More !@#$% Voles in another !@#$% Garden Bed!

I couldn't believe my eyes. Yesterday morning, I went out to get the back flower bed cleared out and cleaned up. In the interest of full disclosure, it's been overrun with violets, and seriously dry weather in August and September meant that I hadn't been out to try weeding until now (the ground was literally like poured concrete, as I may have mentioned in the previous vole posting). All was well until I got to the middle of the bed, around a lilac. As I pulled away violet leaves, I found tunnels and excavated dirt piles all over the bloody place. Voles!!! Some iris rhizomes were only being held up by the fact that their roots were so intertwined- unbelievable! Unfortunately, rain drove me in for the remainder of the day around 1:30, so tomorrow, it's once more into the breach, granules in hand, to try to get the upper hand in this war. And it isn't just me; at lunchtime, the phone company knocked on the door (we'd had land line problems the day before), and the repairman was also grousing about the havoc the little bastards are wreaking on the pillars that house the phone lines. He said he's been running all over creation the last couple of weeks, clearing out nests and replacing chewed wires. A pox on voles!!!!

October's Bright Blue Weather

Yesterday was one of those old-gold days that only seem to come in October. A flawless, cloudless, cobalt sky with the oranges and yellows flaming against it. A mild day that still had a hint of nip in it, making it the kind of day that I absolutely love for working outdoors in the fall. It feels grand to be out, but equally good to go back in after a few hours of hard labor. As much as I hate winter (it goes on forever up here in western NY; world without end, amen), I've had a lifelong love affair with fall in general and October in particular. It is my birth month, and when I was small, I always thought that nature put this show on just for me. It is in many ways the loveliest month of the year, and there are poems and fitting quotes galore celebrating the spectacle. Helen Hunt Jackson's verse about "October's bright blue weather" (an apt description if ever there was one). A favorite quote from the naturalist John Burroughs: "How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.". Even though this spectacular flame-out leads inevitably to the darkest and dreariest months of the year, I'm irresistibly drawn to it - and I'll revel in it until the day I die. Which may be soon, if I don't stop reveling and start getting serious about fall cleanup........

!@#$% Voles in a !@#$% Raised Bed!

Fall cleanup has begun, and today I was working out front, in the large raised bed by the street. Full disclosure - I hadn't done any weeding or cleanup since early August, as most of that month and all of September were bone-dry, and the ground rapidly became like poured cement. Imagine my shock and dismay, then, when I came to the area around my 'Sungold' buddleia and discovered massive amounts of dirt pushed around. Worse still, I went to yank some deqd iris foliage off of a rhizome and found myself holding the entire rhizome itself! Upon clearing the remaining leaves, I found multiple holes all around the area - voles had gotten in and set up serious housekeeping, I thought. Oh, joy. As I moved over slightly to the right of the buddleia to begin eliminating the out-of-control comfrey that was providing the voles safety, heads began popping out of some of the holes, then popping back in again. Definitely voles; no question about it. By now, I was really honked off - getting every last bit of comfrey out of that bed put me light years behind with everything else that needs to be done. Once I finished that obnoxious chore, I decided that half-measures just wouldn't do - I got my last container of Shake-Away granules and dumped a goodly amount down the largest two holes, filled them in with the excavated dirt, stamped around noisily, then scattered the rest of the granules around the area. All I can say is, this bloody well better work. I don't dare mulch this bed now until the ground starts freezing in earnest and that could mean that I'll be doing it in a snowstorm! Meantime, maybe I'd better buy stock in the Shake-Away company.......

The Remains of the Feast

Well, now that two nights of hard freezes have declared the 2009 gardening season officially dead, I'm wading out tomorrow to begin fall cleanup in earnest. After I remove the black mush formerly known as dahlias, tomatoes and peppers, I will no doubt be puzzing until my puzzler is sore over the small pepper I grew that I believed to be 'Yum Yum Gold'. This was supposed to be, I thought, a miniature sweet pepper, perfectly sized for salads and snacking. Well let me tell you - this pepper had a definite bite and more than a little heat to it. I tried it at various color stages. Just gold - vaguely nippy. Orange - a bit spicier, but still tolerable. So, thought I, let's let one go to red. After all, sweet peppers are at their sweetest when they're red, right? Well, you would think so. And you would be wrong. At red, these particular peppers damn near bit your tongue off and gave you a raspberry. So the possibilities are as follows: I misunderstood/misinterpreted the catalog description; the funky growing conditions this year caused some abnormality or recessive gene or some damn thing to kick in; or (my guess) some hot pepper seeds found their way into that packet. Either way, I believe that 'Yum Yum Gold' is definitely off the menu for 2010!

