Chickweeds and Old Leaves

                Here it is, Ash Wednesday in February; a late-season light snow is falling outside.  Here I am, trying to live the good retirement life… the simple, frugal life on a few acres in the country. Starting in February I knew it would be time to spend more time outside …I needed the fresh air, the sunshine, and I needed some exercise to gradually tone up after a couple months of holiday feasting and lounging in the living room next to the fire, reading  seed catalogues and gardening how-to books.

                I began the month by dragging tree limbs downed by heavy January winds and snows up onto a burn pile. Once burned, I will spread the ashes onto those garden areas which will require potash and lime, especially where I’ll plant cantaloupe, Crenshaw, corn, winter squash, cabbage and other sweet- soil loving plants.

                I felt that if I could start some compost piles in the beginning of February, maybe I could have partially finished compost to mulch with by late June.  There were lots of leaves that I had stored from last autumn, so I had plenty of “brown” or carbon-rich material, but what could I use for the “green” or nitrogen –rich material needed to make compost? There was some daily garbage (peels, rinds, coffee grounds, etc.) but that would not be nearly enough. There was also the cover crop of rye grass growing on the ground where I would plant my early vegetables. I could skim off the ryegrass along with a little topsoil for incubator microbes and layer that on top of the six-inch layers of well-wetted brown leaves. Still that was not enough green material to reach the 50-50 ratio I needed between brown and green materials to make compost.

                Chickweed is nature’s winter cover crop, at least in our area of southern Indiana. It grows an inch to three inches deep and is an indication of good soil. Chickweed doesn’t grow out in our cultivated field but is rampant in the woods where the soil has been enriched by falling leaves.  Chickweed is really cold hardy; it is a neat sight in January to see all that green ground cover back in the woods. Some people consider chickweed a winter wild salad green but based on my reading, I do not think it is quite safe for that use. Apparently though, as its name implies, chickens love it for winter fare and it is healthy for them. With a sharp hoe, chickweed peels off the soil like wool being sheared off a sheep. So to make a long-winded story shorter, I covered my six-inch layers of leaves with six-inch layers of chickweeds.  I like the idea that this process is all integrated and self-sustainable since all the material comes from right here on my property. Only time will tell if it makes a good batch of compost by summer.

                In our locale, Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day are the traditional planting times for garden salad greens and peas. I have lettuce and spinach seed planted and will add radishes soon, but I’m not a pea fan, preferring the green beans in my freezer instead.  I’ve raked the leaf mulch off the asparagus so maybe we will have sprouts in a month. As far as the February garden calendar goes, I need to start leeks, seeded-onions, and cabbage plants in trays on the front porch so I can transplant outdoors in March.  Mostly I’m out digging a little in the garden each good-weather day, making beds for the early crops which will be planted in March, (early potatoes, carrots, beets, chard, onions etc.)  Anyway I’m getting a few hours of exercise and sun most days, no gym or tanning spa required.

Winter Roots, Tubers and Bulbs

                Succession planting is one of the most consequential concepts in increasing the output of a small garden and in achieving some degree of food self-sufficiency. Equally important is “succession eating” which would include both eating what is in season and planning for storage crops to eat when the weather is cold and the garden is less productive. My first attempt at practicing this year-round succession eating was growing white potatoes, (any fool can grow a spud) to provide a healthy carbohydrate from July through Thanksgiving and then growing sweet potatoes (one of the few vegetables easier to grow than a spud) to provide a healthy carbohydrate from Thanksgiving until early potatoes came in again. I planted my white potatoes really early…around St. Patty’s Day in mid March. That is mainly because my soil is sandy and I knew the mid-summer drought would play havoc with my garden in July and August. Mostly I tried to have two succession gardens, a pre-drought crop and a post-drought crop. That idea served me really well with last summer’s extreme drought. Sweet potatoes are drought hardy; they grew all summer long and still produced a very respectable crop just before frost. In the end, we had both enough white and sweet potatoes for ourselves and still some extra to give quite a bit away; that always makes an old retiree feel good.

                In addition to these basic two year-round eating crops, I considered growing other storage “roots, tubers and bulbs.” Not being a botanist, I think of all three of these as being roots. First my wife informed me that she wanted some onions to go with those Yukon Gold potatoes. So we planted several pounds of onion sets very early in the spring...in early March when I planted the lettuce and spinach. Through spring and early summer as I weeded and thinned the onions to four inches apart, we used the thinnings as scallions to eat until the onion tops finally dried and fell over just as the summer drought hit and then we had cured onions the rest of the summer. I did a poor job of curing the onions, so none kept into the fall. I planted a row of beets; and they also matured and did very well before the drought. Some Borsht soup went into the freezer. Borsht is basically a stew where potatoes are replaced with beets.

