Summer 2025
September 29, 2025
trees, shrubs, herbaceous, vegetables, fruit, lepidoptera, seasonal review | permalink
On the tree front, I transplanted a few small saplings (4 or 5 inches tall at a maximum) from one place to another: I found a small eastern redbud (cercis canadensis) growing between two of my blueberry bushes, and moved it near the picnic table on the terrace, for eventual shade. I attempted to move a black walnut out of the yard and to the western treeline, but it did not survive. Similar thing with an oak, but on the other side of the driveway. But then I was successful, after being more careful with the roots and more frequent watering, with moving two other oaks out of the yard to the same place. I attempted to graft a few cuttings from the apple tree at my mom's house, whose apples I learned to juggle with. Neither survived. Did not help that it was not the correct season for it. I will try again either late this fall or early next spring. I identified, with the help of MH, three black walnuts. (I was worried they were the non-native alanthus altissima, "tree of heaven".) Two are good where they are, but the third is in the herb garden and so that will have to be moved once we get closer to winter. Removed the fencing on a couple, but then protected with burlap in mid September to protect from deer rubbing.
In shrubs, I found a great laurel (Rhododendron maximum) naturally root layering while visiting my mom, and I think it has successfully taken to my place on the western edge, although growth is slow. Of the 12 elderberries I planted in February, the range of success is pretty wide: of the nine that survived, one is about 4 feet tall (with a new shoot from the ground the same height), another is nearly 3', a couple are close to 2', and the rest are between 1 and 2'. The ones doing the best I had to put bigger cages around, twice. I'm starting to have fencing on hand when I need it, which is convenient and no further expense.
Perhaps the biggest effort of the season was at the herbaceous layer, namely removing the crabgrass that had taken over the four-foot-wide strip of mulch next to the road that I put in last year. That little patch - what I'm trying to make into a "roadside meadow" - has been a bit of a pain in the ass. First I heavily mulched it to kill the grass. A fair amount of weeding grass that survived was done a number of times. Twice I tried to start a holly hedge, and both times it failed. I spent a lot of time planting lupine and blue vervain seeds in it this spring, and mostly they were eaten by the deer. And then the fucking crabgrass. It took a good five or six hours worth of work to remove it all, and then an hour getting and spreading mulch, and then the occasional 15 minutes of weeding here and there to get what survived. After that, beginning in late August, I spent several mornings every week digging up and transplanting blue violets, and the occasional spotted spurge, from my vegetable garden. In all, it ended up being about 40 or 45 of them. I planted them right at the edge of the grass, every six inches or so, hoping they will help to keep it out. The spurge went further in, toward the road. I really like those two plants together. At times I found seed pods from the blue violets and tucked them into the mulch beyond the spurge. I also started a little patch of yellow wood sorrel on the other end, also dug up from my vegetable garden. A couple American plantains got transplanted on that side as well, and some of their seeds spread. Little bluestem seeds sown at the corner with the driveway, but no germination and probably wrong time of year (going to try again in spring).
In other places, non-native thistle was removed, native pokeweed was frustratingly removed by the spouse, grapevines removed from azaleas (I'm actually not sure of nativity of either of those, come to think of it, nor if the vines are really grapevines). Various things trimmed around the AC units. Bricks and rocks moved from one place to another. Got (self-)certified with National Wildlife Foundation, and put up a sign.
The herb and vegetable gardens were good, in addition to being a source of blue violets and yellow wood sorrel. Tons of tomatoes. Cherokee corn, but I need to learn how to harvest/cook it properly if I try it again. Damn groundhog ate the green beans a number of times, resulting in not many harvested. Peas got thrashed by deer, I think, just as they were beginning to first ripen (they ate the tops of the plants, not the pods, damaging the whole plant anyway). I gave up after the second time it happened and the plants didn't seem like they would recover. That was also a disheartening moment. Decent garlic harvest.
The backyard orchard: peaches grew, but I either waited too long to harvest or the trees are just too young (or some other reason that caused them to be dried up and molding when I checked on them in July). Of the seven apples on the apple trees I counted in May, there are three still left on the Arkansas black. Not sure what happened with the two other trees, but the one missing from the black is from me trying it way too early. Have since read up and discovered that it won't ripen until probably November and with perhaps three months of storage after that.
In addition to the black walnut (and redbud), I also identified:
- bittersweet/climbing nightshade (solanum ulcamara, not native)
- various asters (native)
- common dewberry (Rubus flagellaris), common copperleaf (Acalypha rhomboidea), and white vervain (Verbena urticifolia) (native)
- Virginia Pepperweed (lepidium virginicum, native), whose seeds I collected, spread, and stored (it's plain but still pretty, seems like a few more would be good)
- white clover throughout grass (trifolium repens, not native)
- monarchs, monarchs, monarchs
- definitely much more that maybe I'll add later
Finally, I read Attracting Birds, Butterflies, and Other Backyard Wildlife by David Mizejewski/The National Wildlife Federation (2nd ed., 2019).
