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Dear Diary, I can’t believe it has been three months since my last garden blog post. I really can’t believe it. After spending May watering every other day to keep the new plants alive in the dry, windy, 90+ degree heat, the annual Japanese beetle invasion, and the weeds, it’s time now to take a breath. Not that much of a breath, of course. Any vegetable gardener knows that the harvest mostly starts in August around here in Southern Wisconsin, and it’s far from done now. One thing we learned about not cleaning things up right away after harvesting is that some plants – cabbage being one – will give you post-harvest gifts. Little cabbages (the inspiration for the French term of endearment, “Mon petit chou”) arise from the place where the original cabbage was cut. They are tender and mild. Surprisingly, we got to harvest all of our sweet corn, despite nightly visits by various deer. At least one of the deer developed a taste for moss roses and pulled most of them out of the ground....

 

  “Look Mildred,” I said as I walked towards the yearling  deer who was munching on grass just outside the fence near our garden. Not a deer-proof fence. Just a fence. I don’t know for sure that her name was Mildred, but it seemed to fit. “You aren’t supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be in the wilderness someplace, not casing my vegetables.” Mildred tore up another mouthful of grass, began to chomp on it and seemed to ponder what I was saying. “It’s nothing personal. Or deer-onal.   I just don’t want you to eat my garden. Okay?” By this time, I was about a free throw away from her. I looked down for a moment and when I looked up, she was gone. I saw her bounding across the corn field to a well-known hangout across the street where she and a dozen or so of her kind congregate in the evenings. Probably waiting for us to go to bed so they can sneak over to our place again. To be honest, we have been pretty lucky, considering the number of deer in our area. ...

Comedian Demetri Martin says that swimming is a confusing sport, because sometimes we do it for fun, and sometimes we do it not to die. In a way, gardening is the same. All over the world people grow food in order to survive, while most gardeners I know do it as a hobby, albeit one with health advantages that come from the work involved and the food harvested. With food prices at historically high levels and with more concerns about food safety, the hobby part of gardening is taking a back seat to the pragmatic part. More gardens are popping up, and even people without yards are finding ways to plant some food in pots or with hydroponic set-ups in spare rooms. It is interesting to see, especially in community gardens where many people have plots, that some people start with enthusiasm but succumb to the reality of heat, bugs, and weeds, while others endure to harvest time. I think we fall half-way between those two extremes. We keep at it all summer and generally have a good harves...

The unusually warm weather we’ve had recently has been a real treat.  Farmers who couldn’t do the field work they wanted to do last fall because of the rain that turned too quickly into snow were able to play catch-up, and a lot of fields are ready to plant ahead of schedule, and some planting has already been done. Because we live in Wisconsin, most of us feel like there is a shoe left to drop, and that shoe will take the form of a blizzard, complete with a few feet of snow and below zero temperatures.  There is no meteorological basis for this expectation, just a feeling that something good is usually followed by something bad when it comes to weather. I think people in the Midwest see the world that way more than other folks.  On a perfect day in June, you’ll hear people say, “we’re gonna pay for this later!”  I’ve never heard people in San Diego make the same prediction. Well, I may pay for it later, but last weekend I got a start planting our garden.  Most ...

  I Sat With the Cat Not to get all Seussy or anything, but this morning I sat on the cement next to the garage with our cat, Barney. We’ve had a number of cats over the years but now Barney is the sole survivor, and he is showing his age. He is named Barney because he lives in our barn. Before he belonged to us, he belonged to someone else, which we know because he had been “fixed” (a poor choice of words) when we found him. Or when he found us. I was up in the barn loft on a winter night when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I asked, “Is there a cat up here?” It turns out there was, and he meowed very conversationally for several minutes. It was a month or more before he’d hang around with us. We started to feed him on some very cold winter nights, even though he’d been fending for himself for who knows how long. Our horse vet at the time gave the cat his shots and verified that he was neutered. Then we named him (the cat, not the vet) Barney. He has unhappily c...

So many seeds – so little space! We have a pretty big garden, considering that there are just two of us at home these days. We do give food away to our daughters and some other relations and neighbors, but the garden is pretty big. And yet, every year some seeds and plants get crowded, or I’ll look up and realize that we’re out of space with a couple of seed packets left over. It seems like an impossible space to fill when we start, and not big enough once the planting is nearly done. By the same token, we can, freeze, and dry food frantically during the harvest season. We don’t pretend to be self-sufficient, but the way things are going these days, it doesn’t hurt to be prepared for such a circumstance. Now, with days getting longer, we look at our mostly full shelves and freezer and wonder how in the world we’ll be able to eat it all. Of course, that is a wonderful problem to have. So, how do we go about turning stored food into tasty meals? One idea is soup. Lots of soup. ...

