Growing Gardens and Unending Rains

This has been one of the rainiest spring/early summers I can remember. We have had rain every single week, sometimes more than we can bear. It is now the middle of July and I have slept with the windows open several times this month, because evening rains have cooled things so much. Strange as the weather is, it has been great for the gardens. I did tell you that I would give an account of how things were going.

The cucumbers have been exploding. They are one of those mysterious things that you can pick clean every single day, even to lifted the leaves and peeking beneath. And then you go out and find a cuc that is bloated to the size of a radioactive mutant! Where did that thing come from?

But it has been great for eating them fresh nearly every night, and making batches of fridge pickles. I used to can both dill and sweet pickles, but even when the boys were home they didn't get eaten fast enough for my satisfaction. Fridge pickles are quick and you just make as much as you want.

The garden is overflowing with corn. It has tasseled and the ears are nearly half full. I can't wait to start eating it! Corn on the cob is one thing that my entire family loves!

My mustard greens were delicious and now I let them have flowers and go to seed so I can save it to plant next year. If you have only ever eaten greens from those bags of stumps, stems, and giant leaves that they sell at the grocery store, then that is probably why most people hate greens. I pick mine young and tender. Then they are boiled and drained, and topped with bacon and bacon grease, and a balsamic dressing. So good, especially with hams steaks and biscuits.

I had two raised bed of salad greens. And I was tickled to find that one of my packets of mixed greens included dill. I had not thought to put fresh dill in a salad, but it is wonderful. The broccoli and baby cabbage were also ours. Lots of good salads...

I planted a small row of Blue Lake bush beans and only two came up. That is crazy. I think I must have gotten bad seed. Green beans are one of the things I really love to can. Them and tomatoes. There was no way I was going to be canning beans this year, but those two little plants are still giving the hubby and I enough for us to eat! I like them cooked just crisp-tender, and tossed with butter, salt, and lemon juice.

My tomatoes have just been hanging with masses of green tomatoes. My hubby loves green fried tomatoes, but I have told him he has to wait until fall when I am sick of the ripe ones. I'm a tomato tyrant. To hear about our occasional tomato wars read HERE

 Yellow and orange tomatoes are my very favorite for eating fresh. It's hard to tell by this picture, but the orange one fills my hand (and my hands are as large as a man's. Seriously, my hubby and I can wear the same gloves.). The other tomato is twice that size and still ripening.

 My row of zinnias gives me so much joy. I love seeing the color when I go out to the garden, and a giant bunch of zinnias is one of the most cheerful bouquets for a kitchen table.

Here is the little crimson sweet watermelon that was my pride and joy. I talked to it extra nice, so that it would be happy and grow big and sweet. Then I was picking tomatoes one day and I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was our black dog, Tater, nudging something toward me with her nose. She is a crazy dog, and will play fetch for hours. She is always bringing us something to throw, usually a green walnut, so that is what I expected. Oh no, it wasn't a walnut. It was my beautiful baby melon!! She saw me pitch a rotten tomato over the fence to the hogs and got the idea to climb into my raised bed and "pick" my melon and bring it to me to throw. I rocked back on my heels and sat there for a moment, that vein in my forehead pulsing. But she is a ridiculous dog, and the melon was green and round like a really big walnut. Sigh. So it went to the pigs. I have another that is the size of a tennis ball that I hid under the straw...

Remember how I made the old strawberry bed a cutting garden? Well, I think every seed came up. I will have a plethora of pickings come fall.

And the rains rewarded me with the most glorious roses. The leaves have blackspot, I know, but the rain encourages that and I don't spray.

It seemed that they would never stopped blooming, and I was able to bring in enough for big bouquets. You can see in this picture that I got it all weeded out and mulched- hooray!

This beauty is Graham Thomas by David Austen. Most all my roses are English roses or antiques. It is planted by an apricot rose called Tamera that is not in bloom at the moment. They compliment each other perfectly in the garden and the vase.

My poor beds are sparse from plants I have lost, but they are trying.

I want you to look below, at the rose going up the arbor. Let me introduce you to this antique rose from 1868, Zephirine Drouhin. I planted this lady two years ago and it already that tall!  This rose is amazing, because it has no thorns. Astounding, I know, but I was not going to plant something that I had to train and tie up that had thorns. I get cut to pieces on regular days, I really don't need looking like I got in a fight with a cat while I'm trying to make something beautiful. Another great thing about this rose is that it is self-cleaning. That means that when the rose dies, the petals fall naturally. This may not seem a big deal, but some old roses don't do this, and the heads rot and turn brown. For something this big and eye-catching, you want it to look nice even when it is fading away.

And here is one of my very favorite English roses. This is Perdita by David Austin. Perdita was one of the heroines from Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale".

She is the most delicate fleshy peach, and her petals are so thing and delicate that light shines through them, making some paler, and some darker. It is just a rose that I can't have enough of.

 Here are some of my other David Austen's, Mayor of Casterbridge and Eglantyne. Beyond is my circle bed filled with one of my favorite plants- Walker's Low Nepeta (catmint). It grows into bushes that look like lavender from a distance and it blooms for almost three months with the most gorgeous mint scent rising up when it is hot.

This is Gallica, Belle de Crecy. I love that this antique winds her way through bushes and over plants like a wandering vine. The smell is incredible and each flower is so packed with petals it seems they could never all open. This is one of the primary roses that I use to make Rose Petal Syrup, see HERE. The color and fragrance are perfect for it.

