{"id":12330,"date":"2015-06-03T06:40:43","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T13:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=12330"},"modified":"2015-06-05T15:53:09","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T22:53:09","slug":"timing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=12330","title":{"rendered":"Timing."},"content":{"rendered":"

Gardening is all about the long run.\u00a0 The last 2 years we’ve had the best gardens we’ve ever had.\u00a0 Which is not surprising.\u00a0 10 years of building the soil plus 10 years of experience along the way eventually starts to pay off.\u00a0 We finally realized it takes an entire row of snap peas to produce enough peas for a family of 6.\u00a0 This is the first year we’ve had enough peas to share instead of the kids gobbling up the entire crop in one handful.\u00a0 It’s only the second year we’ve produced straight carrots, thanks to finally growing them in containers instead of in the ground.\u00a0 The third year we’ve grown everything for the summer garden from the greenhouse. (Well, almost<\/em> everything.\u00a0 Stupid eggplants.)\u00a0 The fourth year we’ve successfully grown potatoes in straw, both spring and fall.\u00a0 The fifth year we’ve had crops all year long using row covers and frost cloth.\u00a0 But sometimes it’s the little accomplishments that are the most enjoyable.<\/p>\n

For years I’ve planted cleome in empty tires at the edge of the raised veggie beds.\u00a0 I spotted a large bed of these flowers when visiting Old Sturbridge one summer and I was trying to recreate the effect.\u00a0 But every year the flowers struggled.\u00a0 They had a poor germination rate and the plants that did grow were weak and spindly and only threw up a few flower heads in early fall.\u00a0 It didn’t make any sense.\u00a0 How was it warm enough in a colonial village in Massachsuetts but not the right temperature here?\u00a0 I also had to hunt down the seeds in the store every spring because mine never self-sowed while most gardeners considered them almost invasive.<\/p>\n

And then it happened.\u00a0 Inexplicably, little cleome sprouts were evident in the tires by early May.\u00a0 There were actually little patches all over the garden.<\/p>\n

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And now it’s the first week of June and the tires are exploding with so many cleome plants that I need to thin them.<\/p>\n

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They are already blooming!<\/p>\n

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I didn’t change anything about how I grew the plants last year and it seems impossible that the few flowers that bloomed produced all these seedlings.\u00a0 I didn’t change the way I treated the soil—-I always leave the dead stalks in place through the winter and then pull the dry vegetation up, crunching it in my hands, and troweling it back into the dirt.\u00a0 Apparently it just takes time, people.\u00a0 Just plain, old, simple time.<\/p>\n

By the same token, I rescued orange daylilies growing wild in our ditch when we first moved out here.\u00a0 I planted them in containers on the deck and in clumps around the property.\u00a0 Because even though they didn’t flower very much, their green leaves made excellent pot fillers.\u00a0 Check out this lovely display of lily leaves, Virginia buttonweed, and clover:<\/p>\n

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Don’t know why Martha <\/a>never mentions using weeds to fill the container garden on your deck, but it never seems to come up.\u00a0 However, this year the lilies are on the same page as the cleome.\u00a0 On June 1st they opened up all over the property.<\/p>\n

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Maybe 2015 is just the year for lilies.\u00a0 This is the first time that there hasn’t been a Great Goat Escape into the landscaping in the front yard.\u00a0 Every spring right before the bulbs bloom they get goat-nibbled.\u00a0 Last year those punks ate the heads off all the oriental lilies I planted around the pampas grass.\u00a0 Just the heads.\u00a0 Just because.<\/p>\n

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This year they did their walkabout too early to damage anything more than the winter rye.\u00a0 This year we have this:<\/p>\n

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I’m telling you, time is a powerful.\u00a0 I checked on the tomatoes I bought as 3′ tall plants from the farmers market.\u00a0 I was hoping they weren’t too far ahead of the varieties I grew from seeds in the greenhouse.\u00a0 Sure enough the plants from the farmers market had little Old Germans….<\/p>\n

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and tiny Early Girls.<\/p>\n

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As vigorous as my tomato plants were, I didn’t think they had green tomatoes yet.\u00a0 They had their first set of blossoms so I didn’t think they were far behind, but it looked like they hadn’t had enough time to catch up.\u00a0 Until I saw it.\u00a0 Perfect baby Genuwines.<\/p>\n

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I guess this year time is on my side.\u00a0 Except for my 2 year old asparagus plants.\u00a0 Which are 4 years old and still just send up ferns.<\/p>\n

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They must be on the 100 year plan.\u00a0 I hope my great-great-grandkids like asparagus.<\/p>\n

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Gardening is all about the long run.\u00a0 The last 2 years we’ve had the best gardens we’ve ever had.\u00a0 Which is not surprising.\u00a0 10 years of building the soil plus 10 years of experience along the way eventually starts to pay off.\u00a0 We finally realized it takes an entire row of snap peas to produce […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12330"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12361,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12330\/revisions\/12361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}