As soon as things dry out, get going on some of your summer gardening chores. The rain has undoubtedly set you back some, and may have even caused you to forego some of your usual activities in the landscape and garden. Just remember that you don’t want to tramp through soggy soil unless you have to. If you go out to pick tomatoes, it will compact the soil.

Watch out for Japanese beetles. This is their time of year, and this year they seem to be quite prolific. Several products are on the market to help control them, but any spray or dust has to be reapplied after a rain. You can remove the beetles by hand, dropping them into an empty milk jug, or knock them into a pail of soapy water. You might also try using a hand-vac to remove them if you can do so without damaging foliage.

Keep the blooms on annuals and perennials coming by deadheading as soon as flowers begin to fade. Hopefully, you have been able to cut and arrange some bouquets from your garden flowers. Wait until later in the summer or early fall to let a few flowers remain on and form seed that you can save.

Look for sales. Check out the discount and sales sections of garden centers. Give plants a good looking over to be sure you can bring them back from the brink. Some stores will also be cutting prices on seeds and supplies, so watch for deals and stock up.

During the month of July, you can make second plantings of pole string beans, pole lima beans and bush lima beans. Plant Southern peas and rutabagas. Start transplants of collards, broccoli, cabbage, eggplant and tomatoes.

A frequently asked question among gardeners is, “How late can I prune my azaleas?” July, before the plant sets its flower buds for next year, is the latest you should prune if you expect to have flowers in the spring.

Weeds have thrived in this wet weather — in the lawn, the landscape and the vegetable garden. Hoeing and hand-pulling are the best ways to handle weeds around food crops. Put down a good layer of mulch to discourage leftover seeds from sprouting.

When using weed killers, either spray or granular, around ornamentals and in lawns, read directions carefully. Be sure the product is labeled for the specific weeds you are trying to get rid of. Also be sure it is labeled as safe for use on the type of grass or around the ornamentals you do not want to harm. Always avoid applying herbicides on windy days or right before a rain.

Planning an extended out-of-town trip or vacation? If you have houseplants or a vegetable garden, you may want to ask a gardening friend to watch over things for you, watering and harvesting as needed. You can return the favor when they go on vacation or let them keep the produce they pick in exchange.

Have you snapped some pictures of your garden yet this year? And I don’t mean that new pond in your backyard created by our massive amounts of rain. When the sun shines, get out your camera and snap pictures of the flowers and plants that are really outdoing themselves this year. If nothing else, you can post them on Facebook.

Remember to keep tabs on local pick-your-own operations and roadside stands for fruits and vegetables that you don’t grow yourself and that are only available for a short time period. Blueberries, for example, are in full production right now, so don’t let the opportunity to load up on them pass you by.

Contact the writer: 138 Nature’s Trail, Bamberg, SC 29003.

Sow seeds indoors now for late summer and fall transplants such as marigolds, zinnia, petunia, portulaca, and ageratum.

Tomato transplants can be planted now for fall gardens.  The best varieties to make it through the intense summer heat are Surefire, Celebrity, Heatwave, Merced, and cherry types.

Remove faded flowers from plants before they set seed in order to keep them growing and producing more flowers.  A light application of fertilizer every four to six weeks would also encourage growth.

Remove dead, diseased, and damaged branches from trees and shrubs. 

Apply a slow-release iron fertilizer to plants that are showing yellow leaves with green veins.  Be sure to keep iron off of sidewalks and any other areas that could be stained.

Check any new additions to your landscape to be sure that they are getting adequate water—newly transplanted plants require much more water than established ones.  Hold off on planting anything but bedding plants during the summer—fall will be a much easier time to establish new shrubs and trees.

Check for blackspot on roses and spray with a registered fungicide.

Check for evidence of spider mites, which are common in hot weather.  Look for tan speckles on lower leaves and/or spider webbing.  Plants may turn brown and crisp where severe infestations occur.  Hose plants down with a strong jet of water several days in a row to wash the mites off. 

Check for white grubs by digging into the soil of your lawn and flowerbeds.  These insect larvae appear about six weeks after the major June beetle flight has occurred.  If you find five to seven grubs within one square foot of soil, treat with Merit, or any other insecticide labeled for grub worms.  Follow label directions for application.

