End of the Season

It’s been raining since yesterday evening, and more is on the way. The temperatures are in the 70s, a far cry from the 100s of just last Saturday.

Even better, the leaves are starting to turn and fall from the trees. Not the oaks (although I sure do detect a touch of turning), but the hickories and pecans and elms. Fall is definitely on the way.

To celebrate, I’m going to plagiarize myself and post a newspaper article I wrote last year. Be warned: the gardens described are at my old place and not here …

One of my earliest memories is of hiding in the jungle of poppies and tiger lilies and berry bushes that was my grandmother’s garden. Being the youngest, I never did see the family farm because, by then, everyone had moved into the city – well, the city such as it was, given that today, that tiny town in the Ozarks is hardly more than a stop sign on the way to nowhere.

The town may be gone, but my grandmother’s tiger lilies remain, having naturalized and spread, thereby marking the place where memory was formed and grew stronger than the glossy ads posing as gardening shows and magazines that assailed me in the years that followed. I never did get with the program.

I remembered that garden the other day while surveying my own. And is it ever a mess this year. Between rocks flinging themselves beneath the mower and gypsy moths and a month of prime gardening time lost and me stupidly fertilizing the flowers, I’ve ended up with a mess – a blowsy, chaotic jungle listing like a pirate Armada after a raid gone very, very wrong.

But despite catastrophic neglect, there have been bright spots. The scarlet runner beans proved to be champs, producing enough beans to feed a small army. And their flowers attracted every manner of bee, butterfly and hummingbird. They’re a shoo-in for next year.

Then there’s the bronze fennel, lovely plants with an intoxicating scent. The problem is that swallowtail butterflies discovered them immediately, meaning that, for most of the summer, every plant has been covered with plump swallowtail caterpillars. Maybe by the end of this month, the caterpillars will be gone and I can dig the bulbs up for late summer feasting.

It was a good year for tomatoes, too, although it would have been better had I tied the plants up like I usually do and not used cages. Those danged things fell over before July even got here. I tried everything to hoist them up, but to no avail.

Still, I got enough to satisfy my cravings, with the Italian Beefsteaks proving the tastiest. The Dr. Carolyn Pinks weren’t the best eating, but they were pretty little tomatoes, and very healthy and productive plants. As for the Giallos, I never could adjust to their yellow color and kept leaving them on the vine too long. But when I did nab them before they turned to mush, they were a pleasure. A very nice, mellow tasting tomato.

Some other varieties haven’t yet ripened because they went in the ground later than the others. [name deleted to protect the innocent!], well known local Trash Dude and Gardener Extraordinaire, brought me a Purple Brandywine, a Mortgage Lifter and a Cherokee Purple, all of which ended up in the middle of the watermelon patch. Unfortunately, the watermelon patch is completely out of control, thanks to rocks flinging themselves beneath the mower, thereby upending my plan of mowing paths into the patch before the fruit set. So I can’t get to them, for fear I’ll step on a watermelon – or a snake. But I see green tomatoes, so I’m sure I’ll venture in there once I get my courage up.

It was a stellar year for blue potatoes and Romanesco zucchini, as well, although most of the zucchini ended up in the compost. I mean, really – enough is enough. And I had more butterflies and hummingbirds than ever before. In fact, there were so many hummingbirds that venturing outside became hazardous, thanks to their continual bickering.

The eggplant, however – well, not so much. I don’t know if it didn’t get hot enough for them or if it was too cool and rainy for too long too early in the season, but they never did anything. Same for the hops. And the cilantro bolted right off the bat, the anise was a no-show, the nigella sativa (AKA Blessed Herb) turned out to be heat intolerant and I didn’t plant enough basil – again.

Even worse was my decision to fertilize the flowers because of all the rain. I don’t know what got into me, but the result was gigantic nasturtiums and Echinacea, and everything flowering at once then going to pot, instead of leisurely finding their own pace and offering a nice show all summer. That’s a mistake I won’t repeat although, on the plus side, they did provide much needed shade for some young perennials that aren’t yet established.

But worst of all was an invasion of gypsy moths. They showed up on my grapes and coneflowers, and I found evidence of them on some young trees and bushes. It took some detective work to figure out what they were because I thought they only ate trees. So I ended up going through a lengthy process of elimination for beneficial critters at the University of Georgia’s website. Once I felt certain I was dealing with gypsy moths, I studied the little monsters at the U S Forest Service’s site.

Then, I began my attack. First, I hunted down the caterpillars and knocked them into an evil brew of Murphy’s Soap, ammonia and cayenne. Then, I did targeted spraying of bacillus thuringiensis, shooting it onto the leaves of affected plants. Finally, I cut some plants down, putting their remains in black trash bags, into which I shot some more bacillus thuringiensis (for good measure) before placing into a black trashcan in the sun. And so far, so good, knock on wood.

There will be no fall garden for me, because I will be planting a catalpa and three pecans that have been waiting to go in the ground for a year now. I will also get a couple more crab apples and maybe some redbuds from [name edited to protect the innocent!!!!]. And I’m on the lookout for Suncrest peach trees and tiger lily bulbs, and will report back on what I find.

And, fool that I am, I will be building more gardens that will certainly end up just as chaotic as this year’s.