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Summer’s End 2023 (part 2)

With this past summer winding down and the first day of autumn this Saturday, I like taking a look around before the fall chill really starts to bite down. A few leaves have begun turning color, although the real show won’t begin for a few more weeks. Small flocks of birds are starting to congregate, in preparation for their migration south for the winter. The raised beds are past their prime with the potatoes having matured, their greenery dying back. Those I will leave in the ground for the time being. Wax beans have mostly gone by, with the last batch being just enough for a meal.

Zucchini has never done well for me, with only a single zuke on the vine that looks like it might actually amount to something, the others having withered and dropped off the plant without getting any longer than my thumb. This can be due to missing soil nutrients such as calcium or inadequate pollination by insects. Since I have seen a decent population of bumblebees this summer, I suspect that the soil may be the issue. Oh well, there’s always next year.

Carrots didn’t do all that great, with poor germination by the seeds this past spring. I had to replant and even then the seed sprouted slowly in a very desultory fashion. The excess amount of rain we received this summer may have affected their growth. Those that did grow will stay as long as possible in the ground before I pull them up to see how they did.

The carrots left over from last year that I planted as an experiment, blossomed profusely. Many, though not all of the flower heads are going to seed. I noticed with some surprise that ants seemed to favor the blossoms, climbing around on top of the flower heads. My initial suspicion was that they were farming aphids, but close examination of the flowers and stems showed no sign of aphids. Apparently the ants seemed to like the flowers themselves, but whether they did any pollinating is hard to say. I have seen ants on wild sarsaparilla blossoms also, so they may do a bit of pollinating here and there.

The last few weeks of September are when stores such as Home Depot and Walmart fill up with fall mums. The grocery stores offer them up as well. There seem to be just three main colors (that I saw), white, yellow and deep purple. I haven’t seen any of the orange-bronze color yet. As many of my potted flowers are going – well – to pot, I dug some of them out and planted fall mums.

Fall wildflowers put on a bold display with goldenrod and asters predominating. My personal favorite is the New England aster.

The blossoms are a vibrant purple with orange centers. Bees, wasps and yellowjackets zoom around over these tall flowers, eagerly pollinating them. Herbalists make use of these plants, employing the stems and root for relieving pain and healing wounds. The root by itself is claimed to ease diarrhea and fever. I haven’t had occasion to try them out, much preferring to just admire them and try sowing the seed heads about after they finish blooming in the hopes of helping them spread. If this plant does have medicinal value, it’s worthwhile to have as many as possible.

That’s all for this month. Hope your summer was a pleasant one.

Summers’ End 2023

As summer draws near its end, I like looking back at the season gone by. The biggest impression I have of it is the rain. Rain,rain,rain,rain,rain…etc. You get the picture. For almost a decade now, the summers have been abnormally dry, creating moderate to severe drought conditions in New Hampshire. Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction. For the month of July we received nearly 10 inches of rain in the northern half where I live, about triple what the average rainfall usually is. While I didn’t measure the rain in June, it seemed to be a similar amount. Flash flooding in the southern half of the state was severe, with many roads getting washed out and farmers getting their fields too soaked for anything to sprout. August has been drier with about four inches as of the 21^st, but there’s still a few weeks to go.

The plants of course have been loving it. You can almost hear a collective green sigh: Finally some decent rain! After the freak hard freeze of mid-May, oak trees quickly rebounded with new growth, though I see no sign of acorns. Mosquitoes, after a noted absence during the dry years, have experienced a renaissance, back in full force and as ferociously hungry as ever.

I expected to see a bumper crop of mushrooms this year but was surprised to see they are in no more abundance this summer than last. Still, one type of mushroom popped up in the back yard that I haven’t seen for a couple years; the morel.

I’m not a mushroom eater, so I left this specimen to run its life cycle and drop its spores for the next round of morels.

I spotted this patch of ghostpipes about a month ago. Many people, unfamiliar with the plant life in their neighborhoods, confuse these with mushrooms but they are actually a vascular plant, a flower in the same family as heather. Ghostpipes are parasitic, feeding off certain fungi in the soil. Because of this, they have no need for chlorophyll, hence their white coloration.

Mullein is an herbaceous biennial, preferring roadsides and waste areas. This particular plant is in its second year, going from the rosette above in late spring to this in late summer….

