Gearing Up for the Gearing Down

I walked down to the garden about 9 a.m. today, store-bought canes in hand (see last post), intending to string the wire between the green bean poles, stick the canes in the ground, and call it a day. I hadn't even made it all the way across the back yard when Nanny came out of the house and called, "Did you find the wire?" I hollered back that I knew where it was, and went on to the garden.

While I was pushing the store-bought canes into the ground, Nanny arrived with an arm-load of green canes that she had cut from the edge of the woods. We had just enough to do the green bean rows.

But when we finished that job, Nanny said, "Are these butterbeans the running kind?"

Pssshhht. As if I knew. They had foot-long runners on them, but I didn't see anything curling. And I didn't have any more metal posts and canes to make another fence.

I looked around. At the end of the garden was a small pile of 2x2 poles that had once been tomato stakes. I told Nanny, "Maybe we can go ahead and drive these stakes into the butterbean rows, and run some string between them later if it looks like they're going to be climbers." We gathered up the stakes and hammered them into the ground. Naturally, we didn't have enough stakes. But there were more pooped-out tomato plants in the garden, still attached to their stakes, so we stole those stakes to finish the butterbean rows.

Then Nanny said, "Are you going to plant greens? If you are, pull up the rest of those tomatoes, and I'll run the lawnmower through there to make it easier to plow." So we pulled up almost all the rest of the tomato plants, and Nanny hauled them away in the lawn cart while I pulled up and hauled away the sunflower trees that had long-since fallen over.

By then, it was 11 a.m. I hadn't had any breakfast and my stomach was rumbling. "I'm going back to the house," I told Nanny. "I've had enough for today."

I came home and fixed some breakfast. While I was eating, I decided that I ought to go ahead and plow up the spot for the greens and get them planted today, before the rain from hurricane Ike gets here. After breakfast, I went back to the garden. The big tiller actually cranked, and I steered it to the garden.

On the second round of tilling, something faintly intenstine-ish flew out from beneath the tiller and landed beside me. What in the world...? I stooped to get a better look. Ewwww! It was an animal - I'm not sure what it was, but it was pink (didn't have much hair), and it was gasping. I cringed, and stood up, not knowing what to do. Whatever the thing was, it was clearly in pain and needed to be finished off. But...geez.... Fortunately, while I was deliberating about whether to get the shovel or run over it with the tiller again, it shuddered and went still. I apologized to it and went back to my tilling, kinda grossed out by the thing, which I had to look at every time I passed it. Yuck.

I finished the tilling. By then, the heat had sapped my energy again, so I came back home. The ground still needs raking, and the greens still need planting. The sweet peas need a support system. They and the new green beans and butterbeans need fertilizing. The butterpeas, hot peppers, and okra need to be picked, and I'd like to get all of that done before the rain gets here.

But, right now, I have to run over to Mother's to change some light bulbs.

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Addendum:

Got the light bulbs done, came home to get my gloves, and went back to the garden to rake the tilled soil and plant greens. When I went to the shed to get the rake, Pop-Pop was on his back on a creeper under the big John Deere tractor. "Laying down on the job again, are you?" I said, as I passed by.

"Hey, what'd you do with my girlfriend?" he asked (referring to our stylish scarecrow - the one he calls "the Garden Ho'" - which I'd taken down earlier, when we were pulling up tomatoes).

"She's out there," I said, "laying on that pile of tomato stakes."

"I just can't keep a girlfriend," he muttered sadly.

I got my rake and went out to the garden. Before raking, I sprinkled pelletized lime over the soil to "sweeten" it for next year. Nanny came out to help about the time I finished spreading the lime, and we made short work of raking up some rows and planting the seeds. We planted turnips, spinach, kale, lettuce, and mustard. Oh, and a row of beets. (The beets I planted last time came up sparsely and have since disappeared. I'm trying them in a different spot this time. Never did get a single carrot to come up.)

Nanny and I tidied up - pulled some grass from around the three tomato plants that we'd left standing, and weeded the sweet peas. I hooked up the Miracle Grow sprayer to the water hose and fertilized the new beans. I even gave the old green beans a shot, just in case they still have a little energy left in them.

I picked a few squash, a few tomatoes, and an eggplant.

With my last ounce of energy, I hauled the scarecrow back to the center of the garden and put her hat back on her head. Can't have Pop-Pop missing her, can we?

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Negligence

Sorry, bloggettes, to have neglected you this week. I would like to say that I've been too busy gardening to write about gardening, but that would not be entirely true. The hurricanes have sent some rain our way for the past couple of weeks, keeping the ground too wet to work. I have been spending my time reading and cooking and otherwise piddling around the house. The grass in the garden is celebrating both the rain and my absence.

Since my last post, I've canned 17 quarts of green beans, and Nanny has canned five or six quarts. There's probably another pickin' on the vines right now, but it won't yield much more than a family dinner's worth. Fortunately, the new green beans are coming right along. Runners are about a foot long, and twisting around one another in the air above the plants. They need staking. Last weekend, I managed to hammer some metal fence posts in the ground between the rows while the ground was still wet. As soon as it dries up a bit more, I'll string some wire between the posts, and lace bamboo canes through it for the beans to run on (assuming my husband cuts me some bamboo canes, as he has said he would).

The billiard-ball squash I planted around the 4th of July are cranking out squash like crazy. The package said that the fruit matures fast, and it was not kidding. Today's golf-ball-sized squash is tomorrow's tennis ball. Seriously. Much of it gets too big before I get a chance to pick it. It's good squash, though. I've baked it, sauteed it, fried it, and eaten it raw. Its taste and texture is about like regular yellow squash, perhaps with less of that slightly-bitter aftertaste that some squash has. It may get the lion's share of the squash row next year. When I was patroling the edges of the garden earlier in the week, I saw that the squash and pumpkin bugs were having a street fair on the squash and pumpkin leaves. I dusted them with Sevin and did not feel the least bit criminal for doing it.

The pepper plants are showing off. I picked most of them clean two weeks ago, but left the pods to turn red on one or two plants. I've not had much luck with bell pepper in previous years, but this year's crop has been impressive enough to break a few limbs off the plants. I should dig around in the dirt around those plants to find the plastic nursery stakes that came with them so I can get the same kind next year.



In the yard, the sweet autumn clematis is doing its thing. I planted it to grow on a fence, the one I installed to hide all the yard junk. Once I actually got all the junk moved behind the fence, the clematis broke the fence down, so now we have a spectacular view of all the yard junk, together in one place.








The clematis' original home was on a different fence. When I tore the fence down, I dug up the clematis, but, evidently, I left leaving a little piece of the vine in the old location. That little piece took a shine to a Crape Myrtle bush at the corner of my patio. I think I'll let it stay. ;)