The heat promised for last week failed to materialize. It never got much above 60°F, and I’ve had to keep the basil covered most nights to protect it from freezing. My neighbor planted tomatoes last Sunday. They were frost-killed by mid-week. I had planned to plant carrots and cucumbers on Monday evening, but the week’s forecast was already looking sketchy by that point. So… I still haven’t done that. No point to putting the seeds in the ground if the ground isn’t warm enough to stimulate germination. Especially in cold, moist soil where the seeds will just rot.
But rot hasn’t been as much of a risk because the moisture was also very short-lived. We got maybe 3/4 of an inch of precipitation altogether. It hasn’t been quite as windy and dry. In fact, there was fog and frost on Thursday and Friday. But the ground is quickly losing its moisture. I kept the basil covered going into the weekend, even though the temperatures were warm enough to uncover them, just to retain moisture.
But this week I have to plant stuff. If it doesn’t get started now, it won’t mature into food before the first frost in September. But some things need to go in the ground if they’re going to live at all, especially the chiles and eggplants. Much like the basil that just couldn’t wait, my peppers are now about a foot tall with tiny spindle branches and maybe a dozen leaves on each plant. Not at all healthy proportions. They really need sun and heat.
Fortunately (or not), this might be the week for both. We’re entering another dry period, with sunny skies forecasted every day for the next ten, and we’re also looking at the first real heat of the year. It’s predicted to be in the upper 80s (°F) this week. This is not only weirdly brutal for late May and early June; it’s weird for central Vermont, full stop. We don’t see many days in the entire year that are that warm, and if it does happen it’s not until the long summer days have had much more time to warm earth and water.
Perhaps because that warming has not happened so far and there are no heat reservoirs built up yet, it will cool off overnight and allow the house to stay comfortable in this heat. But at those temperatures and with no cloud-cover to mediate the sun, it won’t take long to heat up the surface, especially since rivers are low and sluggish, well after spring melt season. There isn’t much water to warm up between the hot air and the black, heat-absorbing rocks that line the riverbeds. So I’m afraid it’s going to be a long, hot summer, starting more or less now. Already, one of my co-workers was talking about installing air conditioning in her house this year because window units are just not cooling off the second floor bedrooms enough to allow for sleep. In Vermont! And drought is starting to be heard here and there, in anxious muttering at the garden centers and words of cautious concern in the weekend garden section of the local paper. It looks like I’ll be hauling water across the road for the foreseeable future. I suppose it’s good exercise in the evening.
On the positive side, it took maybe two hours to completely dry my clothes on the outside line. So the season of the electric dryer is over for the next many months, and laundry cleaning will be cheaper and more pleasant for the duration. I enjoy the quietly meditative act of hanging laundry out to dry, and I much prefer the texture and scent of line-dried clothing. There is much less ironing needed, and my sheets and towels smell like sunlight and summer. Also, if it stays this dry, I might be able to turn off the basement dehumidifier, which also sucks electricity but usually has to be run in the summer if I want to keep my main-level floor joists from rotting. (Generally a desirable thing…)
I also might be able to dry the herbs and beans without using the dehydrator or the oven. This is better for my electric bill — because, while the dehydrator doesn’t draw a lot of current per hour, it takes many, many hours to desiccate herb leaves and seeds and beans — but I also think drying at temperatures below 100°F preserves more of the flavor of the herbs. I might be imagining it —romanticizing the old, pre-electric ways and all that — but it does stand to reason that the lower heat might allow water to evaporate but leave behind more of the volatile oils. In any case, that’s still a few weeks down the road, during which time the weather could change in any direction multiple times. The herbs are only just putting out leaves and the beans aren’t even planted yet. But it’s a nice fantasy to temper the unseasonable heat.
I suppose it won’t be unseasonable for much longer. I have a note in my calendar saying that the season of Midsummer begins today. This is the longest of my seasons. It lasts from whenever I think Beltaine, or early summer, is over — usually after Mother’s Day — until late in July when the blueberries are coming ripe, indicating a shift to cooler temperatures and shorter days on the near horizon. The actual midpoint of summer comes at the solstice when the sun’s apparent path begins to head in the opposite direction and the days begin growing shorter, gradually at first and then rapidly as the season draws to a close. But the weeks on either side of the solstice are a time of little change, neither in day-length nor weather. This is the time of the doldrums, and the Dog Days begin not long after the solstice.
