Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty

 

The heat of Summer is upon us, and our gardens (and the weeds!) are finally flourishing.  Here at Rancho McGinty, the Roy’s Calais dent corn (corn to be ground into cornmeal) stalks are seven feet tall, and I swear I can hear the corn leaves squealing as they grow.  The poisonous but impressive squash plants are monstrous, and constantly on the outlook for food:  I never pass the squash plants within their viney reach.

Once again, the panels of black weed block fabric with pre-cut planting holes were a production superpower: the onions, leeks, and cabbage were huge, and weed free!

In the berry garden, the Quinault strawberries are producing a quart of juicy goodness every other day (fresh strawberry milkshakes!), while the Doyle thornless blackberries are just coming on – seriously, they make the best blackberry jam I’ve ever tasted.  Did I mention that they are also thornless?

Our garlic crop this year was only so-so:  smaller bulbs, fewer skins (which means cracks between the cloves), and overall fewer bulbs.  A combination of possible causes:  heavy, continuous rain in late Spring and early Summer, hot and dry weather when the rain window closed, underground grass root competition, and other farmer factors.  The good news is that the garlic tastes delicious, and I will have enough cloves to replant in late September for the 2021 harvest.

In the fruit tree orchard, a late Spring frost destroyed most of the beautiful apple, pear, and cherry blossoms – happily the Italian plum trees are loaded with fruit (plums generally have a later blossom period), so our breakfast toast will still have spreadable jam!  Reminder:  remember to prune your plum trees right after harvest, for best production next Summer.

Our cool weather root crops (potatoes, turnips, beets, and carrots) produced bushel baskets of tastiness:  I had never eaten turnips, and so I was expecting maybe musty, dirt-flavored ickyness, but I shredded a couple of turnips (replacing shredded potatoes) into a frittata with scrambled eggs and cheddar cheese, and it was very good!  Easy to grow, and tasty to boot – good to know for early Spring planting calendars.

Finally, remember to harvest veggies as they mature, to encourage additional production:  tomatoes, peppers, squash, ornamental eggplant (I mean tubes of purple Styrofoam ®), cucumbers all need to be monitored daily for ripe perfection.

Now is the time to plan for maximum harvest:  guessing the dreaded “First Frost” date, when most warm weather plants die overnight, is both important and impossible in our challenging environment.  Last year (2019) we experienced a series of totally-unexpected killer frosts in late September and early October (even the professional weather fraudcasters were taken aback).  Will you decide to prune out all the baby squash and blossoms now, in order to focus the plant’s energies on producing ripe livestock food?  Will you leave the plants to their own devices, and hope for a late first frost?  Will you have “frost blankets” or pre-cut sheets of floating row cover (Ree-May ®, or Agribon ®, locally-available at Northwest Seed and Pet in Spokane) to throw over the almost-ready-for-harvest veggies and fruit, at the hint of an overnight sneak frost?  Here at Rancho McGinty, we employ options # 1 and # 3: early pruning, and heavy-weight floating row cover (frost protection down to plus 26 degrees Fahrenheit).

GARDENING CALENDAR:

Once again, I know of no nose-to-nose garden club meetings, classes, or tours this month, though there are a LOT of local on-line gardening resources:  our neighborhood garden club has instructive (and amusing) videos and comments on our club’s blogsite (www.elk-camdengardenkeepers.blogspot.com), and on our Facebook page.  Meanwhile, the Pend Oreille County Master Gardeners in Newport continue to offer free on-line gardening classes on their website (www.extension.wsu.edu/pendoreille/event).

That’s it for this month – keep watering those food-bearing plants, bushes, and trees, and remember to water and turn your developing compost bins and piles – at the end of the gardening season, all that dirt will need replenishing for a better than ever 2021 garden.