Summer may have decided to arrive. We’ve flirted with heat here and there, even hit 93°F back in May, but it has not lasted. It would be warm for a day or two, then it would return to jacket weather. As of this writing I still have not planted out the nightshades because it’s been too cold at night. In fact, it was 40°F both Saturday and Sunday morning. Tomatoes and chiles can survive as long as it’s not freezing, but they don’t like it. And I don’t do things to tick off transplants even further than they already are by being transplanted. (I imagine transplanting feels not unlike having your intestines and spinal column exposed — however briefly — though I try to minimize root exposure by using paper pots that I can just plant in the bed.)
But tonight I think I will be able to get the mini nightshade plants off my back porch and into the ground. It is supposed to be in the upper 80s (°F) today. Tomorrow and Wednesday and Thursday it is supposed to be in the upper 90s (°F). Talk about erratic weather! I was wearing a sweatshirt while working in the garden on Saturday. I’d have heat stroke if I wore that much clothing outside tomorrow.
There may be rain following the heat wave. But they keep forecasting rain that doesn’t come, so I don’t entirely believe in it. The physics don’t work all that well anyway. When it gets that hot for several days running, it tends to stay that hot for a week or more. And there may well be storms, but they tend to be brief unless we get some Atlantic moisture — which doesn’t typically happen because the high pressure associated with heat waves tends to flow from the dry west and also acts as a barrier to low pressure fronts from any direction. Plus, we’re sitting right under the jet stream. If a storm is riding that across the continent it is going to be a dry storm, continental air being generally lacking in sources of moisture.
I hope this doesn’t shock the tomatoes in the other way. But there’s probably no avoiding the temperature flux, certainly not on the back porch, probably not even if I were to move them all to the basement again. (They would not thank me for that. The basement is not much warmer than outside, and now the lilac is shading the one potentially sunny window down there.) It’s going to be hot everywhere (except the basement). So I might as well put the plants into the still-cool soil and keep them as moist and as insulated as possible with straw.
I do worry about the greens bolting. Again… Seems to be a pattern here. I finally get a good round to germinate and the weather instantly turns too hot for greens. I have more feral arugula than cultivated. Which would be great — free food! — except the selection process seems to have bred a plant that dispenses with large tasty leaves and goes straight to seed making on thin spindly stalks, even when the weather is congenial. Because gardening is like that, I suppose.
On the other hand, I may have — touch wood — started to wrest control of the veg patch back from the groundhog. In fact, Mama Marmot seems to be gone. I think they were turfed out of their burrow under the bank by one of our neighborhood skunks. I’m not sure that I’m happy about that. Our neighborhood skunks seem to be an angry lot, meaning there is quite a bit of spraying for no obvious reason. My garage smells. Still, the skunk has no particular interest in the veg. They will dig, but they’re digging for insects, grubs and the nests of birds and rodents. They love eggs. They may eat your carrots if the carrots are easily accessible and there isn’t an alternative, but they prefer raw protein. I try not to think too much about that. The circle of life doesn’t bear close scrutiny.
In any case, the second planting of sweet potatoes is doing well. The Brussels sprouts seem to be rejuvenating. There are peas and beans in the cage. And the beet and turnip bed that they shaved to the ground seems to have taken that as incentive to grow three times as many leaves, enough to allow me to harvest the greens and still have sufficient leaf to develop the roots. And I love beet greens! I would congratulate myself on building hog-proof barriers, only it’s not just the protected plants that are coming back. The monarda and echinacea in the herb bed are also starting to grow now that they aren’t being defoliated every night.
But the final bit of evidence is that one of the little ones is now living under my porch. Or was until Friday. This one was completely without fear. I could stand right over him, waving my arms and yelling, and he’d just blink up at me and go back to eating. I probably could have bent down and grabbed him. I did think about it… toss the little fuzz-butt into the jungle… Now this same fearless — or perhaps developmentally challenged — woodchuck is in my perennial bed, destroying the monarda and campanula. Mom is nowhere to be seen. In fact, the last time I did see her, she was running up the road after what was probably the final scuffle with the skunks. The young ones were straggling behind. One got separated from the group by a passing car. I think that he never did catch up with mom but couldn’t stay in the den. (I wonder if skunks eat groundhog babies…) So he moved across the street to the garden that has neither plant protection nor angry skunks.
I saw him a couple times and chased him until he slid into a bolthole under the front porch. I’ve had groundhogs, skunks and a possum family living out there. They keep building new entrances. This year, I thought that there might not be anything larger than the chipmunks under there. But I guess the groundhog discovered that too. So he moved in.
On Friday, I came home to exactly zero strawberries left in the patch and a ravaged gourd plant that had grown by the mailbox. Had being the operative word. I didn’t plant this gourd, but it was healthy and beautiful and who knows what wonderful fruits it might have produced. Now, we will never know. Nor will I get to eat the dozens of strawberries from the backyard patch. All those berries that were dangling from every stalk, gone. So I declared war on fuzz-butt, who was sitting in the perennial bed munching on a hapless mallow plant. I yelled and he sashayed off to the nearest bolt hole. And then I sort of lost my cool. I took an assortment of metal trays, rocks, a crate and a broken watering can filled with water and blocked all the holes.
