Beating the Heat

This has been a tough two weeks for people, animals and plants alike as temperatures soared into the 100's daily and didn't cool off very well at night.  Thankfully, the weather has shifted. A brief thunderstorm on Monday sent much-needed healing rain down in buckets and although my friends with rain gauges assured me it was about 2/10ths of an inch, it felt like a gallon for the thirsty fields.

With so much space here, we cannot water everything. Add to that a water well which we are responsible for if anything breaks or runs dry and even though it is new, we are reluctant to water overmuch.  I've got the irrigation going in the vegetable garden each night and we water the fruit trees by hand, running a very long hose from the house out to the orchard and giving them a good drink. The Japanese beetles defoliated many of the trees, especially the apple trees, which were struggling anyway. I have a feeling we are going to end up losing a bunch of the apple trees anyway. They left the pears alone and mostly left the peaches alone, but they also are almost every leaf off of the apricots - and they were doing the best!  We're babying all the trees damaged by the beetles until they recover enough to send out new leaves.

We were reminiscing the other night about all the ways we beat the heat during our childhoods. Neither my husband nor I had air conditioning in our homes or schools when we were kids.  Today people act like it's child abuse to let kids go to school without perfect AC in the school room. I can remember being forced to wear my heavy plaid uniform skirt and waiting for the nuns to give us special permission to remove our navy blue blazers. When you got up from the heavily varnished seat at your desk, your thighs would stick to the varnish and sting like crazy, as if peeling off a gigantic band aid.

We had a finished basement on our house and that's where we hung out most of the summer. It was about 65 degrees year-round down there and we had a small black and white television set, an old couch and chair from the living room, our fish tank, and our model horses, dolls, games and crafts. Hey, what more did you need?

But there were two places that my sister Ann and I would head to when heat waves like this one struck when we were kids. We'd get our bikes out of the garage and pedal up to Grand Value. Grand Value was an old five and dime store. It was in the old Bohack's supermarket building in Floral Park, on Covert Avenue.  The only stores today that come close to it are Dollar General and similar dollar stores.  It was always about two degrees below zero in that store with absolutely frigid air conditioning.  We'd go to the toy aisle and I would look for $1 flocked model horses to add to my collection or other plastic horses.  Ann would buy yarn or  patterns or fabric and we would amuse yourselves by making badly-knitted (okay, that was me; Ann's always came out perfectly) shawls or bedspreads for our Barbie dolls, or Ann would take out Aunt Lucille's old toy sewing machine, a circa 1920's singer the size of a shoe box that still made a straight chain stitch, and sew a Barbie doll dress for me.  That was my favorite - my sister still sews beautifully, but I don't have much talent in that area.

We'd spend so much time wandering the aisles of Grand Value that Mr Reilly, the owner, would follow us. Or he'd send the mean lady with the bright dyed orange hair and the heavy Italian accent to follow us.  She would scowl at us and lurk behind the rack of buttons or sewing thread. One time she stopped us on the way out and accused us of shoplifting.  I didn't understand it.  We were the most honest kids and we'd never do that. We were just trying to beat the heat! But now as a business owner, I can imagine how suspicious it would look to me if two kids kept lurking around different racks and didn't spend much money.

The other place I loved to go was the Floral Park Public Library. It was very far away for a kid to bike to, but I'd do it anyway.  The library was in the old post office building, across from the Long Island Rail Road. It was a squat 1960's building with industrial beige carpet and sticky beige chairs and big ugly metal racks. But what was on those racks was gold, pure gold. Books. Books and more books.  I'd go to the 636 (Dewey decimal system) section on horses and sit and stare for hours at pictures of horses and dream of the days when I could ride. Or I'd sit and read Nancy Drew and other mystery novels.

And the air conditioning....

Ugly or not, that palace of books had frigid air condioning.

Happy summer!   Hopefully now that the heat wave has broken and tomorrow temps will be back into the 80's, I can get back into the garden.  Below is our first harvest - cucumbers, zucchini, strawberries and lots of yummy mint for iced mint water to beat the heat.

