Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Summer Harvest

Although the summer solstice is sometimes referred to as Midsummer, this term only makes sense if you think of summer as the six months between the spring and fall equinoxes. The real midpoint of summer falls right around now, at the beginning of August. It's a time when the garden is normally at its peak, cranking out a huge variety of veggies. But sadly, this year's weird weather (including a week of blistering heat followed by pounding rain) doesn't seem to have agreed with our plants. In the past week, we've harvested only:

• 5 cucumbers (one of our old Boston Pickling cukes and four South Winds, our new variety)
• 4 Premio tomatoes, 4 San Marzano tomatoes, and 14 Sun Gold cherry tomatoes
• 7 ounces of bush cherries 
• 1 zucchini 

That's not bad, but it's a lot less than we got last year or the year before. The cucumbers are doing all right, but the tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini have all been a bit sluggish. Worst of all, the plums, which according to their normal two-year cycle should be producing a bumper crop right now, have yielded hardly anything. The Golden Gage plums haven't ripened yet, so there's still a chance of a decent harvest there, but Brian has already picked the Opal tree clean and collected only 9.5 pounds in total—less than one-third of our 2023 harvest and one-fifth of what we got in 2021. And the Mount Royal has done even worse, producing not a single plum that survived to full ripeness. 

More worrying still, the tree itself is looking rather peaky. Its branches, even after two years of diligent pruning, are still heavily infected with black knot, and its leaves have come in small, thin, and riddled with tiny holes. The most likely culprit, apparently, is a fungal infection called shot hole disease. To deal with it, sources recommend removing and destroying every bit of infected foliage, then giving it a dose of fungicide in late fall. Unfortunately, there's pretty much no part of the tree that isn't affected, and the other two trees seem to have it to some extent as well. So to follow this advice properly, we'd have to strip all three trees bare, which is hardly practical. Probably the best we can do is rake up and burn all the leaves in the fall, spray all the trees with our usual copper fungicide, and cross our fingers.

However, there are some plants in our yard that are absolutely loving this weather: the weeds. Between personal travel, business travel, and hazardous weather conditions, Brian and I haven't been able to spend much time in the garden over the past few weeks, and the crabgrass and mugwort took advantage of the lull to invade every planting bed in the yard—flowers, herbs, asparagus—while growing to nearly waist height in the open areas. Brian spent most of yesterday out there with the mower and the string trimmer just beating them back, then we both spent some time on the ground carefully hand-weeding the areas that couldn't be mowed. Brian even put up a new barrier around the flowerbed, using some big pieces of 4-by-four lumber he had sitting out back, to make it harder for the weeds to retake the territory in future. (The phone line insulators that previously marked out the boundaries of the bed went on top.)

So, on the one hand, we don't have much of a harvest to celebrate for this particular Gardeners' Holiday. But we can at least celebrate a temporary victory over the weeds. We can't claim to have defeated them, but at least they're not at risk of eating the house, and that's more than we could say two days ago.

Taming the hell strip

Ever since we bought this house, Brian and I have been trying to reduce the amount of grass on the property—particularly in the little boxed-in front yard. We added the three plum trees, each with its own little island of mulch. We created a bed of day lilies along the cinder block wall. We made several attempts to get a ground cover established in the other portions of the yard, with varying degrees of success. And last month, Brian announced that he'd like to remove the grass from an area I'd never really thought about before: the narrow slice of turf between the sidewalk and street, which is apparently even more of a nuisance to keep mowed than the rest of the yard.

He wasn't quite sure what he wanted on this little sliver of land, aside from "not grass," so I offered to do a little research. I learned, first of all, that this narrow plot is commonly known as the "hell strip," and second, that it's a tricky area to landscape. Plants need to be narrow enough that they won't impinge on the sidewalk and tough enough to survive with very little soil underfoot. And in our yard, they face the additional challenges of heavy clay soil, full afternoon sun, and hungry deer and groundhogs. After consulting several sources online to see what could stand up to this environment, I proposed a mixture of salvia and rudbeckia (Black-Eyed Susans), with maybe a few little thyme plants to fill in the gaps. We already had salvia seeds from our planter project, so we bought a packet of rudbeckia seeds (as well as one of English lavender, which happened to catch Brian's eye), and I figured we'd plant them in the spring.

But this weekend, Brian decided he didn't want to wait that long. With an extra free day from the holiday weekend, he wanted to tackle a project he could see through from start to finish. He started sketching out some plans on Friday, and on Saturday morning he was out there turfing out the sod from the hell strip. He didn't do the whole thing, just a 12-foot section starting at the edge of the driveway. Then he disappeared into the shop and emerged with a small, odd-shaped bracket he'd built out of some pressure-treated 2-by-4 lumber he had leftover from the planter project. This little lopsided trapezoid was just the right size to fill in the angle formed by the driveway apron, turning the rest of the hellstrip into an even rectangle.