  There are so many quotes about gardens and gardening. Most of them have lots of flowery (pardon the pun) language about being one with nature and such. Here are a few quotes that resonated with me, and I thought you might like them too. “A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.” -- Doug Larson   “A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.” -- D. Elton Trueblood   “Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”   -- May Sarton   “Weeds are flowers too -- once you get to know them.”   -- A. A. Milne “Gardening is not a rational act.” -- Margaret Atwood “What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.” -- Charles Dudley Warner ...

  The seed displays have been up at Farm and Fleet stores for a few weeks now. Probably at Fleet Farm stores too. Somehow it’s wrong to have Christmas merchandise up in September, but gardening stuff showing up in January is just fine! Seeing the seed display is both funny, because of the snow and ice outside, and nice, because it confirms the optimism that spring will eventually come. By now I have my standby seed choices. In the green bean world, I like either the Slenderette or Tenderette variety. I can never remember, so I get a pack of each. I always buy things to start indoors, like peppers, tomatoes, melons, etc. The truth is that my luck as a seed starter hasn’t been very good, although last year I grew some very impressive umbrella-shaped mushrooms. In the past I’ve made the mistake of buying seeds for some really beautiful flowers without reading that, in some cases, they “will blossom in 320 days.” Since we live in Wisconsin and not Florida, 320 days to blossom is ...

  The Christmas blizzard of 2022 is revving up in Southern Wisconsin. The snow blows across the white landscape, drifting here and there over the rows and beds of the now resting garden. I’m listening to Christmas songs – mostly new takes on old songs. Take Six, Pentatonix, The Bird and the Bee, Home Free, Over the Rhine… groups that didn’t exist when I started gardening. I used to make mix cds for my extended family. I liked doing that. Now nobody has CD players anymore, and parts of the family aren’t really connected anymore. There is a sadness to the Christmas season that comes into focus as the years pass. In fact, many of the songs have a sad side to them. “Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow.” Not until my dad died did I understand the truth to those lyrics. Now our children have their own growing children. The traditions of Christmas are passed along to them and we feel blessed that we are a part of that passing along. I only hope they will tell...

Hello garden friends!  The link that follows is to my other blog. The post includes photographs from the past few years that I thought you might enjoy. https://peterwallace.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/something-different/  -Peter

  There are plenty of “back to the earth” bloggers out there who do amazing things with their gardens and livestock. As much as I admire them, at this point in my life I either don’t have the energy to do what they do, or I’d rather use that energy for other things. I suppose that if modern society as we know it collapsed, I’d be out there building a greenhouse out of milk jugs and Amazon boxes. That being said, there are a few things we’ve done that fall into the self-sufficiency basket. A few years ago, I started to tap our maple trees and made syrup. We don’t have the “right kind” of maple trees, but it still works, and the end product is really nice. This year I wanted to try making horseradish. We planted our horseradish oh, maybe 15 years ago. Up until last weekend we’d never done anything with it, but after watching a half-dozen YouTube videos it seemed like something easy enough to do. And, other than being a little time consuming, it wasn’t bad. We dug up some root...

  Frankly, I’m glad it’s almost over. There are no more apples, peppers, or tomatoes to deal with. Bumper crops are wonderful, but contending with them takes a lot of time and effort. Fortunately, we have some willing recipients of some of our produce which both makes us feel generous and reduces the canning/freezing/dehydrating workload. Despite several frosts there are still beet greens growing on a comically large, unpicked beet. The Swiss chard (a relative of beets) is also putting out new leaves from the base of the plants. The kale plants stand defiantly, daring us to cut them. Even the raspberries have a few more treats for us if we look carefully. Some spinach is growing from seeds that were left to grow after the plants bolted back in late June. We had a little pea plant growing near where the peas had been. It’s time to put the garden to bed, but we are reluctant to cut down a lot of the dead things because the birds seem to be feasting on flower seeds and such. It’...

