Last week at 4 a.m. on Tuesday—or was it Wednesday? it’s all a sleep deprived blur—the raccoon came back for more apples. 

Thud! Roll! Splat!

James and I both woke up and held our breathe.

Thud! Roll! Splat!

We groaned. James swore, got out of bed, grabbed the cake pans, turned on the porch light and went out to scare away Rocket Raccoon. While another apple hit the roof from high in the tree, he found himself staring eye-to-eye with a big pudgy raccoon in the lower branches. Rocket had brought a friend!

He banged the cake pans together. I heard him from inside and heard Rocket jump out of the tree and scramble across the roof. 

James came back indoors and told me about Pudge, who didn’t budge when James banged the pans together. Thankfully, the apples that are left on the tree are high up on spindly branches and Pudge is too fat to join Rocket. If Rocket keeps eating apples, he too will soon be too pudgy to get the rest.

Of course, thinking Rocket and Pudge would be happy with just the apples was a mistake. They visited the veg garden too. They had fun playing in the water dishes on the deck. They thought the jalapeños looked interesting, but found out they were spicy and didn’t actually eat them, just removed several of them from the plants and scattered them around. Most of them were full size, but we were planning on leaving them on to ripen to red so they’d be spicier. The raccoons were kind enough to not pick all the peppers or destroy the plants, so we still have a chance at some red ones.

The raccoons were not defeated by the cherry bushes, however, which still had quite a few ripening cherries on them. The bushes are only about knee high (they should eventually grow to about 5 feet tall) after having been eaten down to nubs from Fat Rabbit two winters ago. The great thing about the cherry bushes is that the fruit hides beneath the leaves towards the center of the bush, making it hard for birds to get at them and they are sour so squirrels don’t really bother them either. 

The raccoons didn’t care. By the squashed look of the bushes, they climbed right into the middle of them and chowed down. 

James and I had already been picking as they became ripe and have a little over half a quart jar pitted and frozen. The raccoons left a little over a dozen, which I picked. And now that’s the end of the cherries for this year. Not enough for a pie, but enough for some cherry chocolate chip cookies and maybe some pancakes.

Rabbit is still in the garden. We’ve been unable to scare them out of hiding. We are pretty sure they are hunkered down behind the compost bin next to a pile of woody branches waiting to be cut up, making them conveniently inaccessible to our scare sticks.

Rabbit seems to have tired of beans and has been eating the squash blossoms. With the rain and warmth, all the squashes are vining and flowering vigorously, but since Rabbit keeps eating the blossoms, I’m not getting any squash! I have one butternut out of five vines. No kuri squash, one tiny sweet meat squash, and so far no zucchini. Though the zucchini are just getting big enough to begin producing squash having gotten a late start because Wanker the Squirrel kept digging up and eating the seeds every time I planted more.

Surprisingly, the squirrels have not been adding to the mayhem. I suspect they are keeping an eye on the still green but just beginning to blush tomatoes and when they are getting close to ripe, they will rip them off the vine, take one bite, and leave the rest on the ground. I might have to pick tomatoes slightly early and finish ripening them indoors in order to protect them. Because, dang, they are doing great this year! 

I am currently fascinated by the Hungarian Heart Tomatoes. These are a fleshy tomato great for canning. I have never grown them before. I have three plants. Two of them are normal tomato size plants with average sized tomatoes. The third is a gigantic vine that has exceeded the top of the tomato cage by almost a foot and has tomatoes bigger than my fist. The three plants are all near each other so I have no idea why this one is such a monster. I have never had tomatoes this big, or a vine this huge before. I will definitely be saving seeds from this baby! 

The cherry tomato vines are loaded, and the black slicing tomatoes are doing well, though not as amazingly as all the others. And the mystery Alley Tomato, has fruit too. They are small so must be some variety of cherry tomato. But the plant is sturdy and not even staked up, which is pretty amazing. If the resulting fruit is good, I will definitely be saving seeds. 

I planted linen flax in the garden this year, thinking of attempting to process it into yarn. Their little blue flowers are starting open, and they are tiny but pretty. Sadly, the plants did not grow very tall, and I doubt they will turn out to be good enough to make into fiber. Oh well, it was worth a try! I will stick to nettles, which have grown the tallest they have ever been with all the rain this year. 

There is still one peach on Marlon that I am nursing along. But it’s not looking great and I will be surprised if it actually gets ripe. Since I didn’t expect peaches on this tiny new tree to begin with, it is no great loss if this one peach doesn’t make it.

Sadly, though, in spite of the gorgeous flowering of Professor Plum in spring, there is not a single plum on the tree. Professor has grown about two feet this year though and is about 8 feet tall. Considering the severe pruning/coppice after Fat Rabbit girdled the tree two winters ago, the growth is astonishing. I recently inspected the wild plum trees I have foraged from the past few years and they don’t have plums either. So I suspect that so much rain is not to the liking of plums. 

