October Tasks

October Tasks

Posted by Heather Harris

Fall is here and it's gray, misty, and wonderful. I always feel claustrophobic by the end of summer, as if the leaf laden branches, hunching sunflowers, and rotting tomatoes are sitting on top of my chest squeezing the last drops of life out of my overheated, weary body. But once the leaves start to fall and the dead stalks fall over, I am re-energized and can finally start the millions of things recommended by all of the "What To Do in Your Garden in October" lists, which is pretty much everything. The tasks are incredibly daunting and could require a second mortgage on your home as well as hiring a full time gardener. A sampling: Plant a winter vegetable garden, mulch everything, plant all of those perennials you've been drooling over, plant all spring bulbs, reseed your lawn, establish new flower beds, feed soil with bone meal, rake and collect leaves, harvest and dry seeds for next year, clean up the vegetable garden, plant trees, shrubs, and anything except a watermelon. I decided to go with cheap child labor and just shoot for a few of the tasks that absolutely can only be done in the fall.

1. Reseed the Lawn I hear that this can be done in the spring, but I have yet to see that work. To be truthful, this being the first time that I've reseeded the lawn in fall, I have no idea if that works either, but seeing as spring planting has been a disaster, it's either fall or gravel, Those are all the options I have left. It seems that if preschool children can grow grass in Dixie cups in dimly lit church basements, that I should be able to get it to grow in my yard. Not so. We have tried that fluffy green grass stuff that the pros use and factory engineered seeds guaranteed to sprout overnight, all to no avail. Our problem is we always seem to spread the seed right before the one hot and dry week we get in the spring, and I am really bad with watering routines. Or any routine. This time I bought the cheapest grass seed at Bi-Mart that I could find and employed my preschooler, Luke, to shake it out in haphazard fashion all over the yard. I'm very hopeful...

2. Bed Clean Up As with most gardening tasks, I started with bulb planting in mind, but took a detour down to the vegetable garden (looking for my trowel, which I blamed the kids for losing, but it is just as likely that I left it somewhere) and before I knew it I was hip deep in a pile of weeds, my fingers were caked in dirt (I couldn't find my gloves either) and the kids had  rakes and hoes doing God knows what to the areas I had just weeded. Actually, Lily turned out to be quite a raker, as long as she could talk nonstop the whole three hours that she was helping me. On my weeding frenzy, however, I unearthed the crown jewel of my vegetable garden that I have been searching for all summer long: a CUCAMELON! Remember back in seed catalog season when I excitedly expounded on the darling little cucamelons that would be wending their way through my garden, spreading their charm everywhere they went? Well, let's just say that it's October and I have a total of one cucamelon. But, oh it was soooo good! I really shouldn't have tasted it because now I am under the delusion that I should try it again next year.

3. Bulb Planting I did eventually run out of weeds, at least in the places I chose to look, and returned to the intended task of planting bulbs. I always forget how long bulb planting takes. The netted bag even has "Easy, Affordable Fun" written right on the front. It's easy, but I wouldn't say it's fun. I had about 100 bulbs. That means you dig one hundred little holes. Ponder that for a moment. That is, unless you buy a lot of bulbs and you can just dig one huge trench and dump them in, but then I would have to question the "Affordable" part. By this time my little helpers were totally bored by the yard projects and were contentedly bickering on a fence just close enough for me to hear, but not close enough to be of much use should I need, say, a another bag of bone meal from the garage. This is, in my experience,
 the end to every day of gardening with children. I wonder how much a gardener charges?

I Just Love "Scorch Wither and Putrefy!"

I Just Love "Scorch Wither and Putrefy!"

Posted by Heather Harris

Disclaimer: This blog post made a lot more sense when I wrote it two weeks ago. Then I lost half of my writing because basically I'm a moron, and due to major mental trauma from the most hellacious start to a school year ever (and I'm an expert on this topic) I gave up all hope of having any energy to rewrite it until now. So for a minute, pretend you're back on that 90 degree day in September and it hasn't rained in weeks. Forest fires are raging in the weirdest of places.Okay, are you there? Proceed.