Reaching peak tomato
August 4, 2025
vegetables, tomatoes, observations | permalink
Seems like today is the start of having a good amount of tomatoes every day for the rest of the growing season. It won't be long before we've reached our capacity to eat them and will need to give some away. Maybe two weeks? I may also make an extra batch or two of marina sauce to freeze.
Garlic Season Two Complete
July 23, 2025
vegetables, garlic | permalink
Garlic season two began with the planting of 64 cloves, saved from garlic season one. Late last year or early this year I noticed a couple had not come up, and then there were several in the past month that had wilted and I found to have rotted at the stem. That prompted me to harvest them about 10 days earlier (July 5) than I'd planned to (mid July).
Out of 64 planted, I ended up with fewer than expected - 50. That's a decent number and more than last year's 35 or so, but that's a 20% failure rate, double the previous year. I think the ones I lost in late spring and early summer were due to it being much wetter this year than last, but I'm not really sure. I did water them in mid spring when it hadn't rained for while, and I didn't do that last year. At the same time, I think the garlic that did survive has, on average, bigger cloves than last year. Maybe I'll do some reading to improve how I do things next year.
After harvesting the ones that did survive, I tied them together with twine in groups of five, and then hung them over the garden for a couple days. After that, I moved them to the shed, where I placed some hooks in the rafters and then hung them between. They dried there for 16 days, which seems to have been an adequate amount of time.
Eight of the largest heads will be saved for planting the next crop in October, leaving 42. This year I'm going to try to remember to keep track of how long they last us, with an eye towards eventually planting enough to last all year. Though I may have to research how to store them that long.
Spring 2025
June 22, 2025
trees, vegetables, fruit, wildlife, herbaceous, shrubs, seasonal review | permalink
It felt like spring was a lot of effort and not too much to show for it. On the other hand, this work of taking a sterile lawn doused in chemicals to something that actually contributes to and supports the local ecosystem does not happen overnight. I think I need to be more mindful of that, especially at moments of setbacks, of which there were several this season.
I'm going to try something a bit different for this reflection of the past season and go by layer. So let's start from the top: one shade tree went in, a black cherry (prunus serotina). It is at the corner of our property, several feet back from the road. After oaks, it is one of the best trees to plant to support a wide range of wildlife.1
I also planted a few understory trees: an American hophornbeam (ostrya virginiana) and two American hazelnuts (corylus americana).
The black cherry and the hophornbeam came from the township's Shade Commission, while the hazelnuts came from MH.
There was also some work on existing trees: at the end of April, I cut about three feet off the American hornbeam I planted last spring, so now it's about two feet tall. Last year, it dropped nearly all of its leaves during the summer, but then regrew some of them towards fall. I didn't have high hopes that it was going to make it, but then the bottom of it leafed out. Aside from being much shorter, it now looks as healthy as it was when I planted it. I think it probably gets too much sun, so hopefully the black cherry in front of it puts on a few feet in the next couple years to give it a bit of shade. I also extended the fencing on the pear tree and apple tree I put in last season, after removing the top I'd placed on them as a temporary measure. The fencing is now six feet tall rather than four, and so is sufficient for deer protection. I'm not sure how many more trees I'll be putting in, but I'm going to find and use six-foot fencing going forward so I don't have to do that again. Live and learn.
I identified the tree - now about five feet tall - growing in the vegetable garden. It's a northern capalta (catalpa speciosa), which is great luck because I wanted to get one of them. I have not yet decided whether I'm going to do the work to transplant it or just let it go and garden around it. On the one hand, moving it will be a decent amount of work (and it might not survive) and perhaps it could act as a good pole for a pumpkin to climb? On the other, it will probably shade too much of the garden. I'm torn. But I can't be torn for too long, because late fall/early winter will be the best time to move it if I'm going to.
I also have a tentative identification of another tree, which somehow has survived unprotected to about four feet tall in the mulched area in the backyard. It may be an ash - I need to look more closely at it.
So that's the good news on trees. Unfortunately, though, the oak I transplanted last fall did not survive - or at least not as a eight-foot-tall tree. The only sign of life was one shoot coming from its base, which was eaten by some animal within a couple days. I'm reluctant to cut it down, mainly because of how much work it was putting it in but also because I still want to believe it will come back. But I will probably do so between now and next spring. I would like an oak in that spot, so in the meantime I'll probably dig up one of the little saplings I frequently find in the lawn and put it there, under some protection.
