding dress”. A century ago they were the most plentiful waterfowl in their range, capable of producing two broods a season of 8 – 20 eggs. Nest boxes and habitat restoration are slowly bringing these colorful migratory ducks back, especially along the Connecticut River flyway, but there’s no reason they couldn’t make a home in Maine, at our house.
I recognize a culture as well-established based on its minutiae – and the Wood Duck cultural minutiae is epic. There’s a Wood Duck entry in Wikipedia and the Cornell Lab, of course, but there’s also a Wood Duck Society which just had its 25th anniversary meeting in Minnesota, and the USGS has a great page that includes information on assistance programs for restoring habitat. There are at least four Google pages for buying, building, kitting out and siting nest boxes, and learned lengthy discussions (and arguments) about what to use for material inside them.
So, how do you get wood ducks? Google will get you to EFowl.com, where $130.00 will buy a mated pair. Of course, they also sell every conceivable type of earth poultry and some birds that are definitely from Mars, but you can buy wood ducks! I’m thinking that come April, 2012, twenty-six years is the wood duck wedding anniversary.
I’m off to read up on habitat requirements, which we seem to have in spades, and preferences for food and cover in all seasons. Good thing I a planted a lot of button bush (Cephalanthus) which is one of their favorite foods, about 20 years ago.
I had a wonderful day in the garden yesterday, about 16 hours worth ending at 8:15 pm. Until then it was light enough to weed out plants with a spading fork, light enough to tell weeds from desireables, light enough to prune the Sargent crab, which will develop vertical branches no matter how I cut it back in the fall. The temperature was just right for hard labor tonight and the mosquitoes haven’t hatched yet, so I used the time to dig a wheelbarrow full of “generous” plants.
I’ve been reading Gaia’s Garden, Version 2.0, and in it Toby Hemenway has a great rant about plants that have been termed “invasive”. It’s all about niche: water hyacinth loves polluted waterways, and subsides when the pollutants have been filtered out, kudzu loves disturbed soil and thrives in the poor, sunny margins of construction sites. I planted valerian and didn’t take into account the vast amount of poor soil and droughty conditions in my garden. Valerian will grow on in 1/4″ of wood chips on top of landscape fabric. So will rose cambien, dyers woad, weld, heath, and Japanese buckwheat. I dug up a wheelbarrow full of those “generous” plants tonight, and will plant them today at the garden’s sunny, poor frontier.
I’m trying to take Wednesdays off from my day job over the course of the growing season this year. Yesterday was damp but not raining, warm but not too hot to do the heavy work of hauling soil by wheelbarrow to the potato boxes. At the close of day I got a cup of tea and recorded the results for 2011 to date:
Potato boxes are in the “good” column so far. Summer 2010 was hot and dry with a drought for the whole month of August. Per instructions, I had filled the boxes with soil as the vines grew and when the soil dried out and heated up it actually cooked the vines. Instead of heavy yields the boxes produced about a dozen potatoes – one of my worst disappointments in all the years I’ve gardened. In 2011 I’ve planted the seed potatoes in plenty of soil and will use hay to fill the boxes as they grow. Perhaps the mulching effect will hold more moisture (but not too much) and be gentler on the vines. We’re having a nice steady rain today to water them in.
Bergenia is in the “beautiful” column. It has no pests to speak of (the deer nibble the blossoms sometimes but it’s not one of their favorites), it grows in odd shady nooks and spreads slowly, flowering before anything but the bulbs. Twenty years ago this grouping at the NW corner of the house was one plant from my parent’s garden. Growing in gravel and mulched only with its own leaves, it is a welcome patch of green all year round and spectacular in early spring, when the pink hyacinth-like blooms rise above the foliage.
Bad. The lower garden is host to several variaties of borer and here I may have lost the battle for the “Westfield Seek-no-Further”. The apple borers are gone, driven out by white latex paint with “Surround CP” mixed in and epoxy injected into the holes, but the damage is fairly extensive. My plan is to remove the trunk on the right and prune the other parts of the tree rigorously to distribute the weight. Perhaps the remaining parts will survive.
Back in the “good” column, this row has been seeded for three years running with a “Beneficials Mix” from Fedco Seeds. Every year my local climate kills off a few varieties, but some come back and help hold the soil for a new packet of seed. On a hot summer day I’ve counted 30 species of insect life hanging out in this little hedgerow. I can’t sum it up any better than Fedco’s catalog:
6333BM Beneficials Mix “When you increase the diversity of an ecosystem you enhance its ability to maintain itself and to resist perturbation.” Frank Morton inspired 75 seed growers with his talk on Whole Farm Cropping Systems at a Restoring Our Seed seminar. One way to increase the diversity of your ecosystem is to sow this mix of annuals, biennials and perennials that will attract and maintain a diverse population of beneficial insects to help manage pests in the garden. Instead of resorting to toxic sprays, attract hover flies, ladybugs, lacewings, parasitic wasps, tachnids, spiders, minute pirate bugs, damsel flies and big-eyed bugs and let them devour the “bad” bugs! Something in the mix will be blooming from spring through fall. Comprised of alyssum, bachelor’s button, borage, gem marigold, dill, fennel, Phacelia tanacetifolia or fiddleneck, caraway, parsley, golden marguerite, ajuga, basket of gold alyssum, and Rocky Mountain penstemon. Sow as a hedgerow in a well-prepared weed-free seedbed close to the garden in spring in full sun. Easily our best-selling perennial selection.
I expect that the Maine spring combo of 65 degrees and mist will have worked its magic, and everything will be 10% larger when I get home. I’m looking forward to wandering around out there tonight and admiring the garden working on its own.