In many area gardens, beds of early beets, carrots, turnips and garlic bulbs will be harvested between now and early August, challenging us to choose short-season and frost-hardy varieties for continuous planting.
Keying out the details of what remains of the plant on the stormy day on which I write of this discovery, observation points to the noveboracensis, a phenomenal New York Ironweed. I am eager for a close look during the 2019 growing season.
Last week, on the eve of the deepest chill and wind chill of the season, I reached into reserves of dogged determination to secure my harvest of fennel, dill, peppers, French sorrel, amaranth and most of the turnips.
Onions and potatoes, tomatoes and basil, cucumbers and kale, snap beans and zucchini fill dinner plates and overflow salad plates as the growing season peaks.
The unpredictable experiences that occur while gardening can be the most engaging or challenging to our senses, our emotions, intellects and aesthetics.
I find the garden’s vigor expressed in a diversity of late-season flowers and their pollinators, in underground root crops about ready to harvest, and in the earth itself.
Halfway between the summer solstice – the longest day of the year – and the autumnal equinox -- the time of equal day and night –this gardener is feeling swept up in the incoming high tide of growth, maturation and ripening.
As you prepare for succession planting and look ahead to new growing spaces, please consider that creating and maintaining permanent planting beds is the starting point for recognizing soil as an ecosystem of micro- and macro-organisms.
While cool weather prevails, make it a priority to plant onion sets or plantlets, shell and snap peas, lettuce, arugula, spinach and radish, all direct seeded.