Just over four feet in height, it will drop its seeds in late summer and early fall, sowing the next generation. I’ll be collecting a few seeds and see if I can get this plant to grow on the bank in front of my home.

My garden loved the drenching rains as well.

The echinacea is quite tall this year at over four feet (you can see some beebalm in the background).

Phlox, both pink and white, are blooming profusely.

Black eyed Susans are doing well. I have both a domesticated version as well as the wild form. This is the domesticated flower.

I’m trying a experiment this year. At the beginning of the growing season, I found I still had several carrots which I had grown last year, in the bottom of the refrigerator drawer, unused. They had bright green leaves sprouting from their tops, so on a whim I planted them to see if they would grow.

They quicky took off with great gusto as the above picture shows, obviously ready for the second half of their life cycle. Carrots are biennials. The roots we see in the stores are the first year growth. The second year they produce flowers looking much like Queen Anne’s Lace, which isn’t surprising since Queen Anne’s is a wild ancestor of the store-bought carrot. They will hybridize quite freely, producing their ancestral form rather than the carrots we’re fond of.

Since there’s no Queen Anne’s Lace growing nearby (that I know of), the carrots I’m using, a Yellowstone and a Chanteray, should have each other to cross with. Yellowstone is open pollinated but I’m not sure about the other as the seed packet is long gone. Any seeds I collect, will be planted next year. What will grow, if anything, is anyone’s guess. Stay tuned!

Hope you all had a happy summer.

Peace, man.

Bird Nests

Several months ago, at the end of May, I found myself engaged in a peculiar battle. While puttering around the dining room, I spotted a robin flying low past the window with plant material in its beak. Realizing it was probably nest building, I watched eagerly for its next trip back. When it did fly by, it flew directly into the two-car garage attached to my home. This got a big NOPE from me, as I close the garage door (electric) whenever I am away. So I went out to see where the pair of robins were building.

I have a two-car garage, legacy of when my parents were alive and each owned their own car. Now that they have passed on, I use only one half of the garage for my own car and the other half for storage. Peering around, I spotted the nest being built on top of the garage door-opener mechanism for the storage side. As robins tend to be messy, using mud as part of their construction, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving the garage door open all the time for their convenience, this needed to be discouraged. I really didn’t want other critters getting the idea my garage was prime real estate; like skunks, raccoons, squirrels and the occasional bear.

The simplest tactic was to just keep the garage door closed, opening it only to make grocery trips. This proved to be effective, though I’ll admit they were persistent. When I came back from one trip, one robin flew OUT of the garage when I opened the door, so it must have scooted in when I was backing out to leave. Finally they gave up. I felt bad about it, but you have to put your foot down sometimes. Once they were gone, I used a broom to sweep off what they had accumulated. It was mostly weed stems and dried grass, loosely put together, so the nest building process had only just started.

A garage-door opening mechanism is not the most unusual nesting site for a pair of birds to select. Given that we humans hog a good deal of the scenery, there’s a serious shortage of good spots for our avian neighbors to set up housekeeping. This forces birds to try to adapt to what’s available. In fact, birds will often use considerable ingenuity in picking a nesting spot.

This pair of robins selected a basketball hoop (presumably unused) for their nest.

A wind chime was just the thing for this hummingbird.

And this mallard found a flower pot to be a perfectly ducky place for her nest.

For more eye-opening, not to mention laugh-out-loud, nesting choices, the BoredPanda web site has a long list of unusual nesting sites with accompanying photos. Given how determined our feathered neighbors are, it might be worth our while to create additional sites for them. Bird houses can easily be set up. Small platforms in an area secure from squirrels, cats and other predators will no doubt be greatly appreciated. The reward? Ensuring birds and their progeny will be around for a long time to come.

Hard Freeze: Part 2

Last month I noted the result of an unexpected late season hard freeze. While many trees and flowers shook it off, others were hard hit. While maple trees seemed unaffected, the new growth emerging on oak trees was blasted. Tiger lilies were a mixed bag, probably depending on their location and how mature they were. Some were whacked while others made it through just fine.