Enjoy.....

Perennial Combinations: The Sunny Border

  
The pictures today show off the sunny border in the perennial garden I installed in the front lawn. This is a bed that gets full, blazing, hot sun all day long. It's also hard to water, so the plants there have to be tough. 

The border is edged with three colors of Echinacea - purpurea (purple), White Swan (white), and a yellow. I bought a garden collection of seeds from Park Seed in 2008, started them under lights, planted them outside and crossed my fingers.  Today, not only did they thrive, but their offspring are crowded under the shadows of the white snowball Viburnum near the center.

I added three colors of daylilies which you can see peeking from behind the Echinacea.  There's Stella D'Oro, the small, compact daylily with piercing yellow flowers. I added the one most people call the wild type, the orange flowers. And I have one that has no name but produces the most beautiful orange-peach colored flowers. It's sort of the color of the orange and vanilla ice cream mix you can get at the store, if you know what I mean.  Yellow daisies and Gaillardia, started from seeds collected from the sunny driveway perennial garden, finish off the sunny border.

In the center of the bed is my white snowball Viburnum, a red tree peony which is nothing more than a twig right now, and a Festiva Maxima peony and a dwarf pink.  There are also three crepe myrtles, light lavender and red.


Some garden designers suggest planting cool tones in the hot sun, but I love the hot, hot look of bright yellows and oranges with a dash of purple.  Why purple? It's one of my favorite colors. It also came with the seeds....

Happy Hot Friday! Temperatures are expected to reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit here again...yuck.  Very unseasonable.  Here's to watering and mulch!

Garlic Harvest Time

The first of the garlic harvest is in and my front porch smells like an Italian restaurant. This is the first time I have ever grown garlic. No one that I knew back on Long Island grew it, maybe because none of our root vegetables ever came out nice. With the raised beds I do very well with root vegetables so I gratefully accepted a bag of cloves to plant last fall from my neighbor Patty.  She told me the folklore of planting garlic: Plant on Columbus Day (around October 12) and harvest on July 4th.  Well it is about two weeks early for the harvest, but the tops are brown and falling over which is a sure sign it's time to pull them up. I had to use my hoe to dig into the ground a bit to get the bulbs out hidden under the earth. Some of the tops had already rotted off. After pulling them out, I put them in a big bucket, then sat on the porch and cut off the tops and bottoms. I used a stiff bristle scrub brush to scrub off the outer layer of skin on the bulbs, which also gets the dirt off.  Then I put them in my trusty roasting pan and left the whole batch out on the front porch to dry. With today's high temperatures expected near 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it should help them dry out. I have mesh bags in the garage saved from the fall tulip and daffodil planting and I will store the batch of cloves to plant this fall in one of the bags.

Garlic has such a long history and so many myths around it that I decided just for fun to look up some of the folklore.  All of the information below comes from a website called American Folklore.

Did you know that...

• The ancient Egyptians swore oaths on garlic much the same way we swear an oath on the Bible. A group in lower Egypt actually worshiped garlic bulbs.
• Egyptian slaves were given a clove of garlic a day to eat. The belief was that it would ward off illness, which isn't so far fetched after all. Today, a lot of research shows that garlic lowers blood cholesterol and  enhances immune system health.
• When King Tut's tomb was excavated, archeologists found cloves of garlic scattered around the tomb.
• The Prophet Mohammed equates garlic with Satan. When the Devil was cast out of Eden,  his left foot touched the earth, and garlic sprang up, while onion emerged from the footprint of his right foot.
• Garlic has always been thought to keep evil spirits away, and in many cultures too. Koreans ate garlic before going through mountain passes to keep both tigers and evil spirits away. The Greeks placed garlic at the crossroads for Hecate, who would also keep evil spirits away.  Greek midwives hung cloves of garlic in birthing chambers to keep evil spirits away from mother and child.  And of course, garlic wards off vampires.

