Cow Pies

When we finally got a few days with temperatures under ninety degrees, my spirits revived.  We gardeners have to be outside doing something besides measuring the depth of the cracks in the garden.  I did slide the steel tape measure down a few and got a reading of two feet deep, surely a record.  It looked like some of the cracks might go on to become crevasses.

The soil  was hard as a rock, so no digging, weeding or cultivating was possible.  For every season there is a purpose, so I decided the time was ripe for assembling soil enrichment materials.  However, the drought removed any growing vegetation.

                       The grass everywhere was in this state, gray and dismal.

All summer, I'd been looking at the vacated cow pasture, with an eye to slipping through the barbed wire fence and swiping some of the cow pies.  So when the weather turned from unbearably hot, over a hundred degrees, to just hot, I set out with my big rope tub and turning fork.  Finding a really big dried cow plop, I realized that if you are the sort of person who considers such a thing a treasure, you must accept it about yourself.  I have.

If questioned, I was prepared to argue that I was taking it in trade for all the huge tracks the cows left when they got out and wandered through my place.  I could show them exhibits.  Anyway, no one seemed to notice.  Over several days, I got rather a lot and spread it over the garden in anticipation of fall rains.

Who knows, maybe this dried cow stuff has lost all its nutrients, but it was lightweight and should provide some organic material to be tilled in.

In my gardening life, I've shoveled a lot of manure.  When I had the dairy goats, I could load the big manure spreader with goat droppings and straw bedding in a few hours.  Later, when I lost the farm, I gardened in the small town where I lived before finding this place.  I was not above begging horse manure, even llama toidies.

A few days ago, this area was blessed with two inches of rain, the most we'd had at once in a long while. I was actually able to pull a few weeds in the iris bed.  Soon, I'll be able to till in the cow pies.  Life is good.

Midsummer Blues

The same force that causes me to get into a gardening frenzy in December is at work now.  The Summer Solstice is the signal for me to rein in my wild planting excesses.

This year, however, I have been struggling for some time with dry conditions, devoting lots of energy to hauling water or dragging the hoses around.  The statistics just in reveal that this is the second driest April through June on record.  Also, we rarely get our first hundred degree days until late July, and we've had so many now I've lost count.  How it could be so hot and dry and still be humid is one of Nature's nasty secrets.

It's like when you feel kind of crummy and the doctor says you have pneumonia, you feel immediately much worse.

After that, I understood that the reason the Remote Garden has not grown properly is drought. I gave the plants water, fish fertilizer, water, cow manure tea and water.  I can't carry enough water up there to make a difference.  These tomatoes simply do not have enough leaf cover to protect the tomatoes from sun scald.  When corn tassels at two feet tall, it's the same thing; it's not going to make it. The word is unthrifty.

Many trees, like these honey locusts, have been forced to lay off half of their leaves.  My first ripe cucumber looked delicious but when I tasted it, it was so bitter that hours later my lips and tongue were still smarting.
My daughter Lissa raised some like that one year and she said even the chickens wouldn't eat them, and they have no lips.

The only sensible thing for me to do is to stop watering the lost causes and concentrate on things that have a chance of survival.  This is the first time I've ever seen a peony bush wilt.  They did perk up with some water. Veggies and perennials first is my plan.  Some of the annual flowers have already shriveled up in the hot wind.

Even the Grand River doesn't look so grand, and is dropping daily.  I was sitting here at Fishing Beach one evening, listening to some fish tumbling rocks nearby when a young deer appeared on the sandbar.  I held very still and it couldn't seem to figure me out for some time.  It finally trotted along the sand upriver.  My side of the river has no sandbars, just rock. It's on the outer bend of the river, so I must hang out with the rip-rap. The river can now be waded across, so I may see how far I can walk on the sandy side.  At least I can go around the bend, if I haven't already.

Meanwhile, I got an order of wool sock yarns and am knitting away while listening to a biography of Birdseye, inventor of frozen foods.  Also for entertainment, I'm watching Shackleton and reading Black Ice, set in Antarctica.  It all helps.