However, Midsummer is the height of the growing season. So there is constant change in the garden. The green world is rushing to absorb all the sunlight it can in these long days and store it all for the shorter and darker days ahead. It is also the time of long hours of hard work in the garden and on the farm. There may still be planting. In my part of the world, planting season has barely begun this year. But there is a shift to cultivation and harvest in the Midsummer weeks. Every day, there are weeds to pull and watering cans to haul. Much of the grain, hay, early veg and pit fruit harvest will happen in the eight weeks of Midsummer. Garlic will be pulled, cured in the hot sun, and braided into ropes for fall and winter storage. Strawberries will bloom, set fruit and be mostly done with their growing season by July. Raspberries will be done before Lughnasadh. Asparagus season is already nearly over. (Sadly…) And if we get the predicted heat this week, the season of spring greens for the salad bowl will end as well. Leaf lettuces, arugula and mizuna, and most spinaches will bolt into seed when the temperatures climb above 80°F.
Still, there will be little need to cook for a long while. I can go for weeks eating a bowl of oatmeal in the morning and whatever fresh produce is coming out of the garden in the evening served with bread and perhaps some toasted nuts or hummus. There is some need to store berries and whatever veg I can’t eat in a few days. But I try to plant successively, a little at a time, so that doesn’t happen. I plan for a stream of harvests, none of which is more than I can manage. I don’t store much of the early veg. Much of it just doesn’t store well in summer heat, for one thing. But I am also reluctant to go to the trouble of heating up the kitchen so I can roast and blanch roots and peas for the freezer when I can just eat what is done now and plant more later in the summer for storage. I also don’t turn as much fruit into preserves as I once did. This is partly because my garden has changed and doesn’t produce as much of a berry glut. But it’s also because I live alone now and simply can’t eat that much jam. I like a few teaspoons of the stuff every now and again, but not pint jars overflowing the jelly cabinet. That might make a lovely image, but then you have to clean out what you didn’t use… and that’s not at all lovely.
With the warm days comes more activity on the animal side of the farm as well. It’s shearing season, followed by all the smelly and fiddly work of cleaning, drying, carding, and dyeing the wool. The ruminants are usually weaned by now, and if you want goat or sheep milk (and you do!), now is the time of frequent milking. If you have a dairy cow with a spring calf, she might be producing so much milk in these next few weeks of nutritious grass-eating, that despite nursing, you’ll probably need to milk her, maybe more than once a day. And much of this milk needs to be processed into something you can store for more than a couple weeks. So this is butter, cheese and ice-cream making season.
Chickens are also highly productive at Midsummer. There will likely be more than one egg a day from each of your layers; and if you have a rooster, expect at least one of your hens to go broody. In fact, this time of year that can happen even without a rooster. (Hope springs eternal…) If you have larger birds like geese or turkeys (or, god help you, Guinea hens), then there will be clutches of enormous eggs from each hen — of which you’ll probably be able to sneak a few for brunch — but most will be turning into a precarious circus of small balls of peeping downy fluff in the coming weeks.
So there is a lot to do generally, but Midsummer is the height of activity in the herb garden. The entire mint family — from rosemary to peppermint — should have their leaves gathered before the solstice. Most of these plants lose their volatile oils later in the summer, and the carrot family — dill, parsley, chervil, cilantro and so on — just run to seed when it gets hot. In any case, like all leaves, young and tender is better than old and fibrous. Gather the leaves in the morning, if you can, but after any dew has dried. This is when the plant has the most moisture in its leaves and stems, and any abuse you deal out to the plant will be more easily forgiven in the cool of the morning than in the glaring heat of the day. Don’t make the mistake of harvesting wet herbs though. They just rot.