Now that just over a month has passed since the freeze, you would hardly know it happened. Oak trees looked pretty sad for a while but then started putting out new growth, most now looking nearly recovered. Too soon to know if the acorn crop will be affected. Other trees which had been hit also have begun sending out new leaves, signaling their recovery as well. My bleeding-heart plant lost its blossoms and upper growth but has put out new leaves showing it survived. Most of the tiger lilies have recovered so now it’s an ongoing battle to keep them free of the ever-hungry scarlet lily beetles and the disgusting grubs they produce.

Many areas all over the state of New Hampshire as well as elsewhere were hit by the May 18^th freeze. Apple orchards and vineyards were devastated in spite of desperate efforts by growers to save their crops. Apples, pears, cherries and much of the peach crop has been severely damaged. The fruit trees will recover but there will be little fruit for local markets this summer, only enough for farm stands.

There will be no locally produced wine as well, since the vines were blasted by the freeze and one local producer of wine reported he had to go as far afield as Pennsylvania to locate the grapes he needed to produce his wine. While orchardists and vintners are planting other crops this year, such as sweet corn and pumpkins, many have no crop insurance. One farmer stated this was the first year in 50 years of farming he had enough damage to make it worth having the insurance in the first place.

Local farmers know there are good years and bad years, so they make an effort to plant diverse crops as a hedge against problematic weather. It’s worth noting that one orchard owner after checking freeze damage, discovered that heirloom varieties such as Red Astrachan seemed to have weathered the freeze better than more recent varieties.

Supermarkets tend to stock fruits and vegetables which have a standard look and will ship well. Flavor is not always a high priority with them, only shipability and eye appeal. But these standardized varieties do not fit all climates zones, so the result is poorer performance under fluctuating climate conditions.

But this is beginning to change now. With weather getting more erratic and unreliable all the time, it might be well to take another look at older varieties of fruits and vegetables. They could very well be our bulwark against future crop failures.

Something to think about, the next time you come to plant your garden.

Happy July 4^th!

Hard Freeze

By mid spring in New Hampshire most trees and shrubs have begun leafing out. Flowers and low plants are well underway with their growth. Frosts can still occur here even as late as the end of May but most plants can tolerate the frost. Things start being a little more problematic if a hard freeze occurs.

Frosts usually happen when temperatures hover or dip below the freezing mark, 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 0 degrees Celsius. But a hard freeze happens when cold air pushes in, dropping temperatures down into the mid 20s fahrenheit. Many plants can tolerate even these frigid blasts but not all can.

Just over a week ago, a freeze warning was put out by the weather service for our area and that night the thermometer dropped to the mid-twenties. Fortunately most of my plants were still in pots so they could be moved inside the garage for protection. What was in the garden already had not yet sprouted and so were protected by the soil. Still many plants were challenged by these icy conditions and not all fared well.

My bleeding heart plant, in the process of blossoming, was bitten badly. The flowers were destroyed but leaves at the base of the plant survived, so I am hopeful the plant will make a full recovery. Tiger Lilies suffered damage with smaller plants getting the worst of it. Many do not look like they will make it. Larger plants, already several feet tall, looked really beat and for a while I wondered if they would pull through. Lower leaves wilted but the tops recovered. It remains to be seen if they will produce flowers.

Many trees and shrubs shrugged off the arctic blast but a few species got hit hard. Oak trees and one or two other species I’m not familiar with got the worst of it.

At this time of year, oaks are just starting to leaf out. The freeze destroyed the new growth, leaving behind withered brown vegetation. When they are touched, they are dry, crumbling under my fingers, so these will not be coming back.

Will trees be able to survive a hit like this? Looking about, I see many larger oak trees with their leaves blasted. Many smaller trees have been devastated as well though a few twigs here and there managed to make it through. As it is so early in the season, chances are good that the trees (many of whom surely have gone through this before) will be able to put out new growth. How acorn production will be affected by this remains to be seen. I have not been able to locate any information online which might tell me this. Many animals rely on acorns, eating them to fatten up for the winter or storing them away for lean times. Bears, turkeys, squirrels, chipmunks and others will all be affected by this if the acorn crop fails.

But nature is nothing, if not resilient. Natural selection will weed out those who cannot tolerate climate extremes, leaving behind the toughest and the hardiest. Northern New Hampshire is a good place for that. Like the old saying; If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.

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