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| Weeds flourish alongside beets that are protected from birds with wire screen. Damn the birds. Find your own food! (But not our blueberries, please.) |
However, it wasn't that much fun to see the garden upon our return. If you're used to seeing garden lushness on this blog, you may notice and enjoy the contrast with earlier posts.
We'd planted what we believe to be a modest patch in late April/early May and enlisted a gardener friend to keep it alive in our absence. She stopped by every other day or so whilst juggling her three other jobs and managing a complicated personal life. PK had set up "automatic watering" for much, but not all, of the smallest—but still too ambitious—garden we've had in years.
While we were traipsing about, southern Oregon temps soared into the 90s for days on end. Our automatic watering system turned out to be uneven. Let's just say that we have a lot of work to do!
Is it a good idea to leave your garden as plants are just getting started in late spring and early summer? No. It is not a good idea. It is really stupid. If we want to continue gardening and also traveling, we'll need to figure out a schedule kinder to our garden or just give it up for awhile.
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| Leeks survived sparse watering, onions did OK, and the rest of the garden limped along in absence of the daily attention required in early season. It will all come around with TLC. |
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| The mostly-perennial bed got adequate water and managed to beat out the weeds. |
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| Two butternut squash plants will likely fill this space once they get enough water. They're sad now. |
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Oh the poor basil! These guys should be bush-sized. Tomorrow the plants will be weeded, deeply watered, fertilized and maybe even chanted over. Groooooommmmm. I am craving Caprese salad!
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Let's just say this is a super lush patch of pig weed where we'd planted poppies, or so we thought. I'll be yanking those suckers out tomorrow and hunting for something colorful to fill the space.
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| Our blueberries are in full production and our wonderful garden keeper picked and froze many bags for us. I harvested some tonight for tomorrow's breakfast. Birds ruin about half the crop every year, including this one. We still get a lot of berries. We still like birds. |
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I can't complain about early summer zucchini, sweet yellow peppers, a Walla Walla onion, and a few cherry and Early Girl tomatoes, some of which we ate for our welcome-home dinner. I'm sure the garden is glad we're back, but not the deer that had taken up residence under a huge holly bush convenient to our landscaping, which it has apparently been enjoying. Ok, garden, abundant water, fertilizer and TLC coming your way tomorrow!
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Cutting back on gardening to travel. Really?
Road tripping in the Four Wheel Camper'
Biking 100 miles in two days makes for a sore rear end.
Yellowstone Park, and getting along on the road.
Even with almost total neglect yours is producing more than mine. I've had 3 big bowls of strawberries, some green onions, 1 zucchini. The peas are flowering. My tomatoes, peppers and eggplant are lollygagging. Squash and cukes have tons of flowers and small fruit. The garlic will be ready to pull in 2 weeks. The deer at all my lilies. I had an enormous crop of volunteer poppies this year in my asparagus bed, double reds like peonies and big floppy pink ones, all opium poppies I do believe. Wonder where they came from. Looking forward to the trip blog(s).
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