It’s best to use most herbs without washing them, but this isn’t always practical if you have animals or if you garden in the city. So wash them like you would lettuce. Fill a bowl with cold water. Dunk the whole stem into the bowl and swirl it around. Lift the stem out and let it dry on a wire rack covered with a thin, lint-free towel. For some things that grow close to the ground or have particularly tacky or hairy leaves, you may need to rinse more than once to remove all the dirt. This is fine, but start each round of rinsing with a fresh bowl of water; don’t dunk in dirty water.
The thin, fine-textured leaves of dill and fennel can be dried on a paper towel at room temperature. I put them in the oven without the oven on, just to keep them clean and out of the way. It takes a day or two. More often I mince these herbs, gently stir them into softened butter, and freeze the herb butter into serving-sized cubes. I found an old-fashioned ice cube tray that makes one inch cubes for cocktails, which is also a perfect size for herb butter servings. These thin herbs can also be freeze-dried, particularly if your freezer is fairly empty (as it should be in the summer) and your climate is fairly dry. To freeze-dry these thin herbs, snip the leaves off the stems and spread them on a parchment-lined baking sheet in a single layer with plenty of space around all the leaves. Cover with a thin towel, then put the pan in the freezer. They are done when the leaves are brittle. It takes a couple days, but if the leaves are still just frozen and not visibly desiccated by the end of a week, then your freezer is too humid for this to work even on the tiny leaves. I had success with this in New Mexico. But I have lost quite a lot of dill-weed trying to dry it in this fashion in New England, so I don’t do it anymore.
Resinous leaves and the buds of lavender can also go into herb butters or be used to flavor oils and vinegars, and they freeze-dry well also. But this isn’t necessary as they are more easily dried in the dehydrator on its lowest setting. I keep the whole dehydrator covered with a thin towel so moisture can escape but sunlight doesn’t break down the plant materials. Most of the time, I put whole stems on the drying tray, usually without washing the plant. It takes a day or so for a dehydrator full of plants to desiccate the oreganos, mints, basil and flat-leaf parsley. (Don’t bother drying curly parsley; it’s tasteless.) Sage, savory, thyme and rosemary can take longer, so if I have a lot of these, I strip them off the stem first to reduce the plant material in the dehydrator. Herb leaves are sufficiently dry for storage when they are light and rather brittle. They should fracture easily. But they should also be brightly colored and full of scent. If they’ve gone dark or musty, it’s likely they have either rotted or just lost most of their volatiles and are now nothing but flavorless husks.
When dry, I strip the leaves off of the stems and store them in glass jars in a dark, dry, cool place. The bigger leaves get broken into small pieces, but this usually happens naturally as I’m pulling them off the stem. I don’t have to grind or mince most herbs until I use them — except for sage. That one most often gets ground into a powder before I dump it into its canister.
Roots of mallow, angelica and horseradish should be dug around the same time you harvest potatoes, for the same reasons. This is when the root has stored enough sugars and nutrients to be its most potent but the plant hasn’t yet considered it time to put on thick and tough skin around the roots to protect itself from winter. If you grow these plants as annuals, you can dig up the whole plant. If, like me, you grow them as perennials, then keep them planted in loose soil so you can gently lift them in July, cut off a few of the roots and then quickly replant the remainder of the plant. It’s best to do this on a cloudy or lightly rainy day to keep the roots from drying out. I also keep a barrow of water on hand to let the roots soak as I select the ones I want to harvest.
If you want leaves from dill, cilantro, fennel and so on, then gather them before the solstice. But if you want the seeds that are staples in preserving all those late-summer pickles, then this happens after the solstice. You can harvest seeds at any time of the day and really in any kind of weather, though dry is better than wet simply because it’s less mess. But you want to wait until the seeds are bulging and fat, almost ready to drop off the plant. This is when they are ripe. They will have hard shells, strong color and scent, and will come free of the stem with a light brush of your hand. In New Mexico, when the majority of the seeds were ripe on a plant, I just cut the whole plant and hung it upside down inside a paper sack, letting the seeds dry and fall into the sack. I might be able to do that this year here in New England, but it’s more usual for me to brush the seeds off the plant onto a tray that will go into the oven or the dehydrator. I don’t wash the seeds — because you just lose them down the drain more often than not — so I make sure to grow them where they are unaffected by animals and car exhaust. If you need to wash your seeds, then use a colander with as fine a mesh as you can find, or perhaps cheese cloth, though I imagine many of the seeds would get stuck in that.
