Leaving one’s garden as it is coming into its own is a bittersweet event filled with mixed emotions. I now pack for a lengthy and hopefully exotic stay on a beach in Kauai. After spending the last half year in dormancy and now bursting out in full bloom, my garden calls out with the most mundane but essential of needs. Needs that I want to accommodate but just don’t have the time or the timing to accomplish in short order. The herbaceous garden in front needs weeding, the daffodils need to have their rotting stems removed, garlic mustard has invaded the back woodland boarder. The call also has the effect of drowning out equally important needs like stopping the paper, finish making out all the bills, packing. The garden finds it easy to grab hold in a selfish, greedy way making you feel as if you are some type of heartless, Agent-Orange-packing thug abandoning your babies for the pleasure of fermented sap and sun.
So it is time to make choices. Part of me wants to meander about to see how much the butterfly bush has come up or how badly the aphids have attacked the roses after weeks of constant rain or how many wild foxgloves have sprouted since I looked in the last week. But my let’s get-to-business side is tell me to stop messing around and get to business: “Idiot, you have a plane to catch.”
The first thing I do is to harvest the garlic. It is a week or so early, but the tips have started to die off and I’m afraid if I wait till I get back the bulbs will start to break up. So I start to pull the bulbs and place them out to try. But I take my time. Garlic has a wonderful smell when you first pull it out of the ground, particularly if the ground is fairly moist. Grabbing the base stalk carefully, I twist my wrist a few rotations to loosen the roots and then give a firm tug. I hear a gentle rip as the soil gives up the bulb and roots that have been anchoring it for the last 9 months. With that pull of freedom comes a whiff of the garlic that we will eventually enjoy in our cooking: Foxy, Carpathian, Elephant, others. They all smell a bit different as they shoot their heady scent at me with each pull regardless of size.
My wife, Juana, has agreed to braid and bunch the garlic together so I can hang them to dry in the shed. She takes her time creating a nice French-style braid that will hold up over time. A quick line in the shed and we are done.
Pulling up the garlic gives us space to put in some cucumbers we started in the greenhouse a month ago as well as some spinach, lettuce and endive. The ground had few weeds so with quick scuffle hoe action the soil was ready for a bit of compost, bunny manure, and dried kelp. Everything went in well and I started to dream about fresh cucumbers and lettuce in the month ahead. Though I might have been a bit early pulling the garlic, I would have been too late with the new plantings if I waited for another two or three weeks. Satisfied I sat and reflected on the garden. But I wasn’t done. The siren continues to beckon.
I quickly remembered what I needed to do that morning: spray nearly everything with neem or copper to arrest the burgeoning fungal forest that was quickly taking over my garden. But I don’t have time so I just attack one plant: the tomato.
Last year I didn’t grow tomatoes because I wanted to give the garden a rest after a few years of fighting wilts and fungal attacks. But everyone in the family (as well as friends) threw a wide variety of accusations my way ranging from insensitive slob to overcautious, inhuman beast. Pulling tomatoes off the vine in July, August and early September is one of my family’s joys and last year there were a lot of unhappy people when I presented them with my harvest of swiss chard in their place. So if I save anything it will have to be tomatoes.
Considering all the rain, the tomatoes didn’t look too bad with only about half of them having a branch or two being visibly infected with black-spotted yellowing leaves. Nothing had rotted off. Yet. So I clipped them, keeping my Felco’s clean with alcohol, and then sprayed all the plants with a good shot of neem. The bottoms of the plants were now thinned out, which will let air move through minimizing fungus. All infected branches were gone (tossed in the garbage.) And the plants were dripping with a translucent milky coating that will help keep the fungi at bay. It’s all I can do.
Though the garden is still crying out for more, Juana is being a bit more verbal about the yet-to-do chores that I have yet-to-do. It’s time to leave the garden to nature for the next few weeks; time to ignore her fervent cries. But not before I take a quick stroll to smell the roses and flick off a few aphids and spider mites.
