Gabe's Birthday Present

I already have a hard time remembering that six months ago, Gabe's Garden was just a patch of neglected lawn. Happy birthday little dood! Soon you will be old enough to *really* play here.

To celebrate, I hung up the Japanese Children's Day banner that used to be mine. Children's Day, formerly Boy's Day, is actually in May, but since few people here in the US know that, I can get away with flying the carp whenever I like.



Gabe absolutely loves the banner. He waves his arms and shouts "da!" whenever he sees it. By "da", he means "gimmie".

I was a little worried that the banner might scare off the catbird who is nesting in one of the nearby shrubs, but I watched her hop right up underneath it.

That same catbird chased off a hummingbird that showed up to drink from these bee balms. The hummingbird was back a day later - hooray! That makes three hummingbird sightings in the yard, total.

But back to the bee balm. . . dang I love these flowers! So crazy, so red, so easy to grow. It's native to the Midwest, which is native enough to suit me. And it's in the mint family, which means it is safe if Gabe ends up eating some.

This is the last of the mustard which I had sown everywhere in this garden in a sort of permaculture experiment. I had planted them to stabilize and shade the soil while the slower-growing natives got established. I had thought that I would harvest it fast enough to keep it small, but I had my hands too full with Gabe to harvest it often. The explosively-growing mustard was crowding out my blueberry bushes, and otherwise looking like an unruly mess, so I weeded it out. This token plant remains so that we can harvest seed for next year; or, perhaps, for pickles. The plant has slumped over beneath the weight of its own seeds. A baby bunny has been spotted using the fallen plant as cover.


This is another plant that has stolen my heart: common cinquefoil, potentilla simplex. It came along for the ride with the creeping thyme that my neighbor gave me. I love its unruly runners hanging over the edge stones, and the lovely texture of its five-fingered leaves.

A few years ago a friend thought she had identified the hangout of local pot-smokers when she spied some hand-shaped leaves growing beside a lake. Now I know that it was some type of cinquefoil that we were looking at, rather than some stray hot-house plant sprouted from a seed dropped from a baggie. The taller varieties of cinquefoil look even more like marijuana leaves than this variety.


Common cinquefoil is in the rose family, and judging by its leaves and runners and flowers, it must be closely related to strawberries. (Here are some strawberries for comparison.)

The black-eyed susans, Rudbeckia hirta, are still blooming, and in front of that, I have added spiderwart, Tradescantia virginiana. Surprise! Despite the arachnid-and-blemished-skin name, spiderwart is rumored to be edible.


This side of the garden is still looking a bit bare. The lavender has bloomed, and the rosemary is thriving. However the native grass called prairie dropseed, Sporobolus heterolepis, has been looking a bit cooked, and the bunnies keep munching on the native violets
.


The bunnies also seem to like the nasturtiums, Tropaeolum majus. Nasturtiums are non-natives that make a cheerful, colorful filler while building a native plant bed, because (around here, at any rate) they seem to be reliably killed off by the cold winters. But seeds can be collected and stored indoors for the following year if the bunnies don't eat them.

Nasturtiums are edible, and have a delicious radishy flavor that would go nicely with milder salad greens.

That's more of the prairie dropseed there by the nasturtium. It's a short clumping grass with very narrow leaves, making a wonderful texture to contrast with wide leaves and big flowers.


Here is a gratuitous shot of the bowling ball, along with cinquefoil, creeping thyme, bee balm, and a clump of native grass. (Alas, I don't remember what type of grass it is!)


Two clumps of that native grass flank Gabe's future fort. Some day, those serviceberry twigs will be a cage of thick trunks, enclosing the perfect shady spot for a little boy to plan his next big adventure.

A Way to Support Small Farmers Worldwide: Kiva

Small businesses worldwide can benefit greatly from small loans. That's great! . . .except that for ordinary folk, there is no way to make a small loan to someone who needs it. Until now!