Two weeks ago...

 Crispy brown leaves are sailing around my yard, riding the thermal heat waves like sun addled buzzards. What is normally termed "fall" around here should this year be referred to as "scorch, wither and putrefy". My birches, usually a golden yellow by the end of September with heavy raindrops slowly melting off their tips are just  brittle and brown. If I didn't know better I would assume they were dead. Even the cursed buttercups are crunchy and shriveled.  I'm sure we've had  hot and dry summers before, but this is a little crazy, and it has led to some very peculiar outcomes in my vegetable garden that I would never have predicted and in fact prove most everything I've written in this blog thus far false. I will now take this opportunity, on a 90 degree day in late September, to   obliterate any helpful advice I have offered to you in the past. Also, I will prove that any advice I put forth that did hold true, is precisely the advice that I myself willfully ignored, to my own detriment.

1. There is such a thing as too many tomatoes.  I know that I have gone on at great length about my unreasonable love for buckets of ripe tomatoes and openly scoffed at anyone that said they had grown too many. I simply didn't believe it. At least not in a garden in the Pacific Northwest. Impossible! Well, I have in fact produced too many tomatoes. What I failed to realize was that people were not simply stating that they had grown too many tomatoes to use, they were saying that they had grown too many tomatoes to process. Picking, boiling, peeling, chopping, straining, canning and freezing tomatoes is very messy, space hogging, and time consuming; not to mention an incredible attractant for fruit flies. I have lugged in a huge wire basket brimming with tomatoes every other day for the past two months. I have fire roasted them, canned them, crockpotted them, turned them into salsa, soup, pasta sauce, and in a final act of desperation,  just crammed them into Ziploc bags and frozen them, and still there are more! I know that I will probably run out of tomatoes before next summer, but I HAVE TOO MANY TOMATOES. (I'm not complaining though. I'm just in the seven year itch of my love affair.)

2. Slugs are not a threat. When we saw our house for the first time and I was literally twirling around the yard in delirium, exclaiming,"This is it!" there were three members of God's great creation that were in obvious abundance, even to my romantic sensibilities: blackberries, buttercups, and slugs. I am not exaggerating that there were at least three ugly, black, buffalo-backed European slugs per square foot. You couldn't twirl around the yard without stepping on them. At the start of summer I went to Coastal and bought a $15 box of slug bait, resigning myself to the fact that I was going to spend more money on slug extermination this season than supplying a 400 head wedding with champagne, for surely that box of bait was going to last three days. I dumped it out around the base of my 15 tomato plants and I haven't seen a slug since. Not one tomato has suffered a slimy, oozing hole. Unreal.

3. Chickens are Idiots. Of course I new this, but for some reason we gave it another go. The first casualty, Hazel, just sat down in the middle of the yard one day and died. No clue what happened. The second, Ginger, was drug out of the coop late at night by a far superior intellect, namely that of a raccoon, and despite my wild, "Get the hell out of here you evil raccoon" dance, she was left maimed at the base of our maple while the raccoon slowly, and mockingly, retreated up the tree. We nursed her for a few days, but she died as well. Checkers, chicken number three, decided that the fig tree was a pretty safe place to roost for the night, much safer than her securely locked coop, and was apparently taken by a coyote. At least that is the conclusion of my forensic team (Lily and Luke) who found her feathers down by the creek and some coyote scat on the other side. Yes, they can tell you what coyote scat looks like. For those keeping track at home, that is chickens 8, eggs 0 for the Harris household. What is wrong with us?

Well, lessons have been learned, ignored, and proved wrong this year, but overall the vegetable garden project has been a great success. My neighbor's pine tree that blocked our view of his pond resort even fell down (I swear I had nothing to do with it) so now I can look out over his yard from my garden bistro table as well. Now it is on to the next project, and you all know how interesting things get over here when the rains start. Will it be a retaining wall, hugelkultur, or a massive gravel dump? Hmmm...