Raspberries though, the number of canes has exploded this year. After three summers of drought and a big cane die off, they are making a come back. Since they fruit on second year canes, if all goes well, next summer will be a raspberry extravaganza.

Today we dug the potatoes. They are all from small potatoes I saved from last year’s harvest. They did about like they always do, more than we planted but not enough to make us believe the effort is worth it. After trying a number of different techniques and potato varieties and never getting much yield for the work, we’ve decided to not grow potatoes again and use the big space they take up for other plants instead, like giant tomatoes.

We dug up the garlic today too. It did really well. Last fall I planted a few cloves of newly purchased garlic, Music, I think it was, the cloves from a saved bulb the variety of which I have written down somewhere but don’t know where at the moment, and a bunch of seeds from garlic flowers. The Music produced several huge bulbs, one of which I’m saving to plant this fall. And the seeds all grew little bulbs that I will plant in the fall as well as some new seeds from one plant I allowed to flower. I was going to allow two plants to flower but got a little excited cutting all the scapes in spring and  came this close to not having any flowers at all.

The goji berries I started from tiny seeds in March have finally become sizable plants ready for a place in the garden. We planted one today and surrounded them with chicken wire to keep the squirrels, rabbit, and hopefully curious raccoons away. I have two others to plant, possibly three. The possible one was attacked by a cutworm who ate all but one leaf. The plant was already the runt of the four and I don’t know whether they will be able to make a comeback. I will keep them in their pot and see what happens.

Thinking ahead to spring, I ordered some native prairie seeds today from Prairie Restorations. The yarrow I winter sowed two years ago was such a success that I figured I was ready to try some other seeds. I bought a packet each of white prairie clover (Dalea candida), showy penstemon (Penstemon grandiflorus), columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), wild lupine (Lupinus perennis), and black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta). I’ll be sowing these in containers in December or January because they need cold stratification, and then come spring I hope to have a whole mess of plants to fill in empty spaces in the front prairie garden and in a semi-shaded border in the veg garden. 

I know this gardening season isn’t over, it isn’t even winding down yet, but it’s never too early to think about next year while I can see what things look like and what would be good to fill in gaps.

This past week was hot, about 90F/32C every day with a dew point of 70F/21C or close to it, so I felt constantly sticky. We had a rollicking severe thunderstorm roll through Wednesday afternoon while James and I were both biking home from work. I made it home just as the downpour started but poor James got caught in it and arrived home soaked through. Fortunately that was just the start of the storm and we were safe indoors when the hail and high winds hit. The garden looked a bit roughed up afterwards but recovered just fine. Unfortunately, when I biked to work Thursday morning there were plenty of trees with big branches snapped off and one boulevard sapling snapped completely in half. 

We might get some big weather late tonight or tomorrow when a cool front arrives. When the storms clear out we will be left with comfortable humidity and temperatures around 75F/23C for the rest of the week. That’s pretty much perfection in my book.

Reading

• Article: Subvocalization: Why Most of Us Have a Voice in Our Heads When We Read. Do you have a voice in your head while you read? I always do. I even have a voice in my head when I am writing something. It’s not weird! The article explains the hows and whys of subvocalization. 
• Book: An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker. This is a beautiful book. I’ve always found Kara Walker’s art powerful and somehow, even in a “children’s” picture book, it still takes my breath away. And Kincaid, she tells it like it is and doesn’t sugar coat anything. 

Quote

~Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

Listening

• Podcast: First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing: Ada Limón. Host Mitzi Rapkin talks with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón about her recently published anthology You Are Here (it’s a fantastic collection, I highly recommend it!). Two of the poets with poems in the anthology make an appearance to read and briefly discuss their poem. I love Limón’s poetry and it was wonderful to hear her talk about how she put the anthology together as her Laureate project and what she originally wanted to do—drop poems on wildflower infused paper from the sky onto empty fields and lots across the country. There are, however, a number of national parks that now have engravings of poems in them that will be there permanently.

Watching

• Movie: Wicked Little Letters (2023). This was delightful. When people in Littlehampton start getting profanity laced anonymous letters, they immediately blame Rose, a rowdy Irish immigrant with a love of swearing. She’s charged with the crime and sent to prison to await trial because she hasn’t the money to afford bail. But Woman Police Officer Moss takes up her cause and gets to the bottom of things. It’s funny and sad and makes a huge statement about the patriarchy without being in your face about it.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

It was a quiet week in the kitchen as James made easy meals that didn’t need to be eaten hot—spicy peanut noodles—or didn’t require standing over a hot stove—burritos. There was also a summer garden salad with greens, peas, and beans fresh picked from the garden with spicy chick peas, fresh sweet corn, radishes, and a sprinkle of wild bergamot flowers on top. Did you know that the leaves of wild bergamot taste like oregano and can be used as a substitute for the herb? They can also be made into a relaxing tea or a syrup that helps sore throats and stomach upset.