This California-based company, Kiva, allows ordinary folks to make loans as small as $25 to small-business owners around the world. The loans are interest-free, and in the (likely) event that you get your money back, you can choose to re-invest it. This sounds like a great alternative to making donations.

The even offer gift cirtificates!

Viva La Resistance!

I've finished the deed of removing 22 of my blighted tomato plants. I say 22 and not 24 because I had planted two Cosmonaut Volkov Red tomato plants this year and much to my surprise they showed very little damage from the late blight. I noticed while removing the plants that the CVR plants had dead branches from their neighbors draping their healthy branches. There were some branches I had to remove near the base, but there were no stem cankers and overall the plants look good. Their neighbors were showing cankers all the way at the top of their seven foot long vines.

I say resistance and not immune because the plants clearly were showing some signs of minor damage. It looked more light minor early blight rather than late blight. I will keep a close watch on them, but for the moment I have two tomato plants still! Pictures to follow tomorrow as it was too late to take any pictures when I discovered this.

The penalty for finishing my task in the twilight hours is about two dozen mosquito bites on my back. They are straining even my ability to ignore itching;)

Pestilence and Plague

I don't have Chris' eye for spotting plant illness, but even I can see the swaths of yellow-and-brown death galloping up the tomato plants.

I have never had any particular interest in my Irish roots, but here in our yard is the reason for my ancestry. I can't look at this patch of plants without thinking of entire crops wiped out. I'm trying not to imagine what it would be like to starve to death.

There are farmers out there, right now, who are in dire straights because of this. Please visit your local farmers' market and support your local farmers!

This may be the last pretty shot of this year's plants.

Tomatoes Devestated Early by Late Blight - Phytophthora infestans

Tomorrow morning I will have to perform the most difficult act I've ever been required to do: I will have to go out and pull up all twenty four of my tomato plants, place them in plastic bags, and set them on the curb for pickup. Yesterday I showed my friend Jen Gordy the tomatoes, which were looking very good - there was maybe an odd spot on a leaf here or there. Today, they are dead up to three feet from the base of the plant on the most vulnerable plants, and clearly infected on even the most resistant varieties. I don't think I can undersell just how quickly this hit. I reported the event here. I hope it helps them track the problem.


I had read about the problem back on the 4th of July, so I wasn't caught completely off guard. I won't deny that I felt a certain sense of imperiousness since I didn't understand that the spores can travel for miles on the wind. I always thought of it as a "might blow a few doors down the way", not across town.

These leaves literally looked healthy yesterday. To see the change in just twenty-four hours unnerves me. There is a part of my monkey brain that wants to let my plants stay up out of some slim hope that some of the fruits might mature. But I know that this is a lost cause; the plants will be dead within a week, and leaving them up will only give the late blight contagion a stronger chance of taking up permanent residence in my garden.

I just can't believe how sick the plants are.

These tell-tale cankers are present on most of the plant stems.

I'll take further stock tomorrow and may try and save some of the bunches of tomatoes that are close to blushing, but I'm not even sure I want to try at this point. I can only hope some local farmer has avoided this so I can buy some tomatoes at a farmers market.

One of the varieties of potato that I'm growing doesn't seem to be suffering from the late blight yet, but all the others are. I will be pulling them tomorrow as well.

I don't know when I'll get a chance to grow potatoes or tomatoes again. It may take several seasons for the garden to become clear of this blight. The amount of work I've put into these over the past months is great, and to lose them all is a horrible blow.

I'm thankful that my family doesn't depend on the fruits of the garden to survive. I now have a small inkling of the despair the tenant farms of Ireland must have felt as they watched their crops wither overnight.

More Indian Pipe Photos

Lyme-Free for Now

Just a quick note that my Lyme test came back negative, which is good news indeed. It let me start tackling the issues that were causing the stress which is the real source of my current health woes. The year of the slug continues in the garden, though I'm beginning to think it may be the year of the oriental beetle instead. More on that to come.