Success - Epilog

Well, the best beloved 'Moon & Stars' came out of the fridge this afternoon, and went under the knife. The long and short of it is that it wasn't quite completely ripe. I got the ripest parts cut out, and they were fairly sweet, but not what they would have been if I could have squeezed a few more weeks out of the growing season. However, with 2 hard freezes this week followed by daytime temps in the upper 30's and a light dusting of snow this morning, it wasn't to be. Still, I choose to look on the bright side - I got my melon after lo these many years, what little I got from it tasted reasonably good, and now I can move on and quit obsessing about growing a bloody 'Moon & Stars' watermelon!

Success - Don't Know if it's Sweet or Not

Last Saturday afternoon, my garden gave birth to 19 lb., 11 oz. 'Moon & Stars' watermelon - woo hoo!! I have tried for many years to successfully grow one of these melons, so named because the skin, a dark green, is spangled with varying sizes of yellow dots (stars) and the occasional large round yellow dot (moon). I guess it appeals to something childlike in me, or perhaps I'm jsut stubborn, but I became obsessed with growing one. Just one. It's never worked - I've tried starting them early indoors, direct seeding out in the garden, transplanting outdoors under a cloche - you name it, I tried it. And none of it worked. This year wasn't working either at first. I started the plants indoors in early April, put them out in late May - and then we had the coldest, wettest June and July on record. When the vines should have been developing, they just sat there. No flowers at all (I also tried to grow 2 heirloom varieties of musk melons; they just withered up and drowned), and to be honest, by the time August arrived with a near total drought (until the end of September, thank you very much) I had more or less forgotten 'Moon & Stars'. Then one day about the middle of August, I suddenly noticed that speckled vines (the leaves bear the same mottling as the skin) were spreading out far and wide! By September, seeing that there were only one or two flowers, I wrote the crop off, as it would never have enough growing season left to mature. And then, just after our trip to Canada mid-month, I just about fell over when I saw a big, round lump!! My God, I thought, I just may pull this off. I kept checking it daily, fussing over it like a mother hen, and when the time came for us to leave for a few days in Vermont, I dug up my floating row cover and tucked the damn thing in as if it was a newborn infant, for God's sake. But chilly weather was threatening, and I thought "I'll be bloody damned if I've nursed it this far (11.5 lbs. at that point), only to have it get toasted by an unexpected frost". So I left for Vermont, secure in the knowledge that my baby was safe in its swaddling. When I returned last Saturday, the beloved had nearly doubled in size, and with a freeze warning coming Sunday night, I decided that the time had come. In the house came 'Moon & Stars', the swaddling cloth was retired, and Baby Melon will meet its destiny following tomorrow night's dinner. Hopefully, success will be sweet!

Dahlias and Other Diversions

A couple of weeks ago, we were up in Ontario for a car show that we attend every year. We own an LBC (that's Little British Car for the uninitiated), specifically a Triumph Stag, and we come up to British Car Day in Burlington. We're friends with a group of people who also own Stags, and for a couple days prior to the show, we all go tooling around the area to various amusements that they've arranged. One of our field trips was to the Royal Botanical Garden in Hamilton, and it's the first time we've been back there in many years. The other time was during rose season, and that's a sight not to be missed. If you live anywhere in the Northeastern US, you should make it a point to go there. I believe they have the largest collection of lilacs in Canada, and the rose gardens were amazing. At this time of year, there wasn't a great deal blooming, and I was feeling a bit crestfallen as I wandered around - until my eyes fell on a huge bed of dahlias. Nothing but dahlias. Dinnerplates, cactus and zinnia forms, tall ones, short ones, medium ones, all colors, bicolors. You name a dahlia, it was there. I spent so much time prowling around the bed, in a trance of delight, that my husband had to drag me away before we got left behind!

While there, I was reminded of another autumn trip involving dahlias. My husband and I were up in Maine at the beginning of October that year for him to attend a photography workshop. One day we went to Campobello, Franklin Roosevelt's summer home, and lining the driveway to the home was a regiment of dinnerplate dahlias in all the colors of the rainbow. There had been no frost yet, due to the ameliorating effect of the Bay of Fundy, and they were truly magnificent. The few dahlias that I grow here at home are pretty, and invaluable for flower arrangements at this season, but they're only a pale imitation of the dahlias of my Canadian adventures..........