Water garden and lawn only as needed—not necessarily on all three of your designated watering days.  Give plants a thorough soaking rather than frequent, light sprinklings.  Be sure to avoid runoff of water into streets.

TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW)-The summer weather may have caused damage to plants and the Fairlawn Plaza Mall offered its Sick Plant Clinic Monday to diagnose plant problems.

The Sick Plant Clinic is sponsored by the Shawnee County Extension Master Gardeners.

Volunteers and local extension personnel worked from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. Monday to identify plants, weeds and insects and discuss general pest care.

They also helped people with ailing plants, including vegetables, fruit crops and indoor plants.

By Carol Stocker

At the recent annual meeting of the GCFM in Mansfield, outgoing President Heidi Kost-Gross was lauded for her efforts championing the fight against electronic billboards. She reported that the 13,000 membership of the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts was up slightly from last year.There were also reports on efforts to stem the Asian Long Horn Beetle South of Worcester and about its top notch Flower Show School.

The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program will host the opening of several private gardens new to the tour, including five in Bristol County, Saturday, July 13, 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. These are the Coolidge-Goldman Garden, 340 Barneys Joy Road, Dartmouth, The Meadows, 189 Smith Neck Road, The Meadows at 191 Smith Neck Road, both in South Dartmouth, Anne Almy’s Garden 1100 Horseneck Road, Westport, and Penny Garden, 246 River Road, Westport.

The Meadows was designed in 1910 by Warren Manning for ambassador Alanson B. Houghton and his brother Arthur and their families. In 1937 The North House garden was redesigned by the celebrated Ellen Biddle Shipman and is currently being restored by the present owners. James O’Day has written a new book about the estate.

There will also be an Open Day program Saturday, July 20, 10 a.m.to 4 p.m. in Middlesex County, which will include Glenluce Garden, 18 Marlboro Road, Stow, A Secret Garden at 19 Washington Ave., Sterling, Rock Bottom Garden, 47 Marlboro Road, Stow, Maple Grove, 16 School Street Boylston, and the must-see Brigham Hill Farm, 128 Brigham Hill Road, North Grafton.

For more information on all of these, visit www.opendaysprogram.org and www.gardenconservancy.org.

The Boothbay Region Garden Club of Boothbay Harbor in Maine will host its Home and Garden Tour July 26 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased through the Boothbay Harbor Region Chamber of Commerce (207-633-2353).

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July 6th 1:14 am | Seth Kantner
 
 

Tip No. 1: Water.

For nearly 20 years now, June has been my traditional time to travel to villages, running Maniilaq Association’s garden project.

When the ice breaks up on the Kobuk, I have to boat away from my birthplace and lifelong home, and go to work. The land is lit in sun, the river flooding, birds singing and the beavers busy all night in their lakes. It’s a bountiful and beautiful time of year and I don’t much want to leave.

But I grew up with a tradition of folks seeking summer work — commercial fishing and construction jobs — and this job is a short-season one, and linked directly to endless sunlight. As a result the work is manic and rewarding and stressful — like in nature, I guess — all those blueberries and fireweed and lousewort’s leaping to life in spring. All the spruce tips greening, the willows and alders and birches leafing out, swans and geese and loons laying eggs, and thousands of caribou having kids. None of them waste a moment, and I enjoy their tight schedule.

Tip No. 2: Everything needs love and care.

After spending Breakup on ice and walking the tundra, every village I travel to is an incredible oasis of wrecked equipment. Trucks with flat tires slump where they died; new snowgoes, wrecked snowgoes, upside down half-dismantled snowgoes; boats buried in tall young willows, and four-wheelers in all stages of death and disrepair.

Lurking back in the brush are the yellow monsters, heavy equipment randomly rusting behind homes and city office buildings — backhoes and dozers, graters and dump trucks and loaders left after countless construction projects over the decades.

Landing in Kobuk, my assistant, Linnea Wik and I hurry down the steps of the Era Alaska Caravan into sweltering heat. The pilots race to unload case after case of Pepsi. I marvel at the irony — how these pilots stay in great shape, handling so much canned pop.

