LysmachiaMoon's blog: Harvest and Great Tidy Begins

I gave myself the day "off" yesterday and spent the whole time in the garden. Instead of starting out with a plan (which never seems to work out anyways!), I just decided to let the garden tell me what to do. The garden said "You there, wench. Get thee to the Asian Garden and tidy forth." So that's what I did. I spent the whole day working over that now very large area, digging out dozens of small black walnut trees (Squirrels have been plentiful the past couple of years and they bury the nuts everywhere), pulling weeds, etc. I finally FINALLY got the wisteria cut back and tied up to the new set-in-concrete post I put in a couple months ago. I'm hoping to train it to tree form; right now, it's been left to scramble wildly thru nearby trees and nobody's happy with that arrangement. I've got a few things that I need to dig out: a dwindling patch of lilies, two clumps of peonies, two low-growing junipers. All these had been thriving up there, but as the area matures it's become way too shady. Time for these to find new homes elsewhere in the garden.
Also pulled down MASSES of those wild cucumber vines. This year, I'm getting rid of them before they set seed so hopefully next year won't be so bad. Last year was a nightmare.

Now that I've got the area (mostly) cleaned up and open, I want to concentrate on "minimalizing" the planting. I'm going for wide areas of groundcover (Pachysandra, vinca, white violets) and thick mulch in the shady areas and ornamental grasses and iris in the sunnier bits. Progress in that area is glacially slow, but I am seeing progress... and for me, going slowly is usually the best way. It seems like those areas of the garden where I sit down and hammer out a master plan and then go full tilt to make it happen...a year or two later I'm scrambling to re-do or deciding it's all wrong. If I go slow, I can let things evolve.
There's still a lot of work to do. I've got a big patch of weeds/brambles that I've been working at getting rid of for the past few years. Once I've got that cleared off (again), I may see about getting some rocks in to make a traditional Japanese basin in a crevice of the existing native rocks. I've also got to get a very big, very ancient very dead apple tree cut down although that will probably be a job for much later in the autumn.

Good news is that those areas where I've cut, dug out and removed the paper mulberry saplings are finally clear. I've learned that the best way to get rid of it is to cut the stems down to about 1-2 feet and then dab RoundUp on the cut end, then spray a little on any remaining leaves. This seems to work best. Bad news is that I've still got a huge area of uncleared/uncut paper mulberry to deal with. I want to get at this soon, before leaf fall because it works best if the plants are green and actively growing.

Right now, my biggest "perplexity" is how to move enormous quantities of mulch up the hill and into the vast area of the Asian Garden, the Winter Garden, the Dry Garden, the Dark Garden, and the new Jungle Garden. I shudder at the thought of having to wheelbarrow or bucket mulch from the driveway all the way up the hill to these areas; I'm going to try to get the truck as far up the hill on the lawn as I can. How I regret not putting in some sort of access road to the upper part of the property 35 years ago.
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Picked a nice amount of concord grapes and am in the process of turning them into 2 quarts of juice. Best harvest of grapes I've ever had BUT we definitely are seeing a lot of damage to the vines from those Spotted Lantern flies. I killed four adults. They are impossible to swat, but I learned that a spritz of vinegar will kill them almost on contact and this is what I did. It incapacitated them and then I squashed them. I found that you have to spritz them face first; if you spritz them from behind, they hop forward and you lose them...they move like lightning. All of Pennsylvania is on a search and destroy mission for this very destructive invasive pest. Educate yourself and show no mercy.
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Got my scanty harvest of cukes ground up and draining, I'm going to make a couple pints of hamburger relish. Later I need to get my jalepenos picked and make hot sauce. Got another bushel of tomatoes to process too, but that might be tomorrow because this afternoon I'm taking a couple of friends out to lunch. One lady is in for 2 weeks from Berkeley, CA, where's she's a professor. She's staying with family here. I adore her... she harkens back to the hippie chick days and makes me believe that there might be hope for us all.
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MONARCHS! We released 5 monarchs yesterday; 3 female, 2 male. I'm so chuffed! I've got about a dozen more chrysalis in various stages and a handful of caterpillars. It's getting a bit late in the season, but I'm going to do another thorough search of local milkweeds to see if I can find any more caterpillars. So far, I've had only 5 or 6 fails so our success rate is pretty good (estimating at about 93%).

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And, finally, after 1 year 10 months, good news: the braces are coming off and I'll have a nice new smile on September 27.

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