Welcome to the Jungle

This post brought to you by the snarky comment Ryan made about how I should take more pride in my garden, and would I take pictures of the current weed-grown state and put it on my blog? He didn't think so. To which I said "pish," and to prove that I meant "pish," I hereby present a 100% honest nothing-hidden-with-clever-camera-angles post about exactly how overgrown my garden is.

The jungle

There comes a point in every gardener's summer, I believe, when "well-tended" stops being the goal and "damage control" becomes all one can hope for. I reached that point a few weeks ago, and to justify this event, I will enumerate a few facts:

1) I'm pregnant
2) and tired all the time
3) and sensitive to the heat now
4) and prone to dizzy spells in the heat
5) and our average daily temperature has been bloody hot
6) and I have a baby around whose naps I have to schedule my day
7) and we have a really big garden
8) and just getting it all watered is a pretty big chore
9) and I'm pregnant
10) and have I mentioned that it's bloody hot?

So my MO has become something to this effect:

(register shock and fear) Oh, no! The watermelons are about to be completely choked out by weeds! They are sending out their tender little tendrils and will find nowhere to put their roots down! The bugs will all eat the tiny leaves and they will die!

So the watermelons get weeded. Or at least the weeds get mown down so the watermelons have a better chance.

Damage control.

Today I went carrot hunting. Am I the only gardener to be absolutely frustrated with carrots? They took for.ever. to come up, and when they did they looked like little blades of grass, so I didn't dare to weed. Then they started looking more distinctive, and I thinned them and weeded, only ... they didn't all come up. There are large portions of our carrot rows that just had no carrots at all. So I let them be, hoping that these large portions were just as slow to come up as the rest of the carrots had been to start looking like carrots. And then I started with the damage control, and the carrots were very low on my priority list. Occasionally I would peek among the weeds to see if any carrots were down there, and they always seemed to be not growing at all. While the lush and verdant weeds towered over them, the little tiny carrot plants still looked about the size on the seed packet where it shows you how to thin them. Do they really just grow that slow? Or are my carrots stunted because I've neglected them and left them to the weeds?

So my project today was to rescue the carrots from the weeds. I wasn't about to weed the whole rows in all the places where the carrots weren't, because are you crazy? Instead, I found myself bizarrely hunting for carrots through weeds up to my knees, pulling them up wherever I saw a carrot frond.

carrots, pictured with background of thriving weeds

Welcome to the jungle.

In happier news, garden excitement:

baby watermelons

baby squash

and baby tomatoes

please turn red, little green tomatoes

Corn and tomatoes!

Rows of more watermelons than we will know what to do with

A new arrival! and the joys of caffeination

Announcement announcement! We're expecting a playmate for Heidi sometime in the beginning of February! Hurrah!

And as of this morning, to all the naysayers who say that caffeine is bad for you during pregnancy, I say blergh. 

When I found out I was pregnant, I ceased my morning coffee, and coincidentally absolutely ceased to be productive during the day. At all. After feeding Ryan breakfast, packing him lunch, making him coffee and sending him off to work at 6:15 am, I would go back to bed. Wake up when Baby woke up, nurse her in bed while dozing for, oh, an hour. Trudge out to the kitchen, make breakfast for us. Eat at leisure. Put on boots and go garden, lament that it was only going to be shady for 30 more minutes. Get one row weeded, trudge back inside. Put baby to nap, sleep. Wake up when she woke up, trudge into the kitchen to eat some lunch. Finally, at about 1:30, think about the fact that I should clean a little, or maybe work on the book. Simultaneously realize that I haven't made bread or thought about what's for dinner. Make bread, spend 30 minutes thinking about what's for dinner. Decide to make spaghetti and therefore not to worry about it for 4 more hours. Put baby down for afternoon nap; fail at self-discipline and lay down anyway. Have finally swept the floor by the time Ryan comes home. Have to admit to him that in 10 hours I've only weeded one row and swept the floor because I'M JUST SO DARN TIRED.

So last night I admitted to him that I just can't do this healthy thing anymore. Unless, that is, he's happy to have a wife who sleeps all day. He said, "well, then drink coffee!" (This is the same man who tried to forbid me any caffeine whatsoever when I was pregnant with Heidi. Tried. For our own good, of course.) And this morning, I had two cups of blessed blessed coffee.

Which means I weeded almost all of the watermelons AND the radishes AND the turnips.  And trellised the peas. And weeded the one canteloupe plant that I had forgotten to put straw around. And picked all the dangerously fungus-y looking leaves off the raspberries. And ate three blueberries and one absolutely perfect strawberry.

I was going to bring it up to the house to take a picture of it, because it was perfect. And then I smelled it. I couldn't help myself. It was deep bright red and shiny, small and round and just ripe enough to have the seeds fall off in little squishy patches when you squeezed it. And it was SWEET AND DELICIOUS.

