There are good and bad things about going away for a few weeks right after you've planted the garden. On the one hand, you miss you on all the little changes and have lots of weeding to do when you get home. On the other, when you arrive back things have exploded and are grown enough to impress you, and the weeds are still not so bad that they have taken hold.
Then there are the mysteries. Did those things just not come up? Were they eaten by slugs? Crowded out by the proliferating fennel?
This year, I think I got an answer to why the four o-clocks I have planted for many years running never do seem to come up. The answer is that they come up, but something is destroying them. Slugs are my go-to pest, and we've got them here, bad. This year, I found one sad, shredded little four o'clock, hanging in there. With giganto chomp marks out of the leaves. We must be slug heaven or something.
I also try to move things around, to keep down the growth of fungal pests blights in the same place, but I'm not always successful. For one thing, nothing ever seems to both the chives, and they are in a clump like an oak tree, so they get to stay whereever. They are trying to spread, and I am having to get more ruthless with them. [take note Armand, those chives I brought for your garden bear watching] And I commit the cardinal sin of not moving my tomatoes, because there is really only one spot that is good for them in the whole yard. So far so good, and that's the spot that I keep piling on the compost to keep the soil rich. The only down side to the tomato area is that with the cages and wood stakes, all the local birdies like to sit there. This, in itself, isn't a problem, as I love birdies, and so do the dogs and kitties who gaze fondly at them. However the birds eat anything in the yard that grows seeds - see where this is going? - and now everything that grows anywhere else, now comes up in the tomato zone. One plus to that is that I now have catnip, which came from who knows where, but started coming up gangbusters around the tomatoes, and which I have now moved elsewhere.
Alas, with all this goodness, I have to leave again for a few days. Hopefully the slugs will stay at bay and the weather will be cooperative. Maybe when I get back I will mobilize for some photos.
Posted by binky at June 17, 2006 09:10 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Random Thoughts