Dear Friend and Gardener: August 8, 2014

Dear Friend and Gardener,

I’m trying a technique often used in the vegetable garden in my landscape: cover cropping. I’m sowing buckwheat in bare areas in my landscape in hopes of suppressing weeds in the areas I’ve cleared. I just recently learned that buckwheat is not a grass, but is related to sorrel, which I grow and love. I’m hopeful that its long taproots will help break up my thick clay and bring some nutrients up from the subsoil. I have no idea if I’ll be able to harvest any buckwheat seed or not–that will be a little adventure to look forward to as the weather cools.

My vegetable seed-saving is in full swing. It’s a great way to make use of those Principe Borghese tomatoes whose skins split wide open before I can harvest and process them. I’ve also got a fine batch saved from my ‘Contender’ bush beans, and I know I’ll have more ‘Cossack Pineapple’ ground cherries than I’ll know what to do with. I’m donating packets to the Digging Durham Seed Library. I’m still refining my pickle recipe, and hoping to score a second-hand boiling water bath canner from my in-laws’ house so I can take my food processing adventures even further.

My landscape looks tired, but the promises of fall are already visible. The berries on my ‘Issei’ callicarpa are beginning to turn, and buds are forming on the chrysanthemums I cut back in June. My crinums started blooming today–such elegant things. Crinums are supposed to be wonderful passalong plants, but I have to wonder how that passing gets accomplished. From all I’ve read, they, like the amaryllis to which they are related, like to pull their bulbs down into the soil for a few years before they bloom, and don’t care to be moved after that. And we know that the bulbs grow to be the size of basketballs. Who could share one without use of a backhoe?

I’m thinking about building another raised bed before the fall, where I can grow some veg that will be harvested through the winter. I’m planning to order shallots and garlic–I missed the shallots last fall–and I’ve got a long list of spring-blooming bulbs that will need to be ordered soon. The gardening to-do list never ends! What a shame it would be if it did.

Best,

Amy