All before baby's naptime. She played on a big fuzzy blanket out in the shady part of the garden, and then got bored, whined a bit and fell asleep. To be quite honest, I wouldn't have done so much out in the garden if she hadn't fallen asleep, but once she was asleep I thought it a shame to wake her up to bring her inside. She also learned that weeds are itchy when you crawl off your blanket onto them, and that dew is chilly. She has some little red bumps and lines on her skin from the grass. And you know what? I'm ok with that. I'm working so very hard at overcoming my hyperprotective instincts.

I might join Heidi for nap #2 this afternoon. In fact, I hope to. I'm gestating; I'm entitled. But oh my goodness, my life is so much happier this morning for being caffeinated. If anybody knows how to be coffee-energetic on only water, I'm willing to listen. In the meantime, though, natural health and responsibility are far less important to me than feeling human.

Weeds, seedlings and pine needles.

"All one hot morning, the beans were popping out of the ground. Grace discovered them and came shrieking with excitement to tell Ma. All that morning she could not be coaxed away from watching them. Up from the bare earth, bean after bean was popping, its stem uncoiling like a steel spring, and up in the sunshine the halves of the split bean still clutched two pale twin-leaves. Every time a bean popped up, Grace squealed again."

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie

I didn't actually witness any seedlings popping out of the ground today, but I swear, there were some spots that were bare when I started weeding but had brand-new chartreuse sprouts by the time I came back to them.

I have spent the past week or so fearing to walk into the garden. I didn't know where the hills of watermelons, cantaloupes, or squash were. The rows of corn, radishes, turnips and carrots were easy to find, but we put them on the back fence! To get to them, or to get to the berry bushes, I had to tiptoe around unidentified hills of seeds. When we planted them, I put a pile of compost on top of each, and at the time the black spots showed up starkly against the reddish soil. But then it rained every day for five days straight, and when I looked again, there were no more black spots warning me where not to step.

So today, as I picked grass and eagerly examined the ground for any trace of seedlings, I squealed with glee at the sight of a definitely-watermelon sprout. I gathered up some nearby rocks (see? even a curse like rocky soil can be a blessing if you're imaginative) and built a little circle around the precious seedling. I felt vaguely pagan and Druidical, as if I were making a sacred stone ring to protect the gift of Mother Earth, but in fact I was just marking off where I should not step, in such a way that I would be able to see it once I was again 5'7" off the ground.

I put rock circles around the other seedlings I could find, and in several places where I couldn't see seedlings but I imagined that the tiny clover sprouts might be melon sprouts. When I tried looking for sprouts 3 feet apart from each other (the distance we'd planted the melons) I invariably failed, so eventually I went back to picking grass.

And then I found the squash! I had begun to fear that the squash just wouldn't come up, and one of the squash patches still doesn't seem to be very active yet, but the patch that gets the most sun is coming up with a vengeance! Some of those seedlings didn't need a stone ring because even I in my blindness could see them.

When I made my way back across the garden, I built a few more rock circles for seedlings I hadn't seen before, which leads me to believe that they must have sprouted while I was working. Grow, babies, grow!

Little watermelon in a Magic Rock Circle

Peas! We have 4 hoop trellises with 2 rows of peas each.

A squash in a Magic Rock Circle. Judging by the way the mud is displaced around it, I'd say it popped up today.

Corn. And weeds. And more weeds. And more corn.

Tomahtoes. Twelve of these.

Either turnips or radishes; don't remember which we planted in which row. Also pictured: weeds.

I included some pictures of the pine-needle mulching I did yesterday. Pine needles lower the pH of the soil (make it more acidic), which I hear berries appreciate. They're also GREAT for weed control. Ever notice how sparse the grass tends to be under pine trees? YEAH. Not to mention that if you have pine trees, you have FREE MULCH.

Strawberries

Arranging the pine needles around the plants reminded me of bird nests.

Blueberries

Raspberries. Next on the agenda: train this plant onto the trellis! It's growing like crazy!

We will soon have straw to lay down for mulch on the rest of the garden. I can't wait. It helps keep the weeds from taking over, and at the same time it keeps the soil cool and moist and keeps your plants' roots from being scorched. And as it decomposes, it adds organic matter to your soil! You win all around! Some think it's not as pretty as bare soil in between rows, but I'd rather look at a lush, weed-free garden mulched in straw than a scraggly choked-out garden any day.

Quick link: thegardenlady.org

Googled "can I mulch raspberries with pine needles?"

Discovered www.thegardenlady.org.

Answer: YES, and potatoes, and blueberries and strawberries (already knew about the blueberries and strawberries; blackberries too, though she didn't list them) and azaleas. AND dump coffee grounds around them.

So concise. So exactly what I needed to know.

So putting this website on my favorites bar.