This heat wave arrived directly after a frigid fog off the coast ice. I’m wilting and lusting after one of those blue cans though I don’t drink pop. Linnea has been in California; she smiles in the sun and carries boxes of plants across the dusty gravel.

I head for the shore, to search for our program rototiller. The sun burns my shoulders. The leaves are green along the riverbank. I wish a cloud would appear in the sky. I spot the handles of the tiller in Alex Sheldon’s yard. Shedding sled dogs rise in the heat to growl at me.

I’ve known Alex since I was a kid. He’s an Inupiaq man, handsome and humorous. Fifty years back he was friends with Linnea’s and my parents—back before all this clutter came to the Arctic. Later, he ran the Iditarod, and one winter borrowed my lead dog, Murphy, to run around the village. Now he’s out of town, and the recent flood has made rubble of his yard. The red Troybuilt tiller is forlorn, packed with mud and grass and wet caribou hair. When I pull the starter I hear sand grating. The exhaust coughs up orange rusty water. It’s depressing. I used to love small engines, and this one needs a lot of that now.

Linnea and I give up on the machine; we haul shovels and rakes and her pride and joy—her broadfork–to Nina Harvey’s garden to till the soil. Along the sleepy street we acquire a young man on a bicycle. He rides circles around us. He’s wiry and thin, and talks more and faster and louder than villagers generally do. “I’m Guy Moyer. The Guy Moyer, I like to say, since my grandfather Guy Moyer passed away. He was a great gardener. I’m contemplating having a garden. I’m cultivating the thought.”

Within a few minutes Guy makes use of my entire repertoire of little big words: nemesis, detrimental, exponential, dichotomy, etc. “I’m like an XM radio,” he says. “What channel do you want to hear?”

For the next two hours while we work, he rattles on. Nina gets worn down by the chatter, or overheated, and she climbs the steps up to her house. Guy tells stories, always returning to details of stealing carrots from his grandfather’s garden, the joy of plucking a large one, the feel of rubbing it clean on his shirt. He even does a Rambo-like imitation of himself as a five-year-old, making a night raid on Guy Moyer’s famed garden. He crouches behind fireweeds, pretending to inhale the “longs” he used to find (unfinished cigarette butts) and then sprints toward the rows we’ve tilled.

“I call them aisles,” he says, moving fast. “Not rows. I looked for the little markers. You know why? To find the carrot aisles.”

I find myself wishing for a pencil, to write down his words. My memory is useless for these things; my mind like one of those automatic toilets at the Anchorage airport — WHOOSH — flushing randomly before I want it to, everything gone. I wish someone would line this dude out with his own Inupiaq comedy show on TV. From the far end of Nina’s garden the sunshine of Linnea’s smile agrees with me.

Tip No. 3: Talk to your plants.

From Kobuk, George Douglas boats us and our plants down to Shungnak. Before we leave, Guy offers George a pound of bread yeast. Apparently the Kobuk school gave out pounds of it this spring. “Thought you might want to make pizza,” Guy says. George says no thanks, he has plenty. In my mind I’m thinking, Yeah, right, guys. You’re talking homebrew.

George swings a blue 36-pack of Pepsi into his boat. “It’s the quality, not the quantity,” he says when I question him about his purchase. I nod, wondering about sunstroke. Maybe I have it.

The boat ride is splendid, just in time to save me from melting. At Shungnak we disperse plants, and then hide out in the clinic, letting the sun swing north.

At 9 p.m., we head to work again. Shungnak is more wrecked vehicles, with a backdrop of stunningly beautiful scenery, the tundra a huge green fling to the mountains at the pale blue edge of the sky. It’s stifling out still, the Death Star glaring from the north. Linnea and I assist a woman named Johanna planting her tilled silt soil. She has a cloud of kids and quickly more show up. It’s fun, but stressful with so many little feet trampling around the unfenced garden.

“I could plant?” a little boy asks. He’s eight, maybe. I start to answer, but from the lake in the middle of town I hear the chortling call of a grebe. I pause, call to the bird. The serious little boy asks what kind of duck it is, and I tell him of searching for grebe eggs, when I was a kid.

“Let’s go look,” he urges. “You want to? Come on. I find some last year.”

