Weeding Between the Lines

By Jim McGinty

It’s been a long, hot, dry summer again, and the garden here at Rancho McGinty is looking a mite peaked:  the Red Lasoda and Red Gold potatoes performed wonderfully, and we’ve been rationing them for our favorite fried potato meals. The cabbage trial is winding down, with Golden Cross cabbage as the first to be harvested – the heads are about softball size (perfect for two or three diners), and the leaves have a slightly sweet taste -  excellent steamed with bratwurst. Doyle blackberries, once again, took top berry honors regarding sweetness AND production – we are still harvesting the berries, and I’m thinking the three plants have produced two or three gallons of sweet, sticky goodness. Our bush and trellis green beans are just starting to produce (we started the poor guys a tad late this year), while the Silvery Fir tomatoes in the Earthboxes on the deck are loaded with red, ripe fruit – sliced and served with bleu cheese dressing – worth the wait. 

This month is garlic-planting time, and I prefer to wait until the cooler end of September for the task: I have been preparing the garlic bed with mounds of last year’s maple leaves, this year’s grass clippings, and lots of aged goat/sheep/horse/cow manure.  I’ll rototill that mess under with the Troy-Bilt tiller, smooth out the hummocks, thoroughly wet the area, and plant.  I like to plant the individual cloves (pointy end up, please) about 6 inches apart, and the rows about 18 inches apart (I’ll need room next summer to walk between the rows, weeding and clipping off the garlic scapes). Once I apply a six-inch-thick layer of maple leaves and/or pine/fir needles over the bed, that’s pretty much it for this year – it’s an easy crop to grow, but homegrown garlic is SO much better tasting than the “mild” product in the grocery stores.

With autumn rains (hopefully) in our near future, now is an excellent time to wander around the property looking for new, perfect sites for planting fruit trees and berry bushes: full sun, some wind protection, good-ish soil, water availability, and protection from deer predation are all important. September and early-October are very good months in which to plant trees and bushes, but you’ll want to provide water right up until the ground freezes, especially after months of drought. Speaking of fruit trees, remember to prune your plum trees right after this year’s harvest, so as to insure a larger crop next year, and be sure to pick up any apples that have fallen to the ground around those trees, as they are a vector for a number of very bad apple-tree pests and diseases – your chickens and pigs will be glad to help you with any of the “drops.”

Now is the time to critically look at your tomato plants, regarding the First Frost of Doom that is rolling downhill at us on a daily basis: will all those flowers turn into actual red tomatoes, or will the fruit still be green and nasty when they turn to mush at 33 degrees F? Right about now, many tomato aficionados will start thinning the plant’s flowers and smaller green tomatoes in favor of larger red fruit – some folks will remove older branches or even sever the plant’s roots half way around the main stem to stress the plant, and thus, encourage a speedy harvest. Tomato lovers are a focused bunch – don’t get in their way.

GARDEN CALENDAR:

On Sept 8, our local garden club will meet in Camden Grange at 7 p.m. for an interesting gardening-related class, and we’ll no doubt grouse and complain about our year’s experience with drought, high temperatures, out-of-control weeds, and refugee white-tailed deer – and we’ll also discuss what we did (or what we did not do) to alleviate all those problems. Gardeners are very adaptive people – and we love to learn from the experience of others, so come visit with us (the public is always invited to our meetings), learn something, or teach something, and we’ll eat snacks and start rumors about absent club members.

On Sept. 23, I’ll teach a class on garden-season extension techniques at the Newport College Center (1302 W. Fifth St., Newport) from 6-8 p.m. We’ll discuss how to increase your gardening season by two to four weeks, using hoop houses, floating row cover, hot frames and other devices. You can call the Center at 509-447-3835 to ask questions and to register for the class.

On Sept. 30, I’ll teach a class on seed-saving techniques, again at the Newport College Center, from 6-8 p.m. We’ll talk about methods of saving seed from year to year, and how you can keep your grandmother’s special sweet-corn variety from going extinct. You can call the center for more information and to register for the class.

That’s it for this month: stay hydrated, and dress appropriately for all those ultraviolet rays out there in the garden – we do NOT want to see a wrinkled, first-degree sunburn-peeling you at the garden club meeting!