So I am safe. With that big tray of garlic on the front porch, an evil spirit dares not cross my threshold today!

Now what to do with all this garlic? See my cooking and recipe blog, Recipes from the Garden, for my 20 minute shrimp scampi recipe - plenty of fresh garlic, fast, and under $2 per serving!

The Echinacea and Its Offspring

It's about 110 degrees in the shade (literally) today but still I keep finding more Echinacea babies. You'd think that with this intense heat the self-sown seedlings would shrivel up and die, but no - they're going strong.   I'm not sure if it's purple coneflower, yellow or the White Swan.  I found clusters of seedlings under the snowball bush, under the crepe myrtle, and daring the blazing sunlight. They're in a garden bed that gets baking hot sun all day long, no water unless nature provides it, and lousy soil.



Then you have the Echinacea I tenderly nurtured from seeds under the grow lights in the basement. Ten weeks of pampering. Transplanted it in the morning, watered, mulched it, and planted it among the other perennials so it would have some shade. I practically sang this thing a lullaby. And what do I find today? Bare dirt.

Moral of the story: the more I neglect my plants and just follow the leader - the plants - taking my cue from what grows, the better my garden will be!

Oh Oink!

My husband is at the neighbor's farm today helping them butcher a pig. Tomorrow is their pig roast and this year they decided to buy hog on the hoof and do it themselves. I'm hiding at home working. True love is allowing your carnivorous spouse to do what he thinks is right and help a neighbor when you are aiming for vegetarian!

It is not the right time of year to butcher hogs, but butchering is going on today. Normally, pigs are butchered in the fall, when the high heat needed to scald the carcass won't be as bothersome and the meat can be smoked.  But this weekend my neighbors are hosting a big party and wanted fresh meat to barbecue.

They named the pig Wilburjene. 

My neighbor Annette posted this fact to Facebook. I said something like, "You named it???" and she said, "Yes, big mistake."

Even though I ran around the house last night chanting "free the pig" (more to annoy my spouse than anything else), I can't be a hypocrite. My grandfather, great grandfather, and probably many generations back were all butchers in Germany. Slaughtering pigs and other creatures was how they made their living.  And my motto is that I never, ever, impose my own dietary choices on anyone else - not family or friends who visit. If you came to visit and I knew you liked meat, I'd serve you meat.  I never dictate. I share what I think - but I will never try to force you or anyone in my family to eat what I eat!

The pig couldn't go free at any rate. To do would be an enormous and costly mistake with horrific consequences.  Wild pigs root in the ground and dig up farmland, causing damage. In Georgia and Florida, pigs that escaped from farms have done terrible damage to the land. They are also dangerous. One of our farming neighbors was severely mauled by a sow and had to have many surgeries to reattach digits and limbs the sow took off. No, they are not cuddly beasts, and they cannot go free.  A long time ago perhaps nature had predators for them around here but now man is their only predator, at least here.

Our neighbors at Shady Acres Farm, Patty & Ron, had the special scrapers needed to clean the pig after scalding, so we ran over there the other night with Phil and picked them up. They were so generous in lending out their equipment to a total stranger.  Thank you both!

Tomorrow is the big pig roast day on the farm.  To me it is like the old New York City block parties or festival days we had, like the Feast of St Vincent de Paul in Elmont. Our neighbors open up their entire farm and several hundred people attend.  They will roast and barbecue Wilburjene tomorrow.  Everyone brings something to drink and side dishes. The fellas will start a baseball game in the field while cows graze nearby.  Many of the families bring instruments such as guitars and keyboards and they set up a makeshift stage on the front porch of the old farmhouse, and families take turns singing songs and being the entertainment.  I like to just sit and visit with people but John likes to play baseball with the kids.  It's a great day and really does remind me of a good old fashioned New York block party. 

I'll be the one reclining on my lawn chair, nibbling salads and catching up with the gardening neighbors. Wilburjene is safe from me.

