Do you remember the scene in Grosse Pointe Blank where Joan Cusack’s character describes going to her 10 year high school reunion? She said, “It was just as if everyone had swelled.” I couldn’t help thinking of that when I walked through the gardens this morning after 2 weeks away. It was just as if the gardens had swelled. Between hot days and a whole bunch of much needed rain, the garden grew at least another whole dress size. I barely fit down some of the paths. I wish I had taken before pictures of the vegetable garden because I could have sworn that the gourds hadn’t even thought about reaching the top of the arbor and the corn still looked like wispy little grass.

And in a mere 2 weeks, summer became late summer. How I know is because the Joe Pye weed and rudbeckia are in full bloom and the insect and bird activity has reached a frenetic crescendo. This morning I watched a cheeky little hummingbird bully 2 goldfinch away from “his” bamboo grove. Butterflies are everywhere and there are bees and wasps of all shapes and sizes making every garden buzz. Loudly. I hesitate to say it, but I think the light is even starting to change.

I was right about the Lycoris – they have mostly gone by without me seeing them. But the lotus put up more than one bud as it turned out, and I’m thrilled to have caught this one’s glory. And the Sophora (Styphnolobium japonicum) just outside the Rose Garden moongate is in full bloom and just starting to drop.

I still feel like I missed a lot while I was away and yet I’m certain I have a better appreciation for the changes than I otherwise would. Do you like leaving your garden in order to come back to it with fresh eyes or are you tuned in enough to notice the changes — and fully appreciate them all the way through?

When the cicadas start buzzing early in the morning we know we’re in for a scorcher. With temps in the 90′s, high humidity and ground level ozone levels that were predicted to “approach or exceed unhealthy standards”, all we can do – without falling over – is the bare minimum. It’s a good thing we’ve finished planting because all we really need to do now is water, maintain, and harvest the bounty. As for watering, Nature helped a bit yesterday with a freakish afternoon downpour that gave us at least half an inch and by the looks of the refreshed gardens, some of it actually soaked in rather than running right off. As for maintaining, I feel inclined to leave a few extra seedheads for the goldfinch and have concentrated on staking slouchers instead. (I have never noticed our pink peony poppy seedheads looking eaten before – peeled like bananas. But today I caught a glimpse of the goldfinch at work on them and also snacking on the Verbena bonariensis.)

And as for harvesting, there were lots of flowers to pick bright and early for house arrangements, and the vegetables are coming in gangbusters. It was wonderful to be joined by a skeleton crew of very local and very willing-to-be-sweaty volunteers who spent an hour picking a cart-full for the East Bay Food Pantry and then hopefully went straight home to recuperate in front of the A/C. The rest of us on staff who aren’t relaxing on vacation (I’ll follow Gail’s excellent example in a couple of weeks) will have to find inside work for the rest of the day. Check out the fruits of some of my indoor labor here - I finally published plant list pdfs! (For future reference, they are located in a clickable page on the right-hand sidebar, underneath BECOME A MEMBER.)

What are you doing to keep cool?

Nature has her own ways of doing things and her own timing. There’s no predicting it. — It hadn’t occurred to us last August when we ordered bulbs that squirrels would be acorn deprived and tulip-hungry this year. We had no idea after so many years mouse-free in the greenhouse that they’d be back. And we had no way of knowing when setting the date for Daffodil Days last year that they might bloom extra-early this year. Nature keeps us on our toes and all we can do is go with the flow and enjoy the ride.

There’s no fighting the likelihood of an early spring (despite another dusting of snow) so we’re going with it and rescheduling our celebrations to (hopefully) more closely match Nature’s timing. We will hustle to be open for the season and Daffodil Days starting April 1.

As for this being the year of the rodent here at Blithewold, all we can do is roll with the punches and get smarter. We’ve ordered extra spring bloomers to fill in any tulip-shaped gaps. (The squirrels didn’t eat them all so we’ll be sure to spray or dust the survivors with deer repellent.) And we’re doing our darnedest to keep the mice out of the seeds by covering the seedling trays with weighted upside-down trays. Fingers crossed. And I’m sorry to say it but because we can’t grow the gardens we’re known for without these plants, we have also brought out the big guns: poison bait. No dogs allowed in the greenhouse until further notice. (And after that, by invitation only, as per usual.)