                Towards the end of August (and toward the end of the normal drought season), I planted turnips and carrots and began experimenting with fall gardening. I should have put in some beets for winter storage, but I just didn’t get around to it. Besides, I think my cook does not appreciate the “bloodiness” of red beets so in the future I will need to switch to golden beets. I have often read how productive and easy to care for fall gardens are, so I wanted to move up to this next level of gardening and give it a try.  What I found was that once cool and wetter weather came about mid-September, there was a drop off of weed growth and insect attacks. But when I first planted the seed and the new plants sprouted in August, there was a necessity to frequently water and cultivate and hand pick pests. That first month was tough going. The turnips were very fast maturing and ready to pull in October. Raw turnips have that strong “cabbage” or Cole taste which people either hate or love. Fortunately, most of that flavor cooks or fries out of it so that in a soup or hash browns you barely taste it. In a stew it is difficult to tell a cooked turnip from a potato. Rutabagas are even more indistinguishable. Because of the white cabbage butterflies which outnumber all other moths and butterflies by a billion to one, I have to date had no luck growing cabbages. These pests also sometimes lay their cabbage looper eggs on turnips leaves, but they don’t bother the root. By peeling and grating turnips and then adding mayo and sweet vinegar, I can have Cole slaw all winter long. Actually it doesn’t have to be mayonnaise; any salad dressing will give its own distinctive slaw. I usually also grate a carrot into the slaw.

                I find it amazing that a thousand-dollar refrigerator doesn’t keep root crops nearly as well as a five gallon bucket of damp sand in an unheated garage or a cool back room. Carrots (and parsnips which I have not yet grown but will next year) don’t even need a bucket of sand.  This year I allowed my fall carrots to grow undisturbed until nighttime temps fell into the teens in mid December and then I took black bags full of leaves and set them on top the carrot rows. Today is January 23rd and we are suffering through the tail end of an arctic blast, but I can still go out to the garden, move a leaf bag and pick carrots from unfrozen sandy soil.

                The carrots are very sweet and along with the Yukon Gold potatoes are my wife’s favorites. I have had some spectacular failures to this point trying to grow carrots in the springtime. Carrots are slow to germinate while weeds are quick, so a carrot row ends up being a weed patch. I planted just a few radishes in the carrot row to show me where the rows were so that I could hoe-cultivate the weed sprouts between rows. That still leaves weeds in the row and I am not a down-on-my-knees weeder-gardener. I have a bad back and bad knees so weeding and thinning are my least favorite part of gardening. My solutions to these problems are a lawn chair and a scissors. As I sit in the lawn chair, a row of carrots runs right between my legs and between the four chair legs. My body weight forces the chair into the sand so that the seat is right at carrot top. I can lean forward in the chair to use the scissors to snip out weeds and unwanted carrots. After doing about 3 feet of row, I stand up and move the chair back down the row. This works for me for weeding and thinning carrots, turnips, beets, lettuce, spinach, chard etc.

                Most people do not like doing easy crossword puzzles; most people prefer the “challenging” crossword puzzles.  Similarly I enjoy “pushing the envelope” in my small garden because doing so is both a challenge and a learning opportunity. So I will probably fool with a “soup and salad” fall garden next year too. I think a winter garden may even be possible here in zone 6 in a wind-protected, sandy garden. I hope to plant leeks this year so I can harvest them in winter. (And not have to mess with curing onions). Rutabagas, carrots, and parsnips all stand a chance of making it through the winter if mulched in the garden. Numerous salad greens are winter hardy although my preference would be spinach and Swiss chard. I think it would be really cool to harvest garden produce in the dead of winter. Cool?...Downright FRIGID!

Spring garden-May 2012

DROUGHT…frost and insects


I decided to be efficient at the beginning of spring…I would work outdoors in my garden on sunny days and write blogs about what I did on the rainy days. After all, it always rains in the spring, doesn’t it? Well today is July 7, and no it is not raining today; it is just hot as blue blazes (108 degrees predicted) and I figure it’s time I got a blog in, precipitation or not.

