One corner of the front garden: In focus in foreground, cilantro 'Salsa,' African blue basil 'Kasar,' white-flowering stock, and a perennial salvia. Pea plants and many other things behind them.
Today was just plain too cold and raw and rainy to plant the rest of the bean seeds as I’d hoped to do. It had been raining and gusting most of the day, and was pouring by the time I got home (and still gusting). The temperature has been hovering around 60 F all day, but with the wind gusts it feels much colder – more like April than late June. But the weather is supposed to change abruptly, in that way it does here in New England, on Thursday, with highs in the upper 80s F and lows that will be warmer than our recent highs. So I have two more days to get the rest of my warm-weather crops transplanted before actual warm weather finally returns. I am thinking I will plant the beans on Thursday or Friday, after the heat (and hopefully sunshine, which has been too rare here!) has finally warmed the bed back up. While cool, rainy days aren’t favored by most for doing gardening, they are favored by most transplants as being less shock-inducing, so it would be better to get the rest of the transplants in before it gets hot, ideally tomorrow or early Wednesday morning so that they’ll have a bit of rain and grey as they first settle in. I can’t believe it’s after solstice and I’m still talking about transplanting tomatoes, tomatillos, and chiles. But the ones I transplanted in late May/early June have barely grown at all in the past three to four weeks, and I’ve heard similar stories from many other local gardeners. (And yet the neighborhood nursery has already sold off their vegetable plants and a large portion of their herbs, a move I just can’t figure out. If ever there was a year to have crop plants stocked into late June, this is it! But they’ve been making many odd stocking decisions this year, after laying off their manager – who used to do most of the ordering – late last year.)
The box with the bird netting (and more of my autumn seeds) came this evening. I can only hope that the raw weather was as unpalatable to the squirrels today as it was to me. I’m planning to put it over the big pots tomorrow.
After having planted a fair amount of stuff in the back garden over the past couple weeks, I’ve been thinking about more perennial crops that I could add to that area. Alpine strawberries seem so happy back there that I’m considering trying to locate more varieties to add some, well, variety to the planting, as all the ones I have now are the same kind. I’m also thinking of adding ramps, which I grew in my old, moister shade garden, and wood nettle (ditto), and groundnut (which I grew in a sunnier, drier spot in my old garden, with so-so results, possibly just because it was close to the raspberry bramble). All three are native to the US, though I don’t think they are all are originally native to my exact locale. All three are available from Tripple Brook Farm, a nursery towards the other side of my small state, and one which I utilized to stock unusual plants (especially natives) in my old garden. They had high quality, good sized plants then (significantly larger than what most mail order companies send, and worth the generally higher cost), so I am hoping they still do today. I see on the edibles section of their website that they’re still selling wild rice – and I still wish I had appropriate conditions for it! Maybe someday… If anyone reading this has recommendations for other unusual perennial crops, especially ones for partial shade to mostly-shade in compost-enriched soil, I’d be quite interested to hear them. Care to share?
