Rain and Slugs Slugs Slugs

It’s the middle of Summer and you wouldn’t say so. The Boston Globe reported that eastern Massachusetts may have had its “dimmest” June since recording began in 1885.  Through June 22, Boston and vicinity had received just 32% of the available sunshine. In an average June, the region gets 55% of the possible sunshine between dawn and dusk. Until now, only 1903 was dimmer, and we’re still waiting to see whether we yet made the record. It was also unseasonably cool, on average of 59.8 degrees, making this the fourth coldest June since 1885. Rain is also a half-inch above average, with some parts of New England receiving 3 times the normal rainfall for the same period…

In my garden that translates into leggy plants lying down in the mud underneath the onslaught of pounding rain, and hail. All the beans, now in flower, are lying down. They’re bush beans but I’ll have to find some way to shore them up – a horizontal mesh? The potatoes in the beds – the “blight” has not affected them further or any other plants -  are very leggy too and have also chosen the horizontal plane. Them I hope to harvest soon (they’ve been in for 90 days now).

And then there are the SLUGS. I mulched the tomato and eggplant beds with straw to keep the soil from splashing onto the leaves, but the wet straw might harbor more slugs. They’ve eaten half of the kale, and the radishes look just awful, their leaves in tatters. One night the slugs got to the  seedlings that were on the balcony. Many herbs suffered and only one lone broccoli plant survived. The slugs and the wet conditions did in all the new lettuces,  sorrel, purslane (love it in soups!) and carrots that I sowed in bed 4. I’m waiting for drier weather to sow again.

I spread the crushed eggshells that I’ve been saving for the last three months, but they don’t seem to help. I went on a slug hunt last week, and this was the result:

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That’s 83 slugs. Here they are again, from a different angle…

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… just to make sure you know how gross they were. And you should’ve seen the soup the day after! But I can’t go on a slug hunt every night. So I bought iron phosphate from the Garden Center and will apply it this evening. Let’s see if that helps.

And what with all this rain you’d think we have harvested lots of water. We purchased four rain barrels and got one from a friendly neighbor. But nope: we haven’t had a chance or a dry day to install them!

Now as for some good news. I despaired of the compost pile made of straw, leaves and coffee grounds from the local Starbucks. After winter it took a long time to even unfreeze. After checking often – while the other bins steamed and sputtered – I gave up on it, which was easy because it stood in a far corner of the property. I checked it out a couple of days ago and wow, that’s good stuff! Crawling with worms and the other larger decomposers, and smelling so good (that is, not at all). I’ll need to sift it as some of the straw hasn’t decomposed fully. I redistributed it to the other two bins and then moved the bin with some of its contents into the vegetable garden.

Three more trees were removed. They were too close to the house and one of them turned out to be rotten and hollow inside. So our wood pile has grown some more. I think we have wood for three (average) winters now. Now if only we could find an affordable wood stove!

Speaking of stoves, I haven’t checked our energy consumption and waste production in a while. I’ll do so soon and average it all out. I’ll have to figure in our many houseguests – now the co-houser and the family members have all left and it’s back to just the three of us. But I already know where I will find one weak spot. The wet weather has  also undermined one of the corner posts of our Riot (our energy thrifty lifestyle): there has been no line-drying for our clothes this summer. And line-drying them in the basement, which was unproblematic during winter and most of Spring, now makes them smell dreadfully musty and, well, basementy! So in the dryer they must go.

Please, let it be summer as of now on…

Sun on the Cape

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To forget blight trouble, and to expel the dreadful memory of my first nocturnal slug hunt (brrr), an account of our trip to the Cape (Cod), from which we returned (already) several days ago.

We drove out through a torrential downpour into brighter skies. On the Cape we had almost no rain and even some sun. The ocean was made more mysterious and powerful by the ever present fog, but quite bearable qua temperature (after some jumping and yelling – about 56F) and so much fun – I had forgotten how much fun!

It was Amie’s first exposure to the ocean, and she was fearless and careful. What a sensory feast she had, running in the spray, running from the waves, making sandcastles and seeing them demolished by the oncoming tide. Click for larger images.

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We drove back to Boston three days later, now a while ago, through another downpour – or it might have been the same one?

It stopped raining yesterday and the forecast looks more or less clear for the next couple of days. Okay, hey, I’m trying the power of wishful thinking here…

Oh no! BLIGHT! (?)

Via Skippy’s Vegetable Garden, which operates quite near to us, this news:

If you grow tomatoes or potatoes, take heed. This is shaping up to be one of the worst years for Late Blight, the fungal disease made famous as the cause of the Irish potato famine of the mid-1800’s…

Late blight is caused by the fungus called Phytophthora infestans, and it’s actually not uncommon in the Northeast, since it thrives in cool summer temperatures and frequent rains. But usually its occurrence is limited to later in the growing season and only certain areas of the region, typically in a few farm fields. This year, it has shown up early and is widespread. Worse, it’s been identified on tomato plants for sale at a number of home garden centers [*], suggesting that large numbers of home gardeners have purchased infected plants, which may serve as a source of inoculum (spores) that can spread the disease.