When change is good it’s easy to adapt to it. Assistant grounds manager, Dan Christina has joined Dick in managing the vegetable garden. He has drawn a beautiful plan, dug trenches for the asparagus that Dick has been asking for forever, started working on a brilliant array of staking methods and support structures, and will help keep us all to a schedule of extra-productive succession planting and harvests. We’re pretty excited.

Any changes, welcome or not, in your garden? Will you have to hustle to be ready for an early spring too?

In the last post I mentioned that Gail and I just picked more vegetables for the East Bay Food Pantry. It’s no accident that we still have veg to pick. Back in the middle of September we took a little gamble and seeded down a big quilt of lettuce, rows of super-sweet and tiny early Napoli carrots, spinach, and Scarlet Queen Red Stems salad turnips (meant to be eaten raw!) It was late to be seeding but we also put row covers over the lettuce and spinach just in case, and the gamble (more of time than money since seeds are cheap) paid off big time. Given that the weather has been so mild with no real killing frost yet, we wouldn’t have even needed the row covers – uncovered lettuce in the raised beds is fine. When we cleaned out the vegetable garden in October we also left other tough-as-nails cool crops standing, like kale and Swiss chard. What’s truly surprising to me is how surprised the folks were to receive more fresh veg now, this close to winter. Granted, this is the first time we’ve made an effort to grow vegetables past summer but is it truly unusual to take advantage of fall?

I’m no vegetable gardener but that might have to change. Spending that hour or two harvesting at the end of November was like a little revelation. This is doable. And especially this time of year, when fresh veg tastes like a luxury (if you could see the crowds of people at Bristol’s new winter farmer’s market grinning over the gorgeous clubs of Brussels’s sprouts, bales of lettuce, carrots and enormous sweet potatoes you’d think none of us had ever had eaten well past August) a little extra effort at the end of summer – even if it’s a gamble – seems more than worthwhile.

This harvest has inspired Gail and me to make a resolution (a little early for New Year’s but what the hey) to get back out in the vegetable bed in March to at least seed down peas and greens in the raised beds under row covers. And who knows, maybe next year we’ll shoot for a four season vegetable garden à la Elliot Coleman.

Are you still eating from your garden?

If it wasn’t for the thick morning fog we might not know that the seasons are in an indecisive transition. And if we didn’t crash through strands of fog-lit spiderwebs with every step we wouldn’t know we were sailing into fall.

It’s transition time for the gardens that feels a little like waiting out a slack tide. We’re still enjoying all the activity in the garden; excited to see brand-newly blooming flowers (a subject for another post) and we’re certainly not ready to let go of any of summer’s color or seed heads. Instead we’re spending more time on patrol for skrunky leaves and tenacious weeds. If you’re in the same boat, trying to keep your garden looking its best for a few more weeks, try cutting back old leaves from Japanese anemone (leaving the seed heads, of course.) There’s a life-raft of bright green foliage coming up inside the old – it makes a bigger difference than you’d think. And removing brown leaves from everything else – dahlias, phlox, veronica… is almost as gratifying as deadheading ever is. On the other hand, some plants blacken in a dramatic keep-able way. I wouldn’t dream of cutting down these cardoon yet (above, left) or even any of the echinacea.

We’ve got big projects on the horizon that we’re itching to begin as soon as the mansion closes for the season (after Columbus Day weekend; reopening the day after Thanksgiving for Christmas.) This winter the North Garden wall will be restored(!) and we need to move all of the plants out of the adjacent beds and into the vegetable garden-slash-nursery bed. The deadheads started making room in there yesterday (instead of deadheading.) We’ll also take that opportunity to get into the other North Garden beds to amend soil and relieve years of compaction. We’ve got another big perennial haul-out planned (we’ve had it with the daylilies and enormous asters) and we’ll do our usual musical-perennials with everything else, trying to get it just right for next year.

But for now we wait, fuss, and plan. Is your garden in transition too? Are you starting fall projects now or waiting until the last minute?

(Click on any picture for better view of webs, spiders, weeders, and fog.)