A Good Soaking

Generally speaking, it's been a long, dry summer so far. No gentle rains to wash the grit and grime away from the tired looking clover by the road. Without rain, everything outside tends to take on a brown sheen as the wind coats whatever it touches with a fine red dust found only on PEI. The humidity adds Nature's own cement and keeps the wind's painting job nicely stuck to objects. It looks like everything is sweating brown jewels. While the humidity is high, the ground is dry. The plants listlessly sit in the garden remembering damper days. Even my scarecrow looks thirsty.

Well that all changed yesterday. The remnants of some tropical storm edged by and generously dumped a load of liquid refreshment all over us. All afternoon the wind was restless. It alternated between obsessively chasing itself over the fields and through trees then disappearing completely letting the blazing sun broil the earth. I worked in the vegetable garden, pulling weeds, and progressively getting soggier as sweat tried to make up for the lack of rain. Where The Three Sisters are growing I carefully wove the sweet peas around the cornstalks hoping the gentle reminder would encourage them to latch on to the stalks and not each other. The clouds began to make a major appearance, throwing increasing grey patches of shadow to the ground; they ran through my garden and down the road. I scanned the sky for signs of rain. This has happened before; the sky would get all moody and touchy, have a fine old sulk, shed a couple fat drops,then get all sunny and happy again. Basically, a menopausal sky. I top dressed the three sisters with a combo of rabbit manure and compost. Hot and tired, I figured I'd wait till that night to water it in if it didn't rain.

Around five, the sky started grumbling. Rolling complaints and flashes of temper off to the west or southwest, may-be. I think. I am extremely directionally challenged and that's my best guess. If you are giving me driving directions, don't say "south" or "west", it's got to be "right" or "left" or I am going to get lost. Anyhow, the weather was off to my right when I was facing the house from the garden. As I watched the movement of the dark clouds, I sighed because it looked like it was going to pass us by. That's a funny thing about this island. You can watch the rain pour in the distance yet never get a drop yourself.

I had to go pick up my daughter from work. As I drove away, I left the dark brooding clouds behind and entered the sunny zone. Sigh. I so prefer rain to watering. Watering does the job and all, but it's a pain and call me crazy but the plants seem to prefer their water from the sky, not a hose. While waiting for my daughter, I called home and was told there were buckets of rain coming down. I drove right into the downpour going back home. Lightening flashed, thunder followed grumbling about the lightening showing off. Daughter ran inside squeaking only the way middle teens can - kind of a cross between a startled mouse and stepping on a cat's tail. I stood outside and enjoyed. It was cool, it was refreshing and I didn't have to fiddle with the hot/cold knobs to get the temperature just right. The garden shivered and trembled with joy. I swear if the corn could, they would have reached down with their long slender leaves, picked up their roots and danced. Welcome rain, soak in the ground and stay a while.

Tomatoes and Basil

My poor, neglected gardens! With all my efforts being put on the chicken coop, my gardens have pretty much been left to fend for themselves. Other than occasionally throwing the hose in there to water, I've done very little in them. Believe it or not, the picture above is my tomato and basil garden. You don't want to see what the main garden looks like. At this point, I might as well call it my weed patch with the odd plant in it.

So yesterday, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work trying to at least find the plants. As always, I made some lovely and somewhat startling discoveries. I thought the weeding would take forever since it was so overgrown but the weeds being so big, it was a piece of cake. They pulled out easily, roots and all. The bigger the weed, the easier it is to yank out of the ground.

After I planted the tomatoes and basil, I noticed something was just having a field day eating them. I kept intending to mix up some neem oil, water and castile soap to spray on them but never got around to it. At one point, I thought for sure I was going to lose at least half of my 12 tomato plants. But lo and behold, all the plants fought back and held their ground; not one died. So imagine that, the gardens don't need constant supervision; they can grow all by themselves with very little intervention from me. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. I take a lot of joy in my gardens and the fact they don't really need me is a hit to my self-importance. Ah well, pride before a fall and all that. Just a well deserved taking down a peg by Nature, not a bad thing. In fact, it really is a gift. It's always nice to learn more about where I belong in the great scheme of things.

I also discovered a whole bunch of tomato plants where I am absolutely sure I didn't plant any. In fact, I have about 20 tomato plants in there and I started with 12. I also noticed tomato plants in the main garden as well and I know I didn't plant any in there. They must have grown from seed in the compost. How curious! I tend to hot compost which supposedly kills any seeds. May-be some of the early compost I put on didn't have a chance really to heat up fully. I've put on my own compost in past years but this year it was almost solely mine (thank you, bunnies) so may-be that's why the tomato plants sprung up, just the overwhelming number made the survival of a few seeds a possibility. Another possibility is the type of tomato plant I had last year. I did have a variety, one being heritage tomatoes. I'm looking forward to see if that is what is springing up all over the place this year. I'm kind of thinking it might be the heritage tomatoes because they probably germinate better, not being hybrids and all twisted by the hand of man. I do have another theory, and I must admit, this is my favorite: Because I didn't weed for nearly a month, tiny tomato plants that would have been yanked up for being weeds actually had a chance to get a foothold in the garden. But if that was the case, you would think I'd have other plants popping on up, too. Radishes, beans, peas, corn... but no, just tomato plants.

After pulling the weeds, I had to do something about getting the sprawling plants off the ground a bit. Tomato cages don't work at all for me. Ultimately, the plants take exception to being confined and launch an all out grow assault all over the cages. The cages bend and buckle, bowing in defeat and my maters end up on the ground, rotting out. So this year I decided to use what was at hand, downed winter branches and baling twine from the hay bales. I made little teepees over each plant and loosely tied the dragging branches up. It sure looks jury rigged, but if it works, I'll probably do it again. So here's a picture of the garden after I was finished with it.

Look, you can actually see ground! The plants aren't spewing leaves and branches in all directions. But you know, I kind of like the first picture better, even if it wasn't as functional, the garden looked happier. I'll work on that for next year and use important lessons learned this year: Give the garden a chance to fight its own battles. Stop using the "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" approach to weeding, weed less and let them get bigger. Have more heritage plants. A garden should be happy, not just a happy place.