Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty

We’re in the garden home stretch now folks, with approaching cooler weather, and possibly a frost or two.  What to do:  build a giant (expensive!) greenhouse covering your entire garden and orchard, or maybe cover the cold-sensitive plants with floating row cover (protects the crops down to + 26 degrees Fahrenheit – let’s see, for all you metric maniacs, that converts to, um, - 4060 degrees Centenigrate, or maybe it’s Celsonious?), or even cover the poor dears with sheets or curtains (gotta be careful with water-wicking fabric like cotton, which will crush delicate plants).  Could also try winding a string of old-fashioned Christmas tree lights (not the newer LED versions which don’t give off much heat) around and through the row crops (yes, you DO have to plug in the lights, but you can use a timer, and think how COOL your garden will look at night to your neighbors, and the folks on the International Space Station!).  Electric heat mats placed at the plant’s base’s might help, with a protective bubble-pack wrap around the plants?  Typically, we have a snap frost or two late in September, then warmer weather for a while, just to lull us back into inaction, then…WHAM!

Here at Rancho McGinty, the blueberry plants are just about finished with their annual tasty production, while the squash raised bed/trellis is loaded with huge spaghetti squash, butternut squash, and (new to us this year) “Festival Acorn” squash.  The “Festival Acorn” squash is bright orange, with green tops and bottoms, and covered in lots of colorful red and green spots – looks like confetti.  My gardening partner Pat

and I supposed the “Festival Acorn” squash plants would produce a handful of “personal”-sized fruit, but no, the plants produced a LOT of fruit in big clusters around the main stem – looks like a bunch of huge, orange grapes, LOL! 

On the front deck, the “Earth Box” garden is still producing lots of salad makings:  lettuce, spinach, white (almost pink!) tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos.  Still some Summer heat out there, so we are enjoying our fresh salads.

In the orchard, the few apple trees that are bearing fruit have sagging branches, so I may have to prop up those productive limbs with some salvaged-for-the-purpose “Y”-shaped branches – last year, our very productive “Greensleeves” apple tree carried enough fruit to crack off a branch, which stripped off some of the trunk’s protective bark layer.  Sigh.

Out in the garden, it’s almost time to plant garlic:  now is the time to improve the garlic patch soil with manure (I prefer aged chicken poo) or fertilizer (a commercial 10-10-10), a healthy layer of fallen tree leaves and/or weed/seed-free straw (is there such a thing, LOL?), woodstove ashes, and maybe some fish meal or bone meal, if you are organically growing food.  I’ll be planting garlic cloves in (probably) late September, or early October.

GARDEN CALENDAR:

On 10 September, our local gardening club will hold our first annual Zucchini Festival, at 7 P.M. in Camden Grange and Community Center (located at 7 Camden Road, Elk, WA) .  This will be a family-friendly, fun, and vegetable-oriented evening, with competitions for Zucchini-aficionados in the following categories:  biggest/heaviest zuke, ugliest zuke, “Cook-a-Zuke” (best food dish made from Zukes), and best decorated/dressed Zuke (two entry levels: ages 4-14, and ages 15+).

Each entered zuke must have been grown by the contestants, and all entries must be submitted by 7 P.M. in Camden Grange and Community Center.  

Our event is free to the public, and we hope you gardeners find your “dream” zuke lurking under all that foliage, just waiting to be improved with your favorite zuke recipe, or maybe carved into a stylish rose, or even dressed with a “Barbie-doll” wardrobe.

And on that fashionably-dressed squash note, I’m off to review my collection of “Mister Potato Head” decorations and body parts – hmmm.