Friends, perhaps you will be astonished, but after all these years of gardening I finally discovered how amazing a hoe is. I know! What took me so long?

For starters, I never thought I had a use for it. A hoe is intended for weeding and my garden beds are so packed with plants that using a big hoe to chop off weeds is not practicable. Garden paths however, turn out to be a different story.

During my garden vacation a couple weeks ago I spent a lot of time on my hands and knees weeding the garden beds and weeding the paths as I went along. Everything looked grand for about a day. And then plants began popping up in the bare paths again—nature does not like bare dirt. Well, you say, why don’t you lay down wood chips or straw on your paths? Straw is a tripping hazard for James whose feet don’t always do what he wants them to. And wood chips, tried that a few times, but since we allow the chickens into the big garden during off growing season, they scratch the wood chips all over the place and in spring I spend way too much time getting the wood chips out of the vegetable beds.

Looking at all the arugula/rocket, amaranth, and milkweed sprouting back up in the paths, I thought, could I use a hoe on them? I did some research online about the different kinds of hoes and how to use them, and decided I needed a scuffle hoe. But until I could get one, I remembered that once in the long ago, James gifted me with a garden tool set that included a small hand hoe. I dug around through boxes in the basement utility room and there it was in its dusty and never used glory. The handle is short and requires one to stoop over or crawl on hands and knees to use it. The blade is also a solid metal triangle and requires one to chop the weeds, or in my case it’s more like hack.

Before I put down cash for a scuffle hoe, I wanted to make sure a hoe was the tool for the job. Out to the garden we went. Took me a couple tries to figure out the angle at which to use the hoe, but once I got it, I worked my way gleefully down the garden path singing, Off with their heads!!! It took a little over ten minutes to do the length of a path with the hoe—even bent over the whole time which my back didn’t exactly appreciate. It would have taken me 30 minutes or more to do by hand crawling down the path.

James works near a local hardware store that had a scuffle hoe in stock. He was kind enough to pick one up for me. He stopped on his way home from work, and carried the hoe home on his bike like he was a knight with a lance on a horse. My hero!

Of course I had to test out the new hoe when I got home from work. I stood on a path and pushed the hoe back and forth. I swear there were angels floating on clouds and singing a glorious tune. Yeah, it is that good. The tool is incredibly lightweight and I didn’t have to bend over. And all those little sprouting plants? Goners! Five minutes and I was halfway down a path. Seriously life changing.

I was really looking forward to getting out and having a hoe-down this weekend. Unfortunately, we’ve had a red air quality alert since Friday night due to Canadian wildfire smoke. Every time I go out the door I have on an N95 mask, which is warm all on its own, but add humidity and even light exercise and it is just sweaty and gross. The amaranth and arugula sprouting in the paths get a temporary stay of execution.

While I was out hanging up some laundry to dry this morning, I noticed the orange peach tomatoes have little tiny green fruit on them. Happiness! I’ve not grown this variety of tomato before. Allegedly, they are peach-colored and even lightly fuzzy. They are descended from an old French variety called Yellow Peach that was used as a substitute for making marmalade. I’m not sure if this orange variety will make a good marmalade, but from what I can suss out, they do make excellent tomato jam. If all goes well, I will let you know in a few weeks.

For the last two weeks James and I have been making nightly blood donations to the black raspberry patch. Those will be done this week and the garden is now moving into the bean portion of the growing season. I have yellow wax bush beans that are a day or two away from picking. The Kentucky wonder and purple podded pole beans are covered in flowers and have already exceeded the height of the deck so much faster than in years past. The scarlet runner beans are blooming too. And the skunk, succotash, and Hidasta red pole beans are all racing to the tops of their trellises.

The lazy housewife pole beans are the only beany disappointment. I have not grown them before. They are a medium-sized white bean and can be eaten as a snap bean or a shelled dry bean. I planted perhaps 20 of them when I sowed all the rest of the beans and not a single one sprouted. I waited three weeks, just in case, and then planted another 20 or more. I think of that round three or four sprouted and they aren’t exactly racing up the trellis like the other beans. I definitely won’t be growing those again.

I think probably in a week or two the cucumbers will be fruiting too. I haven’t grown cucumbers in ages because I can’t eat them raw and I don’t really care for dill pickles, so I’ve always been big into growing zucchini as a kind of substitute. James makes a delicious zucchini relish. But the zucchini has not been doing well in the garden for the last three or four years because of high heat, humidity, and flash drought. So this year I am not growing zucchini and decided to try lemon cucumbers instead.