I would feel bad about potentially trapping the little guy in there to starve… only I am quite sure there is at least one hole I don’t know about. The big easy-access ones are now gone though, and maybe he’ll think harder on staying someplace with a raving lunatic biped and no quick getaway. I saw him briefly on Saturday munching a mint plant (why?), but he ran off under the fence toward the road when I chased him. So maybe he is gone. Maybe. In any case, I can be territorial now and then. I really love strawberries… If the skunk can be angry, then so can I.
Meanwhile, there might be peas. And the winter squash are all sprouting. And the birds have not yet eaten the peach-lets or the tiny apples. So harvest-y things are looking up this week. I also think I am done planting until August. I spent a few hours over the weekend planting the flowers that I grow around the veg garden: cosmos, zinnias, marigolds, calendula and nasturtiums. These blooms all attract pollinators, and the marigolds and nasturtiums repel many plant pests and even a few rodent pests. I also planted out the purely decorative pumpkins and gourds. I usually plant these in June, sometimes even July. Most take 90 days or so to fruit, so if you want pumpkins for Halloween, then now is the time to plant. If you plant too early, the pumpkins are squirrel-ravaged long before you can carve jack-o-lanterns from them. Or they just rot in the heat of September.
Which might be apocalyptic this year… It’s already apocalyptic for most of the country. There have already been heat deaths from Texas to Detroit. This week, Boston — cold, damp, stuck out there completely exposed on the Atlantic, Boston — is advising people to take precautions. Most people in Boston do not have central air. There’s probably a run on window AC units.
To get ahead of the heat here, I put in my own window AC unit. It cools one room… my bedroom. But at least I can sleep. And if things get really bad, there’s always the basement. I also did all the heavy outdoor work and all the cooking while it was still in the 60s (°F). I probably went a little overboard on the cooking, but I can freeze what doesn’t get eaten. The point is I don’t have to cook for the rest of the week.
I baked a couple small loaves of wheat sourdough. I made yogurt. I also had a couple cups of walnut crumbs and flour, the stuff that builds up at the bottom of the canister until you clean it out. So I put some of that in with chick peas to make a nut butter / hummus thing with paprika, thyme and lemon. I also mixed some walnut oil in with the olive oil. The resulting paste is thicker than hummus, makes a tasty and filling sandwich spread.
I used the rest to make strawberry and walnut scones. While I don’t get to eat my own strawberries, the Champlain Valley farms are starting to send berries to market and I had bought a few pints thinking that I might freeze them, not knowing that my own harvest was gone. These scones were pure improv or I might have shared the recipe. I was working off a cream scone recipe, but I changed almost everything. I’m pretty sure this was a one-off. I couldn’t reproduce it even if I had been taking notes… which is hard to do when your hands are covered in scone dough. I do know that there was much more flour than the recipe called for, and I added vanilla and thyme in addition to the strawberries and ground nuts. It made a wet dough and turned out a bit more like bread with a biscuity crust than a flakey scone texture throughout, but they taste heavenly. And they scented my whole house! (Take that groundhog… I still get strawberries…)
Then, because one can’t live on carbs alone, I made quiche. I used some of the beet greens plus some store-bought lacinato kale and spinach. I thinly sliced and caramelized a red onion and sautéed chopped portobello mushrooms with the softened onion. Then I put the chopped greens into the same pan and let them cook down a bit to release water — so the quiche doesn’t turn into a puddle. I beat the eggs with some goat cheese and added thyme, nutmeg and a bit of prepared mustard. Then I mixed the mushrooms and veg into the eggs mixture and poured all this into a prepared crust. (I have taken to buying a locally made frozen whole wheat pie crust. I honestly don’t know how they do it… someday I might reverse engineer it and make it myself… but why…)
Son#1 and I had quiche and scones for dinner while watching a dopey movie — Red Notice, international art thieves, lots of red herrings, witty banter, unexpected twists, and nobody dies, just a lot of big boo-boos — a fitting cap on the weekend. Tonight, I will plant the nightshades and water everything and eat more quiche. Tomorrow, I will do my best to not be curled fetal in front of the AC unit, fending off the shock of going from 40°F to 95°F in two days. Oh well… at least my work place is refrigerated…
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
You certainly keep yourself busy! It is good to know you had some company over the weekend. Our youngest flew up from Cape Town for the weekend to help celebrate her dad’s 80th birthday. It was a wonderful surprise for him 🙂
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I was cheering for the skunk, but oh no! I hope the baby under your porch relocates or you are able to evict them. Also, it is one of life’s misfortunes that we can’t live on carbs alone. If only!
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