I don’t use many herbs medicinally. Chamomile and lavender tea at bedtime, mint tea for stomach upset, a weak valerian root tincture when the insomnia gets bad, and that’s about it. I used to use raspberry leaf when I had feminine issues to worry about. I use mallow root and lavender buds in creams, and I use soapwort as a mild hand soap after gardening. I went through a soap-making phase a while ago, but that’s a time-intensive mess that needs its own space and tool set. So I haven’t done it for a while. For the same reasons, and because I can readily buy organic oils locally at the co-op or online at Bulk Apothecary, I don’t make essential oils. But then I don’t heavily use essential oils either. I add a few drops of cedar and lavender to the washing machine when washing the bed linens, and I keep a small cabinet of bottled scents for potpourri, which I do make. Or, more accurately, I gather some likely looking plant materials, dry it all as needed, and then drip a bit of essential oil on the mix when I set it out. This has the advantage of not requiring fixatives, most of which (like orris root) are expensive and not altogether non-toxic. It also means that I can use the same bowl of plant stuff for many weeks, refreshing or even changing the scent as the mood takes me.
I do grow some medicinal herbs, mostly as insurance, a library of pharma-free medicine for the future. I make witch hazel tincture from my own plants to keep the smaller varicose veins under control, and I regularly use tea tree and thyme oils as topical astringents. But I grow more than I use — because I’m not sure that many work as billed, and for those that are verifiably potent, I’m not sure I have the tools or skills to use them safely. Still, I’ve planted many patches of wild quinine, Culver’s root, echinacea, eyebright, feverfew and St John’s wort. I grow motherwort, a kind of mint that is exactly what it sounds like. I’ve always grown comfrey and sometimes have used it as a poultice on inflamed bug bites, bruises and arthritis. I have black cohosh growing under the cedars for a time when that might be the only way to calm the arrhythmia or cool the hot flashes. Similarly, I plan to grow hawthorn as a way to keep the blood pressure down and white willow for the arthritis and general anti-inflammatory needs. But those aren’t herbs, I suppose.
I do grow many herbs for their scent in the garden, and some for their flowers or pretty forms — though, to be honest, most herbs are sort of raggedy and weedy. Even so, many are favorites of pollinators, and several are even excellent bug deterrents. I used to grow santolina in New Mexico as a general bug deterrent in the garden. It also has cheery yellow button flowers in the summer, and these dry into perfect wreath-making material, thought the scent tends to fade with drying. The southernwood branch of the artemisia family works the same way in the garden but will also keep its scent when dry for many months. I tend to agree with the bugs though — that mothball scent is unpleasant. Fortunately, lemon balm and the other citrus-scented plants annoy most biting bugs, yet don’t annoy me and also provide flowers for moths, butterflies and bees.
Monarda is one of the prettiest herbs and is a powerhouse of a pollinator attractor. One of its other names is bee-balm, but swarms of all sorts of flying critters surround this plant when it’s in bloom. It also blooms in the early summer, a time that not many other plants are putting out blossoms. As one of the mints, monarda will spread, but it’s not as aggressive. In fact, I find that I have to dig it up and replant it every few years because the center of the patch will die back leaving a donut hole in the middle of the garden. Also, as a mint, monarda has strongly scented oils in its tissues. Its natural scent is somewhat like a cross between mint and lemon with a hint of something sweetly floral like jasmine. But it’s also been bred to produce a rose scent that is stronger and longer-lasting than most roses. In fact, when you buy rose scent, it is more likely derived from monarda or the rose-scented geraniums than actual roses.