But poor Wilburjene. I wish she could have been part of the fun.  I suppose she is, in a sick sort of way.

Turtles, Turtles Everywhere

What is it with the turtles around here? We've had turtles everywhere! It started with Pierre's encounter with the turtle in the flower garden. A few evenings later, John was outside checking on the fruit trees in the orchard with Shadow.  He came to the window and shouted for me to come out and see something.  I found Shadow crouched under a peach tree staring at something.  Under the tree, a box turtle was digging a mighty hole. We ran back inside (making sure Shadow came with us so she wouldn't harass the turtle) and looked it up online. She was laying her eggs! 



We've got the area marked off now since the university website we used for reference says they can take many months to hatch. I'm so excited. I want to see baby turtles!

Then this morning, Shadow and I were walking along the country road and saw a car swerving to avoid something in the road. Sure enough, it was another large painted box turtle zipping across the pavement crossing from the cattle field to the woods on the other side. I picked him up to get him out of the road, doing my good deed for the day. I received an evil hiss before Mr. Turtle ducked into his shell. So much for "thank you."

I have a book of American Indian symbolism of animals.  Throughout my life, whenever an animal appears frequently like this, I always look up the symbol and find it uncanny in its accuracy about what is going on in my life.  Once, owls suddenly started appearing - and we rarely saw owls on Long Island, where I was living at the time.  On vacation in the Dakotas, we hiked right into a herd of buffalo, and one kicked what I thought was a clod of mud at me. Instead it turned out to be a gorgeous crystal that was almost perfectly pyramid shaped. It seemed like a magical moment so I cleaned up the crystal and have kept it in my office ever since.

Here's what my book says the turtle represents: "Awakening to opportunities."

And the turtle's warning? Not to take life at too fast a pace. It asks, "Are you taking time for yourself?"

Given my inclinations towards workaholism, I say, "Thank you, Mr. Turtle, for your message!"

June in the Vegetable Garden

I spent the morning tending my vegetable garden. Nothing lifts my mood more than gardening, and this morning as I weeded among the tomatoes, the scent of rich earth and pungent tomato leaves brought my back to my grandma's side, circa 1970-something, as she tended her tomato plants in the backyard garden in Bellerose. I could even hear in my mind the rustle of her navy blue house dress and see her feet in their tan orthopedic shoes as she bent, sunlight glinting off her cat's eye glasses, to tie up her tomatoes with rags.  Many things trigger memories of my grandmother; gardening and cooking, mostly.  It's nice to imagine her at my side when I'm doing these homey chores.

I weeded each bed and was pleased at most of the vegetables' progress. The sweet potatoes made me smile - those sickly looking twigs are now robust vines. I took some closeup pictures because I could hardly believe that these were the same spindly-looking things I got in the mail!  They are really taking off with lots of robust new growth. The tomatoes look wonderful too, with lots of flowers, and so does the zucchini. One of my favorite summer dishes of all time is simply sauteed zucchini with onions in a little butter or olive oil. I've been known to eat that for days on end in the summer.  And I have a great zucchini bread recipe, which I'll post to my sister blog, Recipes from the Garden.  Zucchini bread is hard to get just right - some recipes, the bread comes out like a brick, while others it's so moist it doesn't bake. Not my recipe.  Stay tuned....

The corn perked up after getting knocked down by the rain, and the cantaloupes and watermelons are really going strong.  I have one volunteer watermelon, a baby Moon & Stars, that is growing next to the seeds I planted this year, a giant variety named Congo. Does anyone know if they cross pollinate? I don't want horrible watermelon and I could pull up Moon & Stars.....someone let me know if you think they'll cross pollinate!

Plenty of cucumbers and my butternut squash looks fine. I did have one plant so wilted it was a bit odd, so I pulled it out in case it's got a virus or something.  Carrots are doing fine - I pulled one out by accident and was surprised at how far along they are. I can harvest them in about a month. Same with the garlic; the bulbs really will be ready by the 4th of July, just as the old wives' tale says (plant on Columbus Day, harvest on 4th of July - check, it really works!).

