The August Garden

 

Here we are already in August! Thanks to hurricane Debby we had an abundant soaking. I can hear the plants all giving a sigh of relief from the drought of July. I tried to be proactive in the garden this year by pulling up vegetable plants as they finished producing. The two back beds, center and right, had Swiss chard, beets, snow peas, radishes, and lettuce. As one crop finished, I planted a succession of another up until now. Those two beds are empty except for a few beets. My goal was to plant one more crop of seeds with zinnias. I got sidetracked with canning tomatoes and pulling weeds so the zinnias never happened. It is a shame because they are always a bright and cheery flower, good for cutting, and they bloom well into October here. However, I have two consolations to make up for no zinnias. One is that the garden still looks fairly tidy and "alive" rather than scraggly and dead. The second are the beautiful hollyhocks, which are new this year, to the left of the shed. 

I had hollyhocks in that spot several years ago until Steve planted a hops plant and it became a monster and choked out the hollyhocks. The hops was invasive and required aggressive pruning, which we did not do. In addition, the dried hops weren't brewing a beer that Steve felt made it worth keeping the plant. Last year we finally pulled the hops plant out. I left that area empty with the hope of returning hollyhocks there. I searched for hollyhocks seeds or plants in all the garden centers around here but could not find any. One day I was rummaging in my seed box for something and I found an old packet of hollyhocks seeds. I felt like I won a prize! The packet was outdated by a couple of years but I figured I had nothing to lose. I planted them and they germinated! The, within a week, the resident rabbits had eaten them down to stubs. I sprayed them with Deer Off and that kept the rabbits from eating them again. Now they are big and beautiful and blooming. I couldn't be more pleased. Steve's mom always had hollyhocks growing near her back door and they remind me of her. This is the view of the garden that I see out of our kitchen sink window. I keep an eye on the garden from here and it gives me pleasure to see everything growing. 

Believe it or not, our county schools went back into session this week. When we lived in New York, the garden was  spent by the time school opened in September. School in August confuses my ancient internal time keeping clock where I associate the seasons with what grows when and what activities take place when. The heat, humidity and growing things tell me it is still high summer. The school buses do not belong in the picture not to mention that we haven't even vacationed yet. August is the best time to be in New England, when the ocean is finally warm enough to step into. I'm going to ignore the school calendar and stay on the summer clock a bit longer.