Below is the Gallica rose, Cardinal de Richelieu, the name of the cardinal famous for disbanding the Musketeers. (Yes, in real life!) It is the closest to purple I have seen in a rose, and packed with petals.

Below is of my circle bed and you can see the gorgeous nepeta. My middle son used to pick handfuls of this and steep it in hot water for a special tea for me.

And here is my perennial yellow hollyhock. I grew them from seed, and they can get 8 feet tall. The neat thing is they are the original "Marsh Mallow" and the roots were originally used to make the marshmallows we eat today! Behind is blue bachelor's button from my grandma, and also a tiny Pink Fairy rose that she rooted for me.

Here is my shady bed, awash in "Mystery Plant". The lovely sky blue flowers came up in some mulch that my Grandma Tommy got at the local composting plant. They are annual, but self-seed. She and I spend a long time trying to identify them from wild plant books, to seed catalogs from England. So far no luck on a name. So I dubbed them "mystery" and they fill my beds come spring till heat of summer.

Speaking of "awash", this is my shady bed from the opposite direction during one of our flash floods. I had just weeded and mulched and all that work washed straight out into the field beyond.

The rains have also made everything that sits still grow luxuriant moss. I check myself regularly if I sit too long - ha! This stump is one the boys brought me and I planted. All the stones around it are gorgeously green.

Even the roof of the woodbox has sprouted a beard. I look at it admiringly as I go by and sometimes pat it's springy-ness. The hubby growled at it one day, telling me that moss will eventually destroy shingles. When I didn't say anything he said, "But you probably like it, don't you?" I admitted that it made me think of a mossy English cottage. There was much eye-rolling on that one ;)

But now we are to July. The season of the roses is down to a sporadic sputter till fall comes close. Now is the time of lilies. Here is a plant that looks like a lily but is actually a Crinum. My great-granny called it a "Milk and Wine" lily, and said that her granny brought it from Mississippi to Texas right after the Civil War. Read more about that ancestor in Apple Granny. From there it went with the family to homestead in New Mexico, then here to Arkansas in 1918. When I researched the flower, that is actually it's name. And yes, it was taken from the most southern states as settlers expanded westward. I love that I have a piece of a plant grown by my family from before 1860.

Here is my circle bed now, with the blue nepeta taking a quick rest before it bursts again. The yellow daylily Hyperion and some pink echinacea (coneflower) fill in while it recuperates.

I don't know the name of this beauty, but I got it from my dear Aunt Sharon's garden after she passed away.

This is a Balsam, or touch-me-not. I have grown these for 20 years from seed my Grandma Tommy gave me. In the last years I lost them all. So this is grown from a seed packet, but at least I have them back in my garden. The seed pouches burst when you touch them, spraying seed and creating the folkname.

I am not a fan of orange, but I made an exception to it around the wellhouse. I couldn't let go of Grandma Tommy's Tiger lilies, or the double daylily. Soon the cheerful faces of Aunt Sharon's Black-eyed-Susans will fill in around them.

This lily look orange, but it actually a glorious apricot color that works well with pastels. It is a turk's cap called Lady Alice, and it will get 6 feet tall.

Below are Stargazer lilies with their incredible fragrance. These flowers were my wedding bouquet. Behind is the white lily Mont Blanc.

Here is the fish pool. The lotus has officially eaten the whole pond again. It is so aggressive that I can't keep it to just one side of the pool.

It makes me think of Maurice, the human-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors. But I forgive it when it has it's dinner plate sized blooms.

 And yes, I told you I would keep you posted about how things were going in my garden drama. Remember how I told you we were ripping wisteria and going to tear things out? Weeeeeell...then it came fishing season and my handy little helper left me. So, the spot beside my arbor and the pond is even worse than before. Just a  pigweed and polk eyesore of despair and hopelessness, with a little poison ivy thrown in for festivity. The hubby says it will all happen this fall. Which I heard last fall....Sigh. I hate things that I cannot do myself.

But to end on a happy and wonderful note- this year is a fruit and berry wonder! My little crabapple that I showed you before has so many apples that we had to tie it to a fence post because it was leaning over so far. My pear has branches almost touching the ground with fruit. And, you guys!!! My Arkansas Black apple tree has apples!! I am so happy. I know it's sort of a hipster thing to want to have certain heirloom varieties, almost like a status symbol. That's not what this tree is to me. I grew up with my dear Great-aunt Jane telling me how her daddy worked in the orchards when she was small. He would bring home bushels of these Arkansas born apples and put them in the closet under the stairs. You see, you don't eat these apples when you pick them. They need to be stored, so they gently ripen and gain a dark blush which is described as black. It's an exercise in restraint, and we all know that I can use to practice patience. She said the smell of the apples would rise up and come through the cracks in the stairs. When she ran down them, all she could smell was Arkansas Black apples. Aunt Jane passed away in her 90's and I planted this tree. And now, Dear Reader, I will smell and taste the apples that made her so happy as a child. I know she will be grinning from heaven and laughing her wonderful, Santa Claus laugh.

Much rambling on, Dear Reader, but I am so happy you went with me for a little jaunt around the gardens. You can't know how much your encouragement this spring meant to me. I still have so much to do. So much to tame. So much to tear out. And, as of this month, I have written the names of ten plants of my Grandma Tommy's that I have lost. It is a sad reminder of the price of neglect. But I tell myself that if I can get everything in shape, I will find those plants again, and set things right with my soul. Thank you for being my companion on this journey!