Yep. The first light frost of the fall hovered over the garden last night. We covered up the things we cared most about saving for the weeks of warmer weather ahead, but the writing is on the wall. Fall is upon us, and then fall’s mean cousin, winter. We didn’t take any long trips this summer, and my retirement meant no work travel, so we had time to mostly keep up with things and even make some improvements. There’s still a lot of autumn work to do to prepare for spring, but it doesn’t feel as overwhelming as it does some years. It seems that the magic of gardening fades slowly from spring to fall, reaching a very low ebb as the short days and cold mornings descend. I wanted to share a few photographs from various times during the summer partly because I like looking at them. Here’s to a few more weeks of garden weather for us all!  

If I had a dollar for every Japanese beetle I picked off our trees and plants last summer, I’d have $6,000. Well, to be fair, that’s an estimate. I stopped counting after 237 on the first day, but the “season” went on for more than a month. So, 6,000 is a pretty fair estimate. This year there seem to be fewer, but they are still plentiful. Japanese beetles are an invasive species that originally came from… you guessed it… Japan, where they are kept at bey by natural predators which the USA doesn’t have. They are known to eat 300 different plant species, but in our yard they prefer our fruit trees, raspberries, grapes and – depending on their moods – green beans, potatoes, currents, and certain types of marigolds, into whose flowers they bury themselves. So, for an hour or so each day I patrol the yard and garden with my plastic convenience store soda cup half-filled with water. I either grab the little buggers or flick them into the cup. It may be futile, but I figure every one I g...

Some summers it seems that the rain never stops. Planting in the mud isn’t much fun, nor is pulling weeds from the wet soil. At least that’s true with whatever kind of soil we have at our house. For the past couple of weeks, it has seemed like rain was just around the corner, but frustratingly far around that corner. We watered some – usually just enough to keep things alive until the rain comes. Despite our meager watering efforts some new plants succumbed to the heat and dryness. Today it is raining. Maybe it will rain a lot. The last time we expected rain we were told to expect multiple inches but got only one-tenth. This time the rain total will be much higher, judging by what I see out the window. In Wisconsin we are fortunate to get a good amount of rain. I feel bad for the people in Southern California, among many places around the world, where drought has become a way of life. The biggest drought I can remember here was in 1988, I think, where it didn’t rain from Mothers’...

Sometimes I think it would be good if gardeners got garden-amnesia each spring. It would help us enjoy the enthusiasm we have with our clean slate of soil without throwing in last year’s memories of weeds and deer and Japanese beetles. Or maybe we do have a little amnesia already. Where I live the mosquitoes won’t be a problem for a few weeks. We do have little insidious flies that bite behind our ears and itch a lot. When the mosquitoes come out, we’re always a little surprised, even though it happens every year. Selective memory. There are about a dozen things I really wanted to get to last year but didn’t. Guess what? There are still the same dozen things. Since we’re in the rain-every-other-day season, those 12 things aren’t getting done yet, but I still hold out hope.  One of these days I’ll bring home some plants and really get things started, keeping in mind that it’s not recommended to plant until Memorial Day where I live. For now there are still lots of things to cl...

There it is. My April Fools' Post.  Well, it isn't from April 1st, but from some time in April some year in the pasts. I think it's a pretty good April Fool's Day joke to have snow on the ground two weeks after having a 70 degree day. Mother nature either has a great sense of humor or none at all. I earmark this day each year to start my plants indoors. As I look at the labels, some should have been planted a month ago, and some probably shouldn't be planted for another month, so I figure I've got it about right. My success with plants started indoors has been spotty. Some survive, and thrive. Some get too spindly and collapse under their own weight like a seven foot tall 8th grader playing basketball. We have new grow lights this year, so I hope that will help. One year I had six trays in one of those little greenhouses covered with heavy plastic. I put them outside on a sunny day which, unfortunately, was also a windy day. Many of those survived after I stuck ...

 ( This post is from a newspaper column I wrote in 2015) Last Friday we went to the Wisconsin Public Television Garden Expo in Madison.   It was a much needed journey into the realm of green things, and the possibility that perhaps winter will someday end. If you haven’t ever been there, I recommend it.   In addition to lots of exhibits by people who would like to help you and/or sell you something to make your home and garden nicer, there are tons of workshops on gardening, composting, landscaping, preserving foods, and all sorts of related topics. This year I went specifically to see a fellow talk about back yard maple syrup production.   He wasn’t a botanist or anything, but just a regular guy who has way more energy and initiative than I do, and who wanted to make maple syrup from two silver maple trees in his back yard.   My father-in-law, who passed away last June, had been making maple syrup for a number of years.   In fact, though he was very ...