transplant | Sarah's Garden Stuff

When the story of my life is written, it will be kind of like Moby Dick. I’m Ishmael, not the whale. And the mammoth quest I pursue to near madness is tying up the tomatoes. I AM GOING TO GET YOU, TOMATOES. YOU ARE ON NOTICE. Today I added a new tool to my arsenal. Twine. I’m just tying a bunch of vines up at once and double-knotting them. None of this fussy business of tie tools stapling up one or two vines at a time. I am tying vines to vines on the other side of the fence. NOW YOU DON’T KNOW WHICH WAY TO FALL, DO YOU? HUH, PUNKS?

I was wrangling the cherry tomatoes at the bottom of the field when one among the farmer’s company drove down and said B said I should go home because it was too hot. I didn’t need to be told twice. In fact, not five minutes earlier I had been about to seek refuge in the shade of the perennial garden to weed for a while, but as I was looping the twine back up, I chanced a look down the row and the tomatoes were taunting me again. I saw that I was quite close to overtaking them, though. So I went back out there. And was then promptly told to leave.

Before that, I finished up with the onions in the long field. Some of the onions look like torpedoes. Some of them have started growing again. Some of them got lost in the weeds. I did the best I could.

The market stuff didn’t take too long this morning. Washed the cabbage, washed and bagged kale, washed and boxed those yellow peppers and the bell peppers (a few red ones now, plus some greenish-purple ones), washed and bundled basil, cleaned and boxed the big tomatoes.

I’ve only done a few things in the garden at home lately; I was away much of the weekend. But on Sunday, I went shopping at a nursery that I haven’t seen since I was a kid. It was a very spendy place, but at the end of the season there were a lot of cheap perennials in 4″ pots. I bought:

– One more strawberry (‘Hecker,’ an everbearing variety). I just planted it out back by the others, so now I have five varieties (I can’t recall offhand what the others are, but it’s two June-bearing and two everbearing. But one of the everbearing ones is actually producing a new strawberry or two every couple of days for the last couple of weeks, which I am probably overly impressed by. But it’s its first year! I mean wow!!)
– Artemisia. I had some artemisia once in the borderland between the front garden and the shade garden. This was back in the days before I ruled these gardens with an iron fist, and there was a mess of weeds, mostly grasses, blending the two areas together in a less than flattering way. So that’s where the artemisia was hiding, and I was sad that I couldn’t see it. So, I decided to move it to a spot on the opposite edge of the shade garden (which isn’t terribly shady) and it never came back.
– Russian sage, which I’d vowed never to have because it spreads a lot and flops and looks messy everywhere I’ve seen it. I tell myself that mine is going to be different somehow. I put this back by the bee balm and the lavender so it forms a kind of C-shape around the daylilies. See, it’s now officially a sensory garden. Also, even if the sage does end up taking over a little bit more than I want, it own’t be much of a loss because there’s not much back in the corner except for creeping Charlie and sedum.
– Some primrose, because why not, I guess.
– Veronica. I got three of them, two blue/purple and one red (‘Red Fox’). I planted them against the front of the house, so that should look nice at the back of the garden there.

So I have yet to plant the artemisia and the primrose.

Other stuff:
– Did I mention I moved the lobelia out from under the gomphrena? I can’t believe how the gomphrena has completely overtaken the corner there. The lobelia went next to the blue and yellow columbine that I planted from seed this year. (One of these three columbines died, by the way.) The lobelia looked fine for a day or two, but today is terribly wilted. I gave it a good watering; hope it will recover.

– The beans are now producing little tiny beans. The plant stems have flopped over somewhat irrevocably and I don’t feel like staking them. They’re just going to grow like this.

– Two of the radishes bolted. What kind of crap is that? I pulled them up and had next to nothing in terms of actual radish.

– I guess I should pull the beets one of these days.

Here are some pictures of other things that are happening.

: The Russian sage in the sea of creeping Charlie

: The crazy-ass corn, sedum, and gomphrena mix on the corner of the pool. Very bushy gomphrena, as you can see. There are probably 10 or 12 plants in there, but only about three of them are responsible for most of what you can see in this picture. And to think I was so worried about their germination rate. (Although to be fair, they grew a bit slowly for my liking.)