I began to have a suspicious premonition when we started having consistent 80 degree May temperatures in early March. Could this global warming thing be for real? If so, how could I deal with a new “normal” reality? Where was the silver lining in this black cloud? If life was giving me lemons…how could I make some margaritas? Let me emphasize that everything which follows from here on is based on the fact that my soil (soil?) is pure sand. I read one author who said that when the first warm days of spring hit and he had a terrible itch to put in a garden that he went fishing instead. That is probably great advice for anyone with much clay in their soil. Working clay before it is dry enough supposedly ruins it for years. But I have a garden on high sand which faces southeast and warms weeks earlier in the spring and lasts weeks later in the fall than most gardens. The strong negative to sand (aside from the total lack of plant nutrients) is that the annual drought in July and August burns everything in it to a crisp.

What appeared the obvious solution to my particular dilemma was to plant early and fight the last of the spring frosts but be able to harvest by early July and then let the garden sit mostly idle and empty until rains and cooler weather returned in late August or September. At that time when there was again adequate moisture I would again replant and have a second garden of fall crops. What would I do during the dead heat of summer? Make compost. There should be plenty of dried up crop residues from the first harvest, especially cornstalks. This would be my “brown” material for the compost. The “green” material would be “garbage” in the form of melon rinds and melon culls. Watermelons are a natural desert plant and the summer drought only sweetens them up. Compost really rots quickly if kept moderately damp in really hot weather and so should be ready to be spread for the fall garden…at least as mulch if not completed humus.

So in early March, that was my plan to battle the usual summer drought…battle the frost early, get plants up and fairly good size before the insect hordes hit them and then allow the early summer drought to help ripen the produce. My most important concept for battling insects organically without insecticides is to get out of sync with and ahead of their natural life cycle. This year I have had to do nothing for insect control…not even spraying with soapy water. The drought and heat probably killed some of them too.

That was my plan for dealing with a “normal” summer drought, global warming and high sand ground. But a nagging doubt or premonition lingered in the back of my head. What if there was a bad spring drought in addition to the summer drought? Part of me wanted to blow this idea off; it always rains here in the spring…after all, this is Tornado Alley. Spring storms were bound to come. On the other hand Texas and the southwest had experienced extreme drought last year and Georgia and the southeast the year before. Maybe it was our turn this year. It was. By the time summer arrived we were a full foot behind the normal annual rainfall. According to my rain gauge we’ve received a total of only 3 inches of rain in two storms early in spring; since summer began we have received nothing. The grass died months ago and now the bushes and trees are struggling. If you’ve ever been barefoot on a hot beach you know what plant roots are going through all day long. I tried to get at least a thin mulch down in the garden from last fall’s leaves, dried bush beans, corn stalks and one bale of straw over several ply of newspaper. I read in a gardening book once that water is the elixir of life. How true! Thank God for the aquifer that lies beneath my high sand and my deep well down into it. I have a very rudimentary drip irrigation hose system which I constantly patch with duct tape. These three things along with planting early saved my garden. Nine tenths of my melon and corn patches were parched bone dry, but there was a six inch strip right over the corn and melon roots which the duct-taped drip irrigation kept just moist enough.

Now I don’t mean to brag (Hell, I am bragging and you know it, so why should I even bother lying) but despite the conditions our garden did OK. As I sit typing this in the rear utility room of our home I see three large boxes of newspaper–wrapped tomatoes (in addition there are still four producing tomato plants in the garden), there are probably 50 pounds of potatoes (plenty to last us until sweet potatoes come in for the winter meals), a small freezer filled with corn, beans, asparagus, grated zucchini and a little borsht soup. As I look through the kitchen door there are probably 15 watermelons and cantaloupe behind the kitchen table cooling in front of the air-conditioner vent (plenty more watermelons still out in the patch). The refrigerator and its freezer are likewise packed with corn on the cob, summer squash, beets etc. It is one of those years when there is plenty for us and family and friends, but not enough to sell. Sitting in the heat in a farmer’s market is not much fun anyway; I think I’d rather give produce away.