Late blight inoculum is easily carried long distances by wind currents, so anyone growing tomatoes or potatoes should be on the lookout for signs of the disease, even in the most remote areas in our region. Currently all varieties of tomato and potato plants grown in home gardens and in commercial fields are susceptible to late blight. If your plants have late blight, be prepared to destroy them in order to limit spread of the disease.

Well, I went out to see my garden – finally, after a couple of days of nonstop downpour – and there it was: sure signs of the blight on the banana fingerlings. What else could this be?

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The other potatoes seem fine, and I am hoping the earlies, the Keuka Golds and Red Norlands, will be harvestable soon enough. The tomato plants seem fine as well (there are some blossoms, no fruits as yet). But the Bananas are, I am afraid, a write-off. I dug some up to see if they are big enough, but no. They haven’t flowered yet, they’re after all mid-to late season. I will dig them up and dispose of them as soon as it stops raining again (tomorrow I am told).

[*] This seems typical of our times, yet another way in which our food is being threatened, and hitting particularly hard those who are trying to take food into their own hands.  I grew all my plants from seed and potato seed, but this stuff blows off in the wind…

As for the rest of the garden, in this constant rain and cloud cover nothing seems to grow. The eggplants have been stalled for weeks: no extra leaves, or inches. The tomatoes grow but slowly, droopily, leggily. What with the wet conditions slugs have been rampant, eating almost all of the kale and broccoli. They’ve proven unstoppable by my crushed eggshell ramparts, so I will have to switch to thin copper strips around the beds and a couple of evenings with flashlight and umbrella to cull the slugs already in the beds.

It’s a whole different game from the seedlings-in-the-basement and the planting-out times! Seasons…

Pictures of My Garden for my Grandfather

My grandfather passed away a few weeks ago, after a prolonged illness. Again I couldn’t be in Belgium for the funeral, nor could I fly over to see him during those three weeks that he was in the hospital. But I did call him at the hospital every other day. Usually the conversation was very brief, because he was short of breath, or tired, and because he dislikes the telephone.

But our last conversation, the day before he died, was longer. He asked how the garden went, and could I email pictures of it to my dad, who could then bring them on his laptop. My grandfather was a gardener too – the only gardener in my family , in fact, till I took up this crazy business, recently. He grew many vegetables, apple and pear and cherry trees, and a compost heap (I remember the hilarious experiments with worms).

I wanted so much for him to see how well all my vegetables and herbs are growing. I didn’t get to send the pictures – even if I had that moment, it would have been too late. Then it rained, and rained. But here they are, some pictures I took on a brighter day:

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The old cold frame (lights removed, fenced in with, yes, repurposed shelving) with cherry tomato, lettuce and chard, and day lilies, and path to the garden.

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Potato towers in forefront, more potatoes in beds in back.

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Beans on a gloomier day  no luck with the lentils, in front, they’re not growing. Notice the big pile of stones to the left: that’s not half the stones we dug out of the ground. In the background to the left you can see the scaffolding for the tomatoes. I have no close-up pictures of it, though, because… it started raining. Sigh.

{UPDATE} Aha! A couple of hours after posting this entry the clouds cleared and I could run out to take a picture of the tomato and eggplant beds:

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Pottery by Mama and Amie

Amie visited my pottery class a couple of weeks ago, just for 10 minutes while DH picked up pizza down the road. We were glazing but I fired up a wheel for her and stuck on a blob of clay and centered it, adding lots of water. Then she put her little hands on the sloppy, turning clay and – wow! she could have stood there for hours, smiling, holding, feeling, turning with the wheel.

When it was time to leave she got hold of four chunks of throw-away and went to ask the teacher very sweetly if she could take it home. There must have been something forbidding in the situation – all those adults suddenly so intent on hearing what she wanted to say – because this is how she asked:

– Lisa, can I please take this clay home? Here [holding out one chunk] you can have this. And this one too [holding out another one], you can have this one too if you want?

Lisa accepted the gifts – quickly, before Amie offered her all of them – and everyone laughed benevolently. Amie was a bit flustered but happy with the chunks she got to keep. Oh, and I remembered those awkward social moments, and realized that this was a glimpse of the struggle she is heading for, quite fearlessly, as she exits that part of childhood when it’s just her and her closest family, and enters the world where things are asked and deserved and owed in certain, mysterious ways.

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I brought home the pots and plates I made. I was more adventurous with the clay this session, with the result that there were less pots to bring home (and give away), but more lessons learned. I took some pictures but in bad light conditions (it’s been so rainy here!).

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I loved turning those plates, what a great tactile experience! And that glaze really put the birds up there in the sky (it’s a translucent white, the blue background was put on before firing as a pigmented slip over paper cutouts of the birds).

I’m so keen on a pottery wheel, but honestly we don’t have the space to put it or, with everything else that’s going on, the time to make it turn as often as it should. But we’ll be doing some handbuilding for sure.