The second attempt at a holly hedge failed. I'm going to continue trying, but on a much smaller scale. I'm going to take a cutting or two from one of the existing hollies and see if I can get them to root in water. I think I'm also going to have to protect them from wildlife - while some simply didn't root, others were eaten.
A few shrubs went in: another northern spicebush (lindera benzoin) and two red-osier dogwoods (swida sericea). I put the spicebush between the other two I'd planted in May 2023. I did not cage this one, mainly because it's rather large and probably needed to be pruned after the transplant anyway. I'll watch how much it gets eaten (so far fairly minimal) and then perhaps just cage all three of them together if necessary. I think I need to get one more in that area, opposite the others, to make it too thick for the deer to reach the middle so they'll do better. I did cage the dogwoods. Fucking deer.
I ordered and planted four bearberries (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), which are doing well. I also tried to propagate several more by root and stem cuttings, but only one may have been successful. It seemed like it was alive the last time I checked.
I spent a lot of time preparing various native seeds for planting outside and then planting either them or the resulting seedlings. None of them developed into full plants, if they grew at all. I knew that would be the case for the milkweeds and blue wild indigo (baptisa australis), but I thought I'd get some decent-looking sundial lupines (lupinus perennis) or literally anything else (black-eyed susans, columbines, purple love grass, little bluestem, buttonbush, blue vervain), but nothing is taller than four inches, except maybe the butterfly milkweeds. I haven't seen a sign of the black-eyed susans, purple love grass (eragrostis spectabilis), little bluestem (schizachyrium scoparium), buttonbush (cephalanthus occidentalis), or blue vervain (verbena hastata). I'm hoping some are just putting down roots and will come up next year. Even if not, I suppose it's ok. I have double that number of species that I'm going to plant in the fall. Seeds are relatively inexpensive (and sometimes free); I'm going to load the ground with them every spring and fall, with the occasional season off to give myself a break.
Removing lawn continued, but at a slower pace than I would have liked. Aside from areas where trees went in, it amounted to maybe 20 square feet.
In the vegetable garden, now nearly double the size it was last year, most things that I planted came up. The things that didn't: about half the corn, most of the Detroit Bull's Blood beets, and none of the handful of cucumbers. Those only accounted for a very small amount of the space, though, and I moved other things that were too thick into their spaces. So everything else came up and grew well, until deer (I assume) got into the raised bed and destroyed the 130 pea plants that were over four feet tall. I was able to save maybe a quart of peas. I'd wanted to keep saving them to replant year after year, but will have to buy some next spring now. Something has also been getting in and eating the green bean leaves. I'm not sure if that's also deer (maybe a rabbit?), but soon I'm going to extend the fencing from four feet to six feet tall. If the green beans are still being eaten, I guess I'll have to put in better protection at the ground level.
I was doing more weeding (mostly grass of one sort or another) than I wanted to, in both the vegetable garden and in the areas where I've removed grass and mulched/planted other things. It's frustrating because one of the reasons I'm trying to remove the lawn is to lower the amount of maintenance needed. And things I've planted are either growing extremely slow or being eaten by deer, allowing room for weeds. It's doubly frustrating because some of it is coming from my compost. I'm hoping that by next year, after another round of native seed planting in the fall, the good things will begin to out-compete the bad things. In the vegetable garden, I think it's now mostly under control from grass clippings I put down, which will have the added benefit of keeping soil more cool and more moist during the hot summer months that are now upon us.
One thing that I did that I had not planned on doing was creating a small rock wall on the western edge of property. I was originally just digging out some rocks so I could plant one of the bearberries, and got carried away, digging up giant rock after giant rock with the help of a neighbor's pry-bar he calls "the persuader". It certainly persuaded the rocks out of the ground much easier than any tool I have. I like how it turned out, and that makes a clear distinction between the grass and the mulched/wildflower area. (Eventually I also intend to start removing the lawn on this side of it, but that's probably at least several years off.)
Other tasks completed:
- fill small sinkhole next to driveway with mulch
- identify groundcover with yellow flowers in space between us and neighbors (lesser celandine)
- empty rotating compost barrel
- transplant blue violets from hillside with grass to new rock wall and hillside with apples
- transplant some of the pussytoes - I don't want to lose them when I eventually get around to removing grass on hillside below flowering dogwood
- plant white hyacinths from MH&DW
- plant sunflowers from MH
- weed and spread woodchips around chestnuts, oak, and maple
- do soil test in vegetable garden
- sharpen mower blades
- Read Chris Baines's How to Make a Wildlife Garden
1. According to Doug Tallamy. I saw this once before but the most recent place was on the May 15, 2021 episode of the Native Plant Podcast.