The drought has taught me a few things, like harvesting early. The virtues of a “vine-ripened” tomato or melon are much over-rated. Most produce will continue to ripen after it is picked and be better off for it. I don’t know how many times I’ve told my wife “either I pick it early and I get it or I wait and the worms and bugs get it.” In these temperatures a cantaloupe that is “almost ripe” in the morning can go to “cooked” and ruined after another day in the sun. Tomatoes are members of the night shades and poisonous, I think, to most pests. The only thing that bothers mine when they’re green are those giant horned green tomato worms (and they can be controlled by hand picking and heel squashing) but let one turn red and some bug will take a few bites and rot will set in and the tomato is lost. Best to pick tomatoes when they are opaque green and let them ripen in the house. I had a gardener friend who complained that she had grown nice large green tomatoes but that the drought and triple-digit heat caused them to fall to the ground before they turned red. I suggested that she treat summer tomatoes exactly like she would the last one before a fall frost. Pick them green, wrap them in newspaper and store them one or two rows deep in a cardboard box. They ripen perfectly, no insect damage and you can often check them without unwrapping them with a touch or gentle squeeze…hard, they are still green; soft, and they are turning red. This allows for a longer eating season as a dozen or so ripens each week; leave them on the vine and they will all ripen at the same time. I pick cantaloupe after they turn from green (hard to see, camouflaged among the leaves) to beige (real easy to spot against green background). More often than not I pick them before the vine “slips” easily from the fruit. I take them in the house to just sit out and ask my wife to sniff them once in a while. When the cantaloupe gets that fragrant “musk melon” smell, they are ready to be cut and refrigerated. Get the corn early too, or the ear worm will do too much damage.

So that is where things stand now. Much of the garden has been harvested and is taking a rest under cornstalk mulch. The watermelons and sweet potatoes are drought hardy and will muddle through with a little irrigating. I have Waltham butternut winter squash growing with mulches around their root bases and shaded by the still standing stalks of the corn patch they grew in. Asparagus, rhubarb, four tomato plants, a few egg plants, carrots, and bell peppers still require watering but none take up much room and all should take the heat well if kept watered. Darn…it’s hot! Think I’ll get a big glass of ice tea, eat some salted cold watermelon and wait for rain.

Just Desserts

When I plan my garden I think of my plate…and my bowl. In regards to the bowl I consider what vegetables I need to grow in order to make hardy winter stews and soups. On my plate I envision one third containing a healthy starch, (one of those tuber crops I discussed in the previous blog.) I think of another third of the plate as holding either a healthy cooked green such as cooked cabbage, spinach, asparagus, etc. or a healthy colored vegetable like tomatoes, corn and so forth. Thus what I want on my plate determines what I plant; I hope to grow two thirds of what goes onto my plate and only buy the meat portion. I’ve tried to keep my garden quite small so that most people could try something similar even if they do not live in the country; a 50’X25’ plot should fit in a suburban back yard or on a vacant city lot. Either that or I kept it small so I could water my whole garden without moving my chair.

I have a terrible sweet tooth and so I feel the small garden should also provide year-round desserts. Not everyone has room to plant fruit trees. The southwest side of my garden is semi-shaded because of an old apple tree. I noticed that raspberries were volunteering under the tree so I planted a 25’ row of raspberries along the fence on that end of the garden along with several thornless blackberries. I stretched hay bale string taut between the fencepost and trained the bramble into it. Behind the raspberries (to keep grasses and weeds out of them and to give me a clear walking/picking path) I laid a three-foot wide piece of old carpet. Volunteer butternut squash also liked the semi-shade and grew to cover most of the carpet then climbed over the raspberries into the garden. Just inside the garden fence I mulched up to the raspberries with cardboard weighted down with leaves. Before I put the cardboard down I dug bushel basket sized hole that I worked my best compost into and planted half a dozen rhubarb plants. So on this one end of the garden I have the makings for berry cobbler in the late spring, rhubarb pie through the summer, and squash pie in the fall and winter.

During the heat of July and August I eat the cantaloupe and early Crenshaw melons that usually grow in front of my sweet corn; we can freeze some of the melon balls for winter consumption. Waltham butternut squash can be grown in every other corn row and still allow room to harvest the sweet corn before the squash spreads to cover the entire patch by late summer. Waltham butternut, unlike other squash and pumpkins, is very bug resistant so that is all I grow for winter storage. It tastes like pumpkin but without the huge seed cavity. Of course the sweet potatoes can be made into sweet potato pie which can taste like pumpkin pie to pecan pie depending on how much butter you put in it.

My main point is that a small garden can serve you up something to satisfy your sweet tooth year round and still have plenty of room for your other vegetables too.

