West garden - ligularia flowers
I’ve become a real slug-a-bed lately. I didn’t get up until 6:15AM on Tuesday morning. But I was awake for about 1½ hours in the middle of the night. I had a lot of photos to edit before I could write my post, so I never finished until 8AM.
Then I went out and made a stab at cleaning the kitchen. I finally got out to the gardens at 9AM and had decided to whip the rose bed in shape. It hadn’t been touched since May.
I am leaving the violets to cover the soil but all the other stuff was taken out. I finished it around 11:30AM.
My helper friend arrived at 9:45AM because he got caught in the massive amount of road construction going on between his place and mine. I set him to work raking the chips back up into a mound around anywhere there had been mounds. He started with the Little Trees II.
Then he weeded the little bit that needed it.
Then he moved over to the Kousa dogwood. It didn’t have mulch needing raked, just a lot of weeding. Now that’s done, my son can bring around a lot of mulch for it.
The edible fruit on the Kousa is starting to ripen.
Next up was the bed for the Little Trees II grapes. That was the one that needed it the most.
Here are the Little Trees II. The Juneberry is small, but the first one I planted stayed small for a couple years before it really started to grow. The Kahinta plum isn’t looking so good, the leaves are curled. The chokeberry was the one that had a cluster of fruit this year.
The Pembina plum looked far better, nice leaves and much fuller. The 2nd chokeberry did well, even if it didn’t fruit. The poor Reliance peach has come back very well, from the disease it had in the spring. I must remember to treat it in November.
The western grape hasn’t done as well as the eastern one, probably due to getting less light. But they both have done well. I sure hope my helper and I can find the time to build their trellis this year.
He moved over to the original Little Trees and did the little sugar maple first before starting on the long bed. He only managed to get half of this bed done. I’m hoping I can finish it on Wednesday.
These are just a few of the original Little Trees. The North Star cherry is doing okay. But the Lapins cherry has almost no leaves. It’s still sort of alive, but barely. The little sugar maple has done well this year. But sadly, all the peaches are gone from the Contender peach tree. We went from hundreds of them to zero. Sigh… I suspect the squirrels. Next year, I will have my helper foliar spray it.
There are still a few apples in the Macintosh tree, but they aren’t in very good shape.
In the Small garden, most of the squashes, etc have succumbed to pests. The butternut is still holding out, and the cukes are still going, but most everything else has died or is in the process. This year I got a lot of these big green gourds. And as usual, I’ll have a lot of white pumpkins, but only 1 orange, if the squirrels don’t eat it.
My son got most of the wood stacked in the shed and now we wait for the wood guy to deliver more in mid September.
I helped my son get the bags of kindling into the cellar and dumped into one bag. At some point he will stuff the remaining bags into another one and take them up to the loft in the barn.
Bee on garlic chive flowers
On Wednesday my #2 intern is coming at 7AM and we will be doing things like finishing the wood chip bed, moving the garlic into the spare bedroom, and a myriad of other small jobs. It’s to be another gorgeous cool day, in the upper 60’s and partly sunny, more like fall than mid August.