My favorite herb, and the one that seems to be the favorite of all the pollinators, is agastache. It is another mint with an amazing scent. It can light up the whole property with anice-like aroma and all the delightful flying beasties who are drawn to such strong scents. Its flowers come in an array of colors and arrangements. Most are large feathery plants with grey-green leaves and stems surmounted by stalks covered in sage-like flowers in outlandish shades of peach and terra cotta and tangerine, hot pink and cool lavender and electric blue. Agastaches are North American natives, but they are commonly named after a Mediterranean wild herb, hyssop (which is another essential in my garden). Agastache is no relative of hyssop and doesn’t look or smell similar, so I’m not sure why it’s called anise-hyssop. I suppose that might have something to do with the similar use humans have made of both plants. Since both have astringent properties and charming scents, both have been used in asperging sacred spaces. In asperging, bound bundles of leaves and flowers are dipped in holy water and then carried about the perimeter of a sanctuary, spritzing the cleansing water all about the space. North American Natives used agastache and sweetgrass; Mediterranean peoples used hyssop and rosemary. But the ritual act and significance were the same.
I also have a weakness for mulleins and the inula family of sunflowers (that which includes compass-flower, sunchokes and perennial sunflowers). I love the extravagant leaves and huge proportions. All of these plants are big, buxom, and as golden as a midsummer sunrise. Mullein leaves grow in huge and hairy greyish-green rosettes with central six-foot spikes of yellow flowers that draw all sorts of pollinators. Later in the year, the dried stalks can be dipped in wax or tallow and used as torches, leading to their folk name, hag candles. There are also cultivated mulleins that are smaller and less hairy and that have flower-spikes that resemble delphiniums, but in a multitude of warm colors (and without the poison of the aconites…). But they just don’t have the self-assurance of a hag candle. And as far as self-assurance goes, the inula called elecampane is about my favorite plant to firmly anchor the back of the herb bed. Its leaves are magnificently, tropically proportioned and it can reach ten feet tall in a season, sending cheery yellow sunflowers, butterfly favorites, soaring above the garden. Like other prairie plants with deep tap-roots, its leaves make great compost tea, without the cesspit stink of the comfreys, and the whole plant becomes nutritious compost at the end of the growing season.
I grow some garden herbs just for scent. Mignonette, meadowsweet, sweet woodruff, sweetgrass, and yellow bedstraw are all fairly non-descript plants with unassuming blooms, though they have their uses as flavoring and dye plants. But they give off intoxicating scents — and there is really no equivalent for any of them. Imagine sugar cookies mixed with new lavender buds mixed with the pure green scent of spring. That’s sweet woodruff. Meadowsweet smells like a flower-filled clover meadow after a summer rain shower. Mignonette, or reseda odorata, is a truly ugly little weed that puts out waves of scent like a bean-laden vanilla orchid warming under dappled tropical sunshine. Only, maybe a thousand times stronger. Heliotrope and sweet alyssum also both have a vanilla sweet scent and they have lovely flowers, but reseda is the plant I want growing by the porch for heady evening fragrance.
All of these flowers are blooming in Midsummer, some early, some later, but all of them could be found woven into the fairy garlands of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Truly, Shakespeare probably grew many of these herbs in his own garden. Few households had no herbs growing near the back door, even in the dirtiest and darkest alleys of London. Herbs are durable plants that thrive on neglect and reward the gardener in all sorts of ways. They can be propagated from mere slivers of a stem or root and, once established, will reproduce themselves for decades, sometimes centuries. There are echoes of colonial herb gardens still growing wild in New England where all other evidence of a homestead has been erased by time — over three hundred years after they were planted!
I’m an herb-garden zealot. The herb garden is the reason I tolerate the heat and weeds and biting insects of Midsummer. In fact, herbs not only make up for the discomfort of summer, they alleviate and diminish many of those discomforts. For example, not many weeds can out-compete the mint family, and not many mosquitos will visit a mint-draped garden, and nothing can beat mint as the essence of cool comfort. But all the herbs are delightful and interesting. And a few are truly indispensable all year round. I don’t think I could live without lavender and thyme.
I’m working on a Full Moon Tale for the Flower Moon that explores just that. What would be left to human culture absent the ubiquitous Midsummer blooms? What would our language, our cuisine, our emotional well-being be like if we follow the TechnoUtopian plan to pack all humans into sterile mega-cities and leave all other growth to the Re-wilds that only the rich would ever be able to experience? It’s turning into a dark tale, indeed…
©Elizabeth Anker 2023
By My Solitary Hearth 
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this 🙂
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