Apples, at last?

We started a row of espaliered fruit trees four years ago, on the west border of our vegetable garden. Two are sour cherries; in between are three different apple cultivars grafted onto dwarf rootstock (all mail-ordered from Adams County Nursery in Pennsylvania). Last year was the first for the apples to flower, but the fruit was all dropped by the trees after early attack by plum curculio.

This season, we've tried Surround, an organic clay product that you start spraying onto the fruits just after petal fall and for a few weeks afterward, to control the plum curculios. Our apples are still on the trees and growing - much bigger than they got last year before dropping. At least for our rather petite and manageable orchard, Surround is working. My understanding is that for our application, it is a "protectant" rather than an "insecticide," which I think means the curculios don't like to touch/chomp it, but it doesn't kill them. We used one of those two-gallon pump-it-up green garden sprayers to apply.


This picture was taken mid-May, after fruit pruning, which encourages the trees to put energy into producing quality rather than quantity. The Surround is white and powdery when it dries. We ordered it from Seven Springs Farm in Virginia, and they shipped it super fast. Their price is good, and I think it got here the next day, which worked out very well for us, because we are real wait-till-the-last-desperate-moment types, and the plum curculios were practically breaking down the front door trying to get through the house and into the backyard... We made our first application just in the nick of time.

A Day Off

The day started out with a lovely hike at the Springbrook Tract of Lackawanna State Forest. Here Matt demonstrates a rousing game of Bite Bite, just before he loses his pinky finger and we have to rush to the ER.


Next, we weeded the garden and prepped dinner. From left to right, kale, strawberries, whiskey-mint-hibiscus drinks, pesto of garden volunteers (orach, lamb's quarters, green garlic and purslane), Hot Cocoa Rose with larkspur and bronze fennel and lavender, first peas.


Finally, the three of us relax.

Cupcake is ruining my life

Cupcake the Woodchuck was missing all spring until NOW. Where has he been? He looks like he's been sleeping in the scrapyard, using a busted up gas tank for a basinett and greasing his 'do with dirty motor oil. Or maybe he just packed himself away in a rock pile without any moth balls last winter.

Cupcake loves strawberries. He likes sunflowers, and he positively relishes tender young cabbage leaves. He says I should write this list in alphabetical order, and base it on my seed starting records, because he intends to sample his way through my entire list of Things Cultivated, then make a final death-sweep through the garden during lunch hour. Well, Cupcake, maybe I should fill up the birdbath with beer so you can wash it all down.

I am so obsessed with this woodchuck that I mistook my boyfriend's filthy old baseball cap, sitting on top of the washing machine, for Cupcake. (In my own defense, I was in a really big hurry). I actually slammed the medicine cabinet door and whirled around thinking, how the f&#% did he get IN HERE?!

Strawberries!

This morning brought the first bowl full of strawberries. They are even sweeter than I remember. And so rewarding to grow - a couple weedings a season, one heavy application of compost, a liberal thinning of old plants to make room for new runners... We have one patch of berries that's about 6x6, and another strip under the espaliered apple and cherry trees that is maybe 2x24. That amount of space gives us June strawberries aplenty, til the mixing bowls runneth over... Most of the berries go in the chest freezer for winter smoothies. Last year's freezer berries held out until about a month ago.

Generally the baby bunnies, who prefer tender crunchy stems of berry clusters to actual berries, thin our crop for us. But they are absent this year, as is the Big Fat Woodchuck From Hell. And now I fear I've cursed us by typing that, and this is only the calm before the storm, and our small garden will soon be overrun with organized forces of armed vermin... Phooey.

Raining robins

Turdus americanus has exited the nest. Babies are plopping out of the sky and living up to their Latin by crapping on positively everything. One attempted a crash landing on the neighbor's chain link fence this morning, tumbling into the hostas below.

I found this little guy after a sweaty afternoon of weeding and setting out starts, when all of a sudden I really needed to go to the liquor store. In his dismay at my wanting to use the truck, he hurled himself, all parts akimbo, at each wall of the cap until he got it right on the fourth try and found the open window. Stub-tailed and just learning to steer... pretty cute.

The real dope on my poppies

This godforsaken orange poppy was, as the story goes, also loathed by my garden predecessor, Nelly. She spent all of her life in this house except for the first few years, and she lived to be 95 or so. In her latter years she enlisted her nephew's help around her home and garden. One of his tasks that I know about - besides wheeling pea coal in the back walk via battered antique baby carriage - was whacking down the Oriental poppies, to prevent Nelly from being arrested by the Feds... Apparently she thought her Oriental poppies were opium poppies, or perhaps she just thought the Feds wouldn't know any better, which likely they don't. In any case, Matt and I now grow enough opium poppies in the backyard to make Nelly roll over in her grave continuously throughout the month of July.

The reason I hate these screaming orange poppies is that they broil up out of the ground each spring and pour like molten lava all through my strawberry patch, and they're impossible to pull out. At least they're good lookin.

No hawk babies this year

After being away for a week, I walked to Connell Park to check on the hawk's nest. A soggy squirrel cowering on the edge didn't bode well, so I left the path to investigate under the tree. This is what I found, rearranged here for the sake of the picture. Lots of pale bluish-white egg scraps, and one embryo.

For some reason this didn't send me into a total crying fit. I guess I spent all my tears this morning, on the stupid oil spill.