Peas - got my first pea pods today!  It's a pitiful harvest but I'm going to eat my raw peas for lunch. All six of them (hee hee).

The herbs got hacked back to a reasonable height.  The only bed where nothing is growing well are the onions and beets.  Last year I had abundant beets and onions. This year, tiny, sickly looking beet plants and really awful onions.  Not sure why.

We had some excitement too while we worked. As I weeded, John used the edger to trim the tall grass the push mower can't get between the raised beds. We had Shadow out with us and Pierre. He's really an indoor cat, but he loves being outside, so we allow him supervised jaunts outdoors. Suddenly John let out a yell, put down the edger and went running back towards the house. Pierre had been sunning himself on the back deck.  As Pierre raced around towards the front porch, I saw something big and black hanging out of his mouth.  We both took off in hot pursuit with Shadow eagerly at our heels. She loves nothing more than to herd Pierre, proving you CAN herd cats if you really put your mind to it.

Pierre hid behind the hydrangea at the front of the house but not before we saw him release a large skink. I think it is a type of lizard. It was black with gold racing stripes.  And no tail! Poor guy lost his tail somewhere. We have a mesh screen to keep wildlife out from under the porch, but the holes in the mesh are large enough so that Mr. Skink slunk under the porch. Poor Pierre....mewing and struggling, voicing his protests, we brought him back into the house.  He's been pacing by the front door ever since, hoping for the chance to get back for round two with Mr. Skink.

Happy gardening Saturday!

Pierre Meets a Turtle

Pierre was out "helping" John water the shrubs this morning when John noticed the cat standing stock still, nose stretched out, on high alert. He peeked into the brush, afraid it was a snake, but instead found a small painted box turtle.  Pierre's eyes were huge. The turtle took one look at the big gray tomcat and zpf - faster than you can say turtle - drew head and all four legs neatly into the shell.  I wish I'd gotten a photo, but by the time I heard John calling me and ran downstairs, Pierre had gotten bored with his new friend and wandered off.  Both Shadow and Pierre spent quite a while sniffing the strange 'rock'. They seemed to know it was an animal of some sort, but by the look of puzzlement on their faces, couldn't quite figure it out!

Mr. Turtle, I am happy to report, was last seen running as fast as his stubby legs could carry him back into the woods. He's probably telling the same story, albeit from his own perspective, to his turtle-buddies now.

Flower Gardening Photos

I am in business strategic planning meetings most of this week, which give me a headache even when they're as productive as this week has been. So I snuck out to the garden for some early morning beauty today to soothe my senses.  Here's what's blooming now.  We did more cement work last night and cut steps into the pathway leading down to the woods. The flowers look riotous this year - tall, lanky, and just bursting with bees. And Japanese beetles. The weird cord stretched from my trellis goes back to a tree in the woods and we hung the Japanese beetle trap there. Yeah, yeah, I know; the University of Kentucky research says it attracts more beetles than it handles.  My own experience bears out the use of the trap and it seems to help.  That, and my trusty organic neem oil spray.  They devoured one Sonia rose but leave the Blaze alone.  Strange. Beetles with gourmet taste? Anyway, enjoy today's stroll around the flower garden. I am pouring you a virtual glass of wine or sweet tea, your choice, and handing you some yummy Brie cheese and crackers to enjoy while you stroll the gardens at Seven Oaks.

Shadow, Destroyer of Plants

Dogs and kids destroy things that are precious to us and we may get angry but we forgive. Shadow's been running to the construction site next to our driveway to visit with friends of ours who are building a house.  She loves the men working there but gives us a fright when we can't find her - and last week, the neighbors down the road showed up with her on the end of a leash, claiming she'd been across the street nosing around someone's property. So her days off leash while John mows the lawn are over, at least for now.


We've taken to tying her up on the front porch. It's shady, cool, and she can watch us as we work in the garden. John ate his breakfast on the porch this morning and left Shadow tied there.