Roots

I’ve been pondering my roots lately…both the ancestral and garden varieties. First the ancestral. I remember one winter as a young lad going down into the basement cellar of my grandparents’ big white two-story old farm house. I discovered in one room down there a huge pile of potatoes, about a pickup truck load, lying on the concrete floor. These were the fruits of my grandmother’s gardening. This was in the early 1950’s when Americans were meat, potatoes and gravy eaters so in the corner of that cellar was a good portion of my grandparents’ and their Sunday visitors’ eating until new potatoes came in the following year. Mashed potatoes and country fried potatoes were a mainstay on grandma’s dining room table. From an early age I was impressed with my grandparent’s self-sufficiency on their small integrated farm.

Fast forward to my own gardening experiences with root crop for this year. Part of my self-sufficiency gardening plan worked and another part did not. The part that did work was that my stored sweet potatoes from last year did last through the winter until early summer when my new white potatoes matured; the white potatoes in turn have lasted until my crop of sweet potatoes have come in for this winter and next spring. So my idea of succession eating of some root crop year round has been a success and I have been able to microwave me a hot potato for buttering any day of the year. This winter my wife will help me to explore the versatility of sweet potatoes in varied recipes. We are most interested in oven baked sweet potato “fries” spiced with red pepper and also with using sweet potatoes in soups, stews and pies.

I dug my sweet potatoes a little early this year and did not leave them in until the approach of the first frost. It was a trade off; I lost a little in the size of the tubers so I could plant my cover crop of annual rye grass before really cold weather stunted its growth. I really appreciate rye grass as a winter cover crop; it puts down so much root growth deep into the garden so easily. Those root systems produced over winter will be the soils organic material for next year’s garden. It is very easy and cheap; $5 worth of ryegrass seed transported in the back seat of the car. Despite digging them a few weeks early, some of the sweet potatoes were still large enough that one tuber could feed four people for a meal.

The part of my plan for root crops that did not work this year was my delusion that I could plant a succession planting of sweet potatoes in ground where white potatoes came out of. The reality was that the white potatoes were harvested in early July and I planted the sweet potatoes in late April. So successive eating worked but successive planting did not. Still I haven’t given up entirely on successive planting of root crops. White potatoes could be followed with beets, carrots and those huge rutabagas for November harvest. Sweet potatoes (which just sit on their mounded rows for a good month before they begin to spread vines) could be preceded by a quick growing spring turnip like Tokyo Cross® or onions in the valleys between the raised rows. My wife did make some borsht soup with the few beets that I did raise this year and I really liked the flavor so that could become a winter staple. Borsht seems to me to be a stew where the potatoes have been replaced with beets. Good cooking in the kitchen and good recipes are what make self-sufficiency vegetable gardening work.

I have mixed emotions about root crops. They produce huge quantities of food in a small area, they are easy to grow, they store well for long periods and they can be made into a variety of delicious recipes. But they are also inexpensive to buy in the grocery and normally I prefer to grow something expensive like watermelon or cantaloupe or sweet corn. With all the craziness that is going on in the world today maybe it just makes me feel a little more secure knowing there are tubers in the back room and beans and rice in the pantry.

Tight or REALLY Tight

How can you tell if you are just cheap…oops, I mean tight… or if you are REALLY tight? Here are a few examples to help gauge your level of parsimony.

If you grow and dig your own potatoes and add the potato vines to your compost pile and smash any grub worms that you come upon while digging with the back of your shovel then you are being frugal. But if you save the marble-sized new potatoes to be seed for your late straw potatoes and put the grubs in a recycled butter container to use for fish bait and bury the fish heads and bones deep in your garden, then you are really tight.

If you organically grow your own tomato plants and prune the vines to encourage more fruit production and throw the prunings on your compost pile then you are economical. If instead you replant and water the pruned cuttings to try to get a second harvest of free tomatoes just before frost hits, then you are really a tightwad.

If you find a seed company which offers $25 worth of free seeds or plants (Gurney’s Seed and Nursery Co.) and you get seeds for your garden for just the price of handling and shipping then you are pretty parsimonious. If you get several of your siblings to also get the seed catalog and offer for your benefit and buy asparagus spears and blackberries and other perennial plants which may produce food in your garden for the next twenty years then you are truly tight.

If you have your wife give you a buzz hair cut at home to save giving the barber $15 and paying for the gas to get to his shop, well that is commendably thrifty. But if you scoop up the cut hair to put around those afore-mentioned free asparagus plants to act as a high nitrogen, long lasting mulch and also as a human-scent deterrent to keep any deer from bothering your garden patch well that is getting darn near being really tight.