I’m surprised. I remember my brother and me searching with kayaks. The eggs weren’t easy to find. I’d like to join the boy, to acknowledge and encourage him. But we have work to do. “We have to work,” I say.

When we are done, George strolls up wearing trunks and a tanktop. He hands me a shopping bag. Inside are huge wedges of homemade pizza, hot still, with corn meal on the bottom of the crust, and fresh red peppers, olives and pepperoni on top. Open-mouthed, Linnea and I stare into the bag, not believing our fortune.

We stroll toward our next job, famished and searching for shade. Finally we sit on a dusty plywood box to eat. The little boy appears again. He has a grebe egg in his hand. How did he find it so fast? “Let’s go look more,” he urges. “Come on.”

“I have to work,” I say, agonizingly. “I know it doesn’t look it, sitting here eating. But we have to.” I explain how to check if the egg is good–with a cup of water—and that a floater should go back in the nest.

The little boy goes away again, and an old friend saunters up. He tells us the boy’s name, of him setting rabbit snares by himself, and how it was him who found the man down along the river. He tells of suicide and hardship and abandonment. “He’s the one who found the body.”

In sober silence we walk down to Wesley Wood’s old garden. It’s cooler there by the water, and Wesley’s daughters and relatives are turning the mucky soil. The bugs come out and join us. After midnight Linnea and I carry our tools up the hill. Some of our plants left outside have been stolen. Kids play by the steps of the tribal office. One of them is the little boy. “How to grow?” he asks, so serious.

I hand him a cabbage start, explaining as best I can. Our plants are drooped, wilted yet again today. I’m hot and tired, so impressed, and nearly hopeless. “Here,” I say. “These are the roots.”

Tip # 4: Love your garden.

In Ambler, after dispersing plants, I chat with Gladys Jones. She tells me she and Lawrence are building a log cabin at camp now. Previously, they built their own home, and then a grocery store, too, that they manage together.

Her words and accomplishments seem surreal here in the dusty and worn tribal office. “Where did you find such an energetic husband?” I joke thoughtlessly.

“I think it’s me,” Gladys says with a small smile. “And I want to study to be a physician’s assistant. It’s good being busy.”

Later, the villages and people begin to blur. In Noorvik, we rent a boat ride upriver to Kiana. The drivers turn out to be two smiling teenaged girls, Tinmiaq and Iriqtaq Hailstone. “We’ve just did three more episodes for our reality show,” they tell us proudly. I nod blankly; I’ve never owned a TV. I’m worried about these cabbage plants in the open boat. The girls turn to Linnea, explaining the show.

Working in Kiana late into the night, we’re accompanied by two girls, aged four and five, Danielle and Shayden. They’re sun-cooked, red-cheeked, their bare arms and legs lumpy with bug welts. They watch and help and never complain, all the while squinting and scratching and waving away mosquitoes. Only once Shayden holds out a can of WD-40, asking quietly, “This one is bug dope?”

In Deering, Marlene Moto wears a back brace like something out of a science fiction movie. Somehow she scurries across a maze of dog diggings, to point out where she wants another garden. She stands staring off across the distant sweep of land, like she’s done that every day of her life.

In Kivalina, at the last garden, my new tiller won’t run. Again Linnea happily presses her human-powered broadfork into the soil. I give up and join her. Beside us the Swan ladies cut blubber off ugruk hides. Laughter drifts over from their work. Old Joe Swan putters with the little tiller engine. “You got the power,” he croons to it.

“Is he a rototiller whisperer?” Linnea murmurs.

“I’ve heard of talking to plants,” I tell Joe. “But not to engines.”

“I’m more accustomed to hearing people swear at them,” Linnea whispers again.

“Oh, you have to talk to them,” Joe says. “You’ve got the power…”

Smiling, Linnea and I turn back to the soil. Occasionally we pull out a shard of glass, a chunk of rusted steel, caribou teeth, a .22 cartridge. Suddenly I remember something Guy blurted out up in Kobuk. “I like to stay positive,” he said. “Too many people here hook both wires up to the negative terminal.”

I think about those words, and my past and future, our region’s past and future, as we continue gently pressing tiny turnip starts into the dark earth. And watering them.

 

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