He came back an hour later to find that she'd dug herself a nice little hole in the dirt. Problem is, the hole was in my flower bed, and she'd rolled her 70+ pound self right onto my Heuchera "Palace Purple."

I'd planted those there because they reminded me of my mother! She too had planted Coral Bells along the entrance path into our tiny backyard garden. I loved to pick the flowers as a child. They remind me of her. I'd placed them specifically in that spot in her honor, and placed the angel statue there too.

Argh.....John was afraid to show me the smashed and broken plants.  But he did.  He said, "I have good news and bad news. The good news is you can see your angel statue really well now!" The bad news was delivered by handing me half of the Purple Palace plant like a bouquet of flowers.

I took the bashed stems and stuck them into the moist soil. Let's see if they grow.

In the meantime, Shadow is giving me a wide berth....John was surprised at how calm I actually was, but honestly, can I really yell at her?  I wasn't there to teach her not to dig in the dirt.

It reminds me of times when I was a kid and did really bad stuff. Like the time I glued (not taped) my coloring book pictures of Donald Duck to the wood paneling in the basement play room.

The day I sold my dad's house, there were still two white ovals on the paneling from where the paper had stuck. Over 25 years later!

So really, how can I yell at my big, hairy, sweet and dumb beast?

Sale on My Gardening Book

Just got an email today from my publisher, Lulu.com, that they are offering a $1 off coupon on the paperback version of my gardening book Get Your Hands Dirty.

Use coupon code SUMMERREAD305 at checkout and receive 10% off Get Your Hands Dirty: A Beginner's Guide to Gardening. 

Happy Reading! 

Preview and order it here - publisher's website, Lulu.

Garden Guests: Wolf Spiders

This morning I went out to weed the flower garden before the heat soared, and encountered two unexpected visitors close up and in person. One resulted in a bee sting before I could withdraw my hand quickly enough from the patch of  Gaillardia I was weeding.  He got my just above the edge of my gardening gloves, about halfway up the arm, but I managed to whisk the bee off before the stinger penetrated too far, so aside from a bit of sting and redness I'm all set.


But then there was the wolf spider.

Do you have wolf spiders in your area? In North America there are 125 species and they are everywhere. They are the size of tarantulas. The body is about 1 to 2 inches long, and with the legs they're about 4 inches long at maturity.  Here is more information and photos of them: wolfspider.org

I surprise many in the garden. Today I tackled the weeds at the entrance to the garden path and the thousands of morning glories that seeded throughout the flowers beds near the entrance. I pulled up a stone, and a very large, very frightened wolf spider bolted out. 

She carried the most exquisite turquoise-colored egg sac on her back. Wolf spider females carry their eggs with them in either a white or robin's egg blue egg sac attached to the abdomen. Around my garden, many of the females have beautiful blue egg sacs ranging from the palest blue to a deep, rich robin's egg blue.  Today's mama had a turquoise colored sac.

Wolf spiders do bite, but only if they mistake your finger for an insect.  They prefer insects and mama spider was more interested in finding a safe rock to hide under than she was at biting me. 

When the babies hatch, they cling to the mother's back. It's not uncommon for me to stop and wait while a mother wolf spider races across the road in front of us as I walk Shadow in the morning.  I marvel at the hundreds of tiny babies waving their legs at me as if to say, "Thank you!" Sometimes I feel like a crossing guard.

No picture today of spiders.  I'm not fond of looking at them myself. Instead, here's the sunny face of a Gaillardia near where Mr. Bee got me.

RawPeople | Debugging the Garden with Natural Pesticides

RawPeople | Debugging the Garden with Natural Pesticides

My latest organic gardening article for RawPeople.com. Use flowers, plants and natural methods to cope with 'bad' insects in the garden. Enjoy!

Growing Culinary Herbs - LoveToKnow Herbs

Growing Culinary Herbs - LoveToKnow Herbs

My latest article on growing culinary herbs...enjoy!