My, my has time gone by!

I taught a heavy load of classes from August to May and am now settling into a relatively gentle summer schedule. I did the best I could to get the garden planted sooner rather than later but the weather was crazy changeable and I didn’t get everything done that I wanted to. The fruit trees are getting large but not producing a lot- mostly because of freezing temperatures when the trees were in bloom. There were two issues with the apple trees- one was cedar rust, which I learned how to solve, and the second was a bug that makes the fruit wormy and drop off the tree. Too late to solve that this year, but I’ll be ready next year. This is the third year that has happened! In spite of those difficulties, the old reliables have been producing well- asparagus and strawberries.

I have not finalized all of my garden data from last year, but I did grow over 500 lbs of (mostly) vegetables in my modest backyard food garden. The real surprises were the things that came up that I didn’t plant: giant butternut squash, zucchini and yellow squash! The butternut squash made the best squash soup I could have ever imagined. The squash kept all winter. I saved seeds and replanted this year.

Besides the food garden there is an adjacent prairie garden that I started a couple of years ago. It is slowly replacing lawn. Last year it doubled in size. This year, it is doubling again by the removal of a large clump of day lilies and weeds, then replanting with prairie species. I’m also removing a decorative “paver walkway to nowhere” which must have been conceived as a decorative element but was impossible to find by mid-summer with all of the overgrowth from bordering plants. The prairie plantings from two years ago looks tremendous. It is a wonder to watch as they completely fade by winter and look like nothing more than a thin mat of brown/gray stems by spring. When the weather warms, overnight it springs to life and grows surprisingly fast. The succession of flowers over the spring-summer-fall is wonderful. It also supports my organic/sustainable garden practices because it is a permanent refuge and habitat for agricultural pest predators that control aphids and leaf-eating larvae in my garden.

Be safe and be chill, until we chat again.

Dr. Z