I Finished Mowing

I finished mowing on Monday by 9:30:AM before it got too hot outside. After finishing the mowing job, I did what is probably the part gardeners love most of all: puttering around the yard. Puttering amounts mostly of tidying up--dead-heading spent blossoms (I throw them on the ground around the plants because in some cases, like marigolds, some of the blossoms are mature enough to include seeds that come up -- "volunteer," to use the old-fashioned term -- and surprise you the next season.) If you don't want them where they come up, you can always transplant them or treat them like weeds, but since they usually come up earlier in the season that seeds you sow or than plants are available in retail shops, you get an early start on the season. In some cases too, as with coleus and zinnias, the volunteer seedlings turn out to be hybrids that are unique and (we can always dream) valuable.

My stepfather, Joe Grado had a dream like that. He was a great gardener and was an amateur cross breeder of day lilies. He sometimes came up with new and very beautiful new varieties, but (alas) he never hit the jackpot he dreamed of: a blue day lilie, which he believed would make him rich and famous. Everybody needs a dream like that even if the chances are better of getting hit by lightening or winning the lottery.

Monday's puttering included pulling up the few brave weeds that have committed suicide by coming up in my garden and flower beds. (I am ruthless.) If you pull it out every time you see a weed, then big-time weeding is never needed--you just need to put in some puttering time every day or so.

Not only have we been suffering through a major heat wave, it's been dry too, so I decided it was time to irrigate the garden by running the hose in the trenches between the rows for about 1/2 hour per row. You can tell when it's enough by watching the "wet" line as it creeps up by capillary action of the soil towards the top of the row. When it's almost to the base of the plants, you've done enough. I don't usually sprinkle with the hose unless the plants looked wilted or the leaves are dirty from debris thrown up by mowing. A little sprinkling at the end of a hot day perks up the wilted plants nicely, but I do it early enough for the leaves to dry before dark. If you sprinkle and the leaves are still wet when the sun goes down, you take a chance on mildew--which is ugly and interferes with a plant's photosynthesis because it blocks the sunlight.

I did turn the sprinkler on for the flower bed at the back door, the one around the birdbath and the ones in front of the house. The zinnias are up about 2 inches around the birdbath. Zinnias literaly spring up almost overnight when it's this hot. They'll be blooming too in a week or two.

The neighbors' dog slipped his rope this morning and kept me (not entirely welcome) company while I worked. Dogs, God love them, love to hang out with people, even strangers and they can be a pest, mostly because they want to be involved in whatever you're doing and they get in the way. If they just watched it would be OK, but they want to help--or whatever. And when you turn your back on them, they'll find the very place to lie down for a rest where you have been working. I lost the better part of a zinnia that was about to bloom to doggy bedding on Monday.

I went over to the neighbors' house to tell them the dog was loose at about 9:30AM when I thought they'd be awake, but they didn't come to the door, so I left the dog to wander when I went inside.

The last piece of puttering Monday was to pick 12 1/2 dozen ripe figs from the tree in the back yard. Now I have to get out the book on dehydration and learn how to dry them.

One on other thing, my new digital camera arrived in the mail Monday, so I'll have some new pictures of Glynn's Farm to put up soon.

And. . .in reading back over Saturday's issue, I think I may have been painted too rosy a picture of what cars and gasoline, etc. were like in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. I'll back-track to that discussion later on.

I have been invited to give the invocation at the San Augustine Chamber of Commerce meeting today (Tuesday) at lunch, so I have to quit posting now to get ready to be presentable there.

Keep your hoes sharp and your tillers fueled.