Tomato starts
April 15, 2025
vegetables, observations, tomatoes | permalink
All the grape tomatoes planted from seeds (from last year's volunteer) on March 12 now have first true leaves. Two of the four heirloom tomatoes planted from seeds (from tomato bought from grocery store) on March 31 do as well; not sure the other two are going to survive. One of the five grape tomatoes (again, from last year's volunteer) started on March 19 has a true leaf, none yet on other 4.
Tomato starts
April 7, 2025
tomatoes, vegetables, observations | permalink
First (tiny) true leaves on a couple tomato seedlings have started.
Third raised bed built
February 9, 2025
Nearly two years after I built the first large raised bed and five months since I built the small one for garlic, I've added a third raised bed, just a bit smaller than the first one (4 feet x 10 feet, rather than 5 feet x 10 feet). Five feet is just a bit too wide to be able to comfortably reach into the middle from the sides; I think four feet will be better.
It was just as easy to build as the first one: buy three boards, cut one in two, screw them together. This time, though, I built it on the floor of the shed (one end hanging out the open doors), rather than in-place, so it would be easier to square the boards up. So I then had to carry/slide the finished frame from the shed through the yard and up the hill to the terrace. I wouldn't have been able to do it myself had it been much bigger, but it ended up being easier than I thought, thankfully.
It's about half-filled with decomposing wood chips that I got late in the fall, a bucketful of deer poop, and some ashes from the fireplace. Sometime in the next few weeks I'll top if off with compost and soil, and then work on extending the fencing from the other raised bed to encompass both of them. Before I do that, though, I'll move the asters that are growing in the middle of it.
Now that I have three raised beds and two compost bins, I think I'm going to start referring to it as my farm, tiny as it is.
Pumpkin and the fox
June 7, 2024
wildlife, trees, vegetables | permalink
This pumpkin is currently my favorite plant. Look at it! It was about six inches tall two weeks ago. I'm training it up the wooden stake so it will have more room; we'll see how it survives once I get it up over the side. Deer snack? Maybe. Though I have another growing outside the raised bed and it has been untouched so far, knock on wood.
Speaking of wildlife, a bit earlier I had finished putting protection around the two newly planted hickories (because they've already been nibbled by deer), and then ran into the fox. Not sure if it's always the same fox I see, but likely? We had been walking towards each other from two different paths on the terrace. I was unaware of it until I turned onto the path it was on, which was coming from the raised bed and compost area. I'm sure the fox had already noticed me, though I think both of us were surprised. I backed up and it slowly but fairly nonchalantly continued on its way, marked its territory on a juniper I had planted, and then ended up where I took these pics a couple minutes later. First curious, then indifferent.
Planted spinach and beans
May 29, 2024
I planted spinach and more french filet beans in the places where other things hadn't come up or survived, which was basically all of the soybeans, most of the carrots, half of the beets, and a few french filets that had been chomped. If the beans do well, they'll now be probably half of the garden.
Raised bed deer protection finished
May 28, 2024
wildlife, vegetables | permalink
Around 8pm, I finally finished putting up the fencing to protect the raised bed from deer. For now, they are the main issue, trimming off the tops of some of the vegetables I planted. Later, I'll probably have an issue with chipmunks and squirrels since they can still easily get in. My first step for dealing with that is to plant some rosemary at the obvious entries - we'll see if that works. (And if not, oh well, it's the first year so I'm kind of expecting the worst.)
Anyway, after ten hours over the past month, it's complete. Two of the four sides of the fencing act as doors and seem to be functioning well. We'll see how long they hold up, but it's easy enough (though a little too difficult and awkward) to open and close them. I nailed the fencing to the structure and then to 1x1s that then connect to the frame by a hook. It's probably not the final version, but it works for now.
Here it is on May 11, when I'd completed the frame and put up the first portion of fencing:
One of the foxes came to investigate right when I was wrapping up on May 28:
A view inside the garden a few days after completing the fencing, on June 1:
Raised bed planted
April 21, 2024
Raised bed was planted: two types of beets, carrots, soybeans, fava beans, green and yellow squash, a pumpkin or two, peas, french filet beans. Too much for the space, but I figured some of it wouldn't make it and if everything did I'd just move some things somewhere else. Oh, and the garlic on the left that had been planted in the fall.
Raised bed started
May 8, 2023
Here's the first picture I have of the raised bed I made. Compared to the two other small building projects, this one was really a breeze: three 2x6s, 10 feet long, cut one of them in half, screw them together. Most of the work was hauling up dirt to fill it in. Thankfully, I suppose, there was a ton of excess soil/mulch around two sides of the house that needed to be removed and so it went into the bed.
Here is the lumber I had picked up for this and the other projects the week or so before:
