Eye-candy and the promise of food-to-come abound during one of the best months for garden viewing – May 2019
PEPPERS AND POTATOES
Shishitos are the first pepper to reach eating size in the Sunken Gardens of Moncure, and the potatoes will be ready for digging next month. We planted twenty pepper plants of every variety from jalapeno to pimento, and we expect to harvest 100 pounds of six potato varieties.
POTATO BUGS
The potato beetle, shown here in larval and mature stages, is our nemesis. Organic gardening requires we pick the bugs off by hand. They squish easily, but we prefer to drop them into a jar half filled with water.
WHAT BLOOM IS THIS?
Ten points for saying, “Potato!”
LETTUCE AND PEANUTS
We harvested the last of our lettuce this month and won’t grow more until the days turn cooler. Hot weather encourages leafy greens to bolt (go to seed) which makes them bitter. The peanuts, which up to now have been developing at a glacial pace, love the heat. We planted both the lettuce and the peanuts from seed.
SUN GOLD
Our favorite snacking tomato is coming on like gangbusters. Whatever that means.
THE BACK FORTY
Cantaloupe, lower left, crook-necked pumpkins, and pohas a.k.a. ground cherries in one of five containers on the far west side of the garden.
AND THEN THERE’S THE LAWN…
Not an eating crop, the lawn requires weekly mowing and trimming. This year we seek to tame, and keep tamed, the un-mowable ditch. Camille spent a week of mornings beating back weeds as tall as those behind Bob in the ditch across the street with her little battery-operated trimmer.
CHESTNUT SEX
Lots of activity in our orchard around the chestnuts as they pollinate. The male pollen-bearing flowers appear as fuzzy catkins, attract insects which bump the pollen into the small female flowers below.
BUTTERFLY WEED
The bright orange butterfly weed flowers attract swallowtail butterflies, but not monarchs.
SQUIRRELS ARE MADE FROM NUTS
Rats on acid, Bob calls them. And this year we’ve got a big bloom of young, hungry acid rats, all hungry who have not yet accepted the futility of foraging at the squirrel-proof bird feeders. Squirrels are heavy enough to pull the base down and close off the seed windows, whereas birds are not.
ANNUALS FOR CURB APPEAL
Purple petunias in front, coleus and caladium out back. We’d plant a perennial like hosta to achieve a similar effect if we thought the deer would leave them alone.
YES, THERE IS A PLAN
It takes mapping and planning to pull off a forager’s paradise. In order to get her head around the garden in her first year as full-time apprentice, Camille mapped it out and added pink sticky notes with what was in each of two dozen plots. Also worth noting: we killed 93 bees seeking to make swiss cheese out of our porch and garage. This is an astonishing record, given that we generally take out twenty or less.