These are an heirloom variety from 1894, and are apparently quite popular in Australian farmers markets. Seed Saver’s says they have a hint of a citrusy flavor and they are “easy to digest.” They are also drought tolerant. So I thought I’d give them a try. If they turn out to not agree with me when raw, then James can make sweet relish with them and pickles of the dill and not-dill variety.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I planted the seeds. Actually, I was imagining a well-behaved bed of sprawling cucumber vines based off something I read from a professional gardener trialling climate change tolerant vegetables. She recommended allowing cucumbers to sprawl across the ground where their leaves will shade the soil, keeping in moisture and suppressing weeds.

Maybe I would have a well-behaved sprawl if I had only planted three or four vines. But back in May, when the bed was empty, “only” three or four plants didn’t seem like enough, so I ended up seeding a dozen, maybe even more. It’s hard to tell at this point where one plant ends and the other begins. These cucumbers are vigorous growers and by report, highly productive. They have been blooming for close to two weeks now, and I am starting to spy tiny little cucumbers the size of marbles. Even if I am able to eat them raw, there are going to be so many James had better start lining up the canning jars and getting his relish and pickle recipes ready.

I have an addendum to the rabbit saga. After we evicted the second little rabbit and patched up our perimeter, we got to spend a blissful couple of days rabbit-free. Until we saw another rabbit in the garden Wednesday! Much chasing and beating of the bushes ensued, but the little critter kept disappearing when they ran up towards the deck. Down on hands and knees—clearly a posture I have gotten used to—peering beneath the deck revealed no hiding rabbit. We assumed they dodged beneath the deck and out the other side and was hiding somewhere. But where?

Yesterday we were out watering the garden from the rain barrels and lo, the rabbit! The chase was on. They revealed to us a gap on the fence by the chicken garden gate when they ran through it and then sat just on the other side of the gate. Thinking I would scare them away, I stomped up to the gate and yelled, go away rabbit! What did rabbit do?

The bold bun did not run away, but ran back through the gap, into the garden, and practically across my feet! We watched as they bounded towards the other end of the garden near the rain barrel and the deck, and then poof! Disappeared. Some magical rabbit trick.

We gave up and went back to watering. That’s when James discovered the rabbit’s secret. Along the fence behind the rain barrel, the rabbit had dug under the wire and made a hidden entrance and exit. James filled in the hole and put a big rock on top of it for extra emphasis and to prevent a re-dig. Assuming the rabbit disappeared through the hole when we were chasing them, we are, once again, rabbit free. For now. We think.

Reading

• Book: Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber. A fired, or retired, professor, depending on who you ask, is trying to resume working on his magnum opus, a book-length essay about Montaigne. His wife died a week ago and he is deep in unacknowledged grief. His smartphone keeps chirping and interrupting him and he doesn’t know how to turn it off. And it’s time for another cup of coffee. Essentially the book is about not writing. It is beautiful and sad and ultimately hopeful. If you choose to read this though, you should know it has three sections and no chapters or paragraphs, and the sentences sometimes are 2 pages long. Nonetheless, it is easy to read if you allow yourself to flow along on the river of words.
• Humor: McSweeney’s: New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Violated the Constitution.” Because mockery is also resistance

Listening

• Podcast: Green Dreamer: Sophie Strand: Glitching towards a return to each other. An interrogation of the dominant culture’s obsession with wellness and its discomfort with chronic illness. Also a great discussion about community.
• Podcast: Planet Critical: What’s Really Warming the Planet, with Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop. Wedderburn-Bisshop is an Australian scientist who recently published a paper concluding that the largest driver of climate change is not fossil fuels but animal agriculture that produces gigantic amounts of methane. The problem is, when talking about climate change, the measures of impact between fossil fuels and animal agriculture, carbon and methane, are assessed on different scales and timeframes. However, with a whole bunch of new data that spans decades, if we calculate everything in the same way on the same scale, animal agriculture is driving climate change. Which also means, this is something each and every one of us can do something about simply by eating a plant-based diet. It’s a fantastic and interesting conversation and I’m not just saying that because I’m vegan!

Watching

• Movie: Friendship (2024). This stars Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, and while I don’t find Rudd (AKA Ant Man) to be all that great of an actor, he does really well in this movie about a suburban dad (Tim Robinson) who just wants a friend. It’s delightfully awkward and uncomfortable.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

This morning we had black raspberry compote and almond “whipped cream” on sourdough waffles. How many ways are there to say yum? The other day James also made a deep dish “pea-zza” using all the peas we managed to harvest after the rabbits ate most of them. It was so good I am sad there are no more peas. I’m going to check my seed supply and see if I might be able to plant some in early August for a fall harvest, provided we can keep the wascally wabbits out of the garden.