One of the Joys of Maturity
One of the Joys of Maturity |
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One of the joys of getting a bit older is having the time to putter around in the garden. Below is my garden blog. This site also contains sections of recipes and features about specific, and often obscure, gardening lore. Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - Deer Damage Today was a lovely day for gardening...until I went out to pick asparagus. On my way to the asparagus patches I saw that our plantings of brassicas and lettuce had been ravaged. Looking at the unmulched soil around the lettuce, deer tracks were obvious.
Fortunately, I hadn't yet given away our extra transplants. Of course, what was left were not our very best plants which had gone into the ground in our original transplanting. I spent an hour or so replacing the broccoli and cauliflower, but had no extra Brussels sprouts transplants. I did reset what was left of the Brussels sprouts plants in case they might regrow from the roots (not terribly likely, but possible).
I also had enough lettuce transplants to replant that area. To prevent another deer disaster, I cut Irish Spring bar soap around the plantings and also sprinkled some Repels All around the area. I had some Thuricide left in our organics planter. To let the deer know I cared, I added some of our Not Tonight Deer homebrew to the Thuricide before spraying the brassicas. When I was putting away the gallon jug of Not Tonight Deer, the smell of it just about overpowered me. At this point, I can only say that I should have known better. Deer rarely come into our yard, but they have at times. A few years ago, they came in just as our sweet corn tasselled and ate every ear of corn on the stalks. I just didn't think about taking precautions and have now paid the price.
Having cleared some space on our dining room table, I brought a bunch of soon-to-bloom gloxinias upstairs for us to enjoy. The gloxinias coming into bloom are almost all plants started from commercial seed in December. The gloxinia with white blooms showing is an older plant as are the three on the right. One gloxinia is showing a bit of a red bud. It will be fun to see what this group of Empress gloxinias produces in colors.
I Should Have Known With all due respects to The Cyrkle's Red Rubber Ball, "I should have known" that deer damage was predictable in our main garden beds. It's happened before, but only rarely. Nevertheless, it happened, and I'm a bit devastated. I was able to re-plant a whole row of the Goliath broccoli we're trying to save seed from. The rest of the planting was just what we had on hand to put into the ground. I had a good bit of Castle Dome broccoli for the re-planting. The rest is just what we had and pretty much won't be identifiable as to variety. I even plopped in several cabbage transplants that were intended for other areas. On the Other Hand I drug our Weber grill out of the garage today to grill some rib eyes I've had marinating for a day. I've just finished off my second double scotch on the rocks, so I'm beginning to feel a bit better about life and gardening.
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If I were teaching a class on photography, the image below would be a good example of lens compression. Compression is the effect of things appearing to be larger or closer than they truly are caused by the use of a telephoto lens. In the image below, the white blooming buckwheat is actually about forty feet behind the row of zinnias!
My mother was always fond of zinnias. In her honor, I've often planted a long row of zinnias along one border of our large (80' x 80') East Garden plot. I also frequently grow several turndown crops of buckwheat on half of the plot each season. The range of blooms in zinnias is amazing. Here's a rerun from a 2013 posting.
Since most of our row of zinnias failed to come up last year, I seeded really heavily. Then I used a rake to draw soil over the furrow and firmed it with the rake head. And that was it. No fertilizers. No watering the furrow. It rained this morning and is sure to rain again tonight and tomorrow. My biggest worry other than our saved seed possibly being bad is having a whole lot of maple seedlings coming up in the row of zinnias. There are more maple wings down this year than I've ever seen before. Of course, maple seedlings are easy to identify and pull. And once the zinnias emerge, I'll mulch them with grass clipping mulch. Other than occasionally refreshing the mulch, that's all the care they need for the season. That is, of course, if the zinnias ever come up. Once you grow some zinnias, buying seed can become a thing of the past. While I often buy a packet or two of cheapie zinnia seed off a rack, most of our zinnia seed comes from seed saved in previous years. Once the zinnia blooms brown and black out in late summer and fall, you just need to pick the brownish/black seed heads and let them dry for awhile. After they've dried a week or two, rubbing the seed heads releases the seeds and a lot of organic trash. I don't bother with separating the seed from the trash, as it won't hurt anything in the ground. I bag our zinnia seed in a ziplock bag and keep it in our manual defrost freezer between seasons. If you do a Google Advanced Image Search for "zinnias" from senior-gardening.com, this is what you'll see:
With rain predicted for tonight and most of tomorrow, the zinnias and our other crops should get all the moisture they need. Mom should be smiling in heaven.