If you ask your significant other to make melon balls from excess melons that would otherwise go to waste so that you can enjoy melon frozen desserts in mid-winter, that’s laudable. However when she’s completed the task if you hint that she should also pickle the rind and parch and salt the watermelon seed then (trust me…) you are truly pushing the envelope.

I could go on with other examples but I think you get the idea already. I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m one of those FANATICS! I wonder if she could boil the watermelon juice down to make pancake syrup…..

Bees and the Beans

Plants talk to me. Seriously. I planted and heavily mulched four thornless blackberry plants and four raspberry plants in fertile soil in the back yard. Despite regular watering, seven of the eight were dead within a couple years. Meanwhile volunteer raspberries (and lots of them) kept appearing under my apple and apricot trees next o the garden. One day one of the volunteers looked me in the eye and said, “Hey moron, we like the semi –shade; that is how bramble grows naturally in the wild.” So I dug up some of the volunteers, stretched several rows of taut straw baling string between the fence posts at the south end of my garden and replanted the bramble just outside the garden fence under the shade of overhanging apple tree limbs. I intertwined the bramble volunteers in the straw baling string and laid a three foot wide strip of old carpet just behind them as a permanent mulch weed control which also served as clean picking path just behind the row of plants. “It’s about time!” the plants said and took off like gangbusters to form a permanent hedge demarcating one end of the garden. They were receiving both the shade of the apple and the fertility of the garden.

Then the butternut squash made eye contact and said, “Us too…We want the semi-shade too.” I had bought a super hybrid butternut squash and planted it in the field; every plant withered and died without bearing any fruit. There was a volunteer which came up with some cucumbers I planted near the apple tree. Since I didn’t want it choking out my cukes I treated it as a weed and ripped part of it out. It came back. It grew up the carpet behind my raspberries and then climbed over the fence and into my garden. Okay, I get the message; next year you go between the sweet corn rows where you can get both dappled shade and garden fertility and watering.

I didn’t know if cabbage would grow in my type of soil or not so I planted some this spring as an experiment. The plants seemed to love the soil and grew very quickly and I lost every plant. One of the hole-ridden dying plants spoke to me, “Cabbage is a fall crop; do not plant us until you have seen the last white cabbage butterfly.” So I noted that the cabbage butterflies were all gone by the beginning of August and will plant accordingly next year. One of the best organic methods to control pests is to watch their life cycle and try to grow plants out of step with the insects’ natural life span. For a lot of plants that meant planting early in my sandy soil which drains and warms up early but for cabbage it means planting later. Either I use a floating row cover or spray BT or else I plant the main crop behind some earlier crop for fall harvest.

Well, that brings me back to the pole beans. They are trying to tell me something but I can’t quite make out what they are saying. I put in some ten-foot poles. The beans grew to the top of the poles with lush vines and then turned around and headed back down, hanging almost to the ground. The vines were covered with blossoms and insect damage and plant disease seemed to be minimal. But not a single bean has developed…not one. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones…I can’t get no…pollination. They say that things go in cycles. Last year we had honey bees galore…so many that I could not help but commit apiscide as I trench composted over-ripe water melons into the garden from the melon patch last fall. (When I was a kid we didn’t have fancy terms like “trench composting” or “French Bio-intensive Gardening”; Mom just told us to “bury the garbage.”) Anyway a lot of bees got buried last year because they could not resist watermelon rind; this year I bet I haven’t seen two honey bees all summer. This year I purposely laid out some exposed rinds on the compost pile next to the beans to try to draw in a few scout bees but nothing resulted. This whole episode has given me a greater appreciation for garden produce which is not dependent on insect pollination like potatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuce and sweet corn (wind pollinated). I continue to tell myself that honeybees are a European import and there must have been native pollinators before the colonists brought their bees over.

I strongly considered just yanking up the beans and cantaloupe plants and tossing them on the compost pile but if I cannot understand what the pole beans are saying to me, I can certainly understand what my wife is saying (she has a somewhat irritating habit of being too right too often.) She says let everything be until we get a return to cooler weather after this prolonged heat wave. Maybe Mother Nature will make a last ditch effort to produce fruit when cooler days and longer nights return. Straight-faced farmers tell me “you planted under the wrong sign of the moon,” but I think they may just be secretly poking fun at a greenhorn.