I did replace a Jericho lettuce plant that had failed and also thinned our spinach row again. I'm lucky that I got that stuff done early in the day as a light rain moved in. I was still able to pick asparagus later in the day in a fine mist. I also started some more paprika peppers, as I started too few of them in an initial planting. I seeded more Hungarian Spice, Boldog Hungarian Spice, and Sweet Paprika Pepper. These plants will go into our East Garden plot, so there's plenty of time for them to germinate and mature before being transplanted.
We grow our spinach both spring and fall. I usually let our spring spinach eventually go to seed for seed saving. While we love spinach salad, we also enjoy boiled spinach, spinach in Shrimp Portofino, and spinach in omelettes and in egg tortillas. I only rarely can or freeze spinach, and at this writing, I'm at a loss as to why.
Your Annual Nag about UV Exposure
Beyond getting appropriate medical care, protecting oneself from UV radiation while still being able to do the outdoor things we gardeners love is a major concern. The CDC notes that the hours between 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. (Daylight Saving Time) are the most hazardous for UV exposure outdoors, with UV rays being greatest during the late spring and early summer in North America. Heavy clouds do filter out some UV, but not as much as you'd think. The trick for we senior gardeners prone to actinic keratoses and/or skin cancers is to find ways to garden without exposing ourselves to too much UV radiation. Keeping in mind the CDC recommendations and checking UV scales often posted on weather sites can guide one on when it is safest to work outside. But not all jobs can be done in the early or late hours of the day. For me, mowing is one of those jobs where I have to be out in the sun at peak UV hours.
When I get into serious gardening in warm weather, I generally wear a T-shirt with a sun protective shirt over it along with a hat. And since I've had cancers in and on my hands, I wear gloves almost all the time when working outside. At one time, Coolibar Here are some related links about UV radiation and protective clothing:
We've been blessed to have all the asparagus we can eat for a couple of weeks now. We should also have lots of spinach and lettuce ready to pick this month. If we get really lucky, we might pick a few peas towards the end of the month.
We're beginning May in pretty good shape. Our raised beds are almost fully planted. I'm waiting a bit before putting our Earlirouge tomatoes and Earliest Red Sweet pepper plants in the ground. They need warm soil or they'll just sit and wait for it. I'm aiming for a May 10 transplanting. I've tilled our large East Garden plot twice already. That's a bit unusual, but the weather worked for us at times this spring. I should be able to plant potatoes in it soon. We have to grow our potatoes early, as our usual July/August mini-drought pretty well cuts off their growth. Started early, we can get a decent crop. The rest of our East Garden crops go in a bit later, as our sh2 sweet corn varieties don't germinate well in cool soil. I'll also hold off on putting tomatoes and paprika peppers into the ground until things warm up a bit more. And at some point, a row of red kidney beans will get planted for our Portuguese Kale Soup and Refried Kidney Beans. At this point, I'm considering direct seeding most of our watermelons other than our seedless varieties that have to be started with bottom heat to germinate well. And I'm on hold on butternut squash until I clear our old compost pile where the butternuts will go.
We still have lots of transplants under our cold frame. There are a whole bunch of lovely geraniums almost past the point where they need to be transplanted. Our Earlirouge tomato plants and Earliest Sweet peppers won't go into the ground until around May 10. And there are lots of flower transplants to adorn our garden plots and flowerbeds.
Vegetables We Plan (Hope) to Grow in 2021 The full list of vegetables we intend to grow this year looks long, but seasoned gardeners may notice some omissions. We grow only what we like to eat. I like Harvard beets, but my wife hates beets - so, only a few beets. Asparagus: Viking and whatever was planted in Bonnie's Asparagus Patch over thirty years ago So there it is. Lots of hopes and dreams for our gardening season grounded in successes and failures of the past. But it's an exciting time for gardeners. Here's hoping for a wonderful gardening season for you and yours.
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But losing all of our brassicas still really sucks.
, and to a lesser extent, 
was the only show in town for sun protective garments. With more emphasis on skin cancer in recent years, other entities such as 
have entered the market. Hopefully, such competition will eventually reduce the prices on sun protective gear, which until recently has been quite expensive.