Next to that, he began laying out a small paved area that would serve as a landing pad for our trash and recycling bins. We didn't have any groundcloth to keep weeds out, but we had some heavy paper leaf bags that had proved equally effective at weed suppression in our garden paths. Laid flat, the bag was exactly wide enough to fill in the strip. Brian then began covering it with the last of the pavers leftover from our patio project, which had spent the last several years stashed in the shed. After filling in the cracks with fine sand (from a bag we acquired so long ago we've forgotten what it was originally for, he boxed in the remainder of the strip with more lengths of 2-by-4 and filled it up with topsoil. (He didn't nail these pieces together, so whenever he wants to expand the hellstrip planting, he can simply remove the end piece and add more boards to extend the frame.)

By the end of Saturday, he had the entire strip neatly laid out and already looking much better than it had before. However, we knew that if we simply left it like this, it wouldn't stay nice-looking for long. The "grass" (which in our yard really means a mixture of crabgrass and other lawn weeds) would re-colonize the nicely-laid-out bed in short order if we didn't get something else in there. We didn't have time to start a bunch of salvia, lavender, and Black-Eyed Susans indoors, and if we sowed the seeds directly in the midsummer heat, they might not survive. So we decided to stop by the same nursery where we'd bought the plants for our large planters last spring and grab a few deer-tolerant plants to serve as place holders for the rest of the season.

Unfortunately, the nursery was closed, presumably on account of the holiday weekend. We tried the nearby Home Depot, but the only suitable plants we found there were a few salvias, which we already had at home. So we switched to Plan B: digging up and transplanting some of the salvia from our planters, along with any other plants we could scavenge from our flowerbeds. We found one large echinacea that had somehow seeded itself in our herb bed, as well as several smaller ones scattered closer to their parent plants. We also divided off several sections from our largest yarrow plant, since multiple sources had recommended yarrow as a suitable plant for hellstrips. However, the plant was so huge and floppy that we quickly realized the pieces extracted from it would never manage to stand upright on their own. Brian planted a couple of them next to the street sign at one end of the strip with a wire cage around them for support, hoping that once they're in full sun they'll eventually take on a more upright posture. The rest of the bed got filled in with a mixture of salvia and echnicacea and covered with a layer of wood-chip mulch. (We got this free from a neighbor of ours who got a large delivery of wood chips from a tree service and generously offered up the leftovers on Freecycle.)

This newly planted area doesn't exactly look polished, but between the paved area and the layer of mulch, it's fairly neat. Come next spring, we'll start a bunch of echnicea, salvia, and maybe lavender and plant the area more fully. But for now, it's a decided improvement on the "grass" we had there before.

The planter project

Last month, when I told you about our new patio set, I mentioned that we'd been able to haul it home because we'd already rented a truck to tote lumber for the laundry room and for another project that I promised to tell you about later. Well, that time has come. Allow me to present our new outdoor planter.

The background on this: When we moved into our house, there were several barriers between our property and our next-door neighbor's. Our driveway was lined with a couple of hefty concrete road barriers, and our neighbor had some large evergreen bushes and an aging picket fence along the side of his yard. The bushes covered up the gaps in the picket fence and softened the industrial forms of the crumbling concrete barriers, so taken as a whole it didn't look too bad. But a few years ago, our neighbor cut down those shrubs, and their absence exposed the full extent of the fence's battered condition—not to mention the ugliness of the concrete barriers on our side.

So, around that time, Brian started noodling with ideas for ways to replace those concrete blocks with something more attractive that would also be tall enough to conceal the fence. He considered putting up a new fence, then toyed with the idea of planter boxes with attached trellises for climbing vines. But eventually he settled on the idea of a couple of plain, trellis-free planter boxes that he could build out of two-by-fours. He spent several months sketching out different designs until he settled on one he was satisfied with: a long, deep V shape formed by stacked two-by-fours mounted on three sets of crossed legs. Then, after hauling home the lumber, he spent much of the past two weekends sawing all the boards to the proper length and assembling the pieces that could be assembled indoors. And finally, today, he had a few free hours with decent weather to put it all together.

Mind you, when I say "decent," I don't mean "pleasant." As of 10 am, the thunderstorms that the weather forecast has been consistently and inaccurately predicting all week still had not materialized. But in their place we had blazing sun, heavy humidity, and temperatures that were already into the upper eighties. When I wasn't helping Brian with the parts of the job that required an extra pair of hands, I was bringing him cold drinks and dishes of salty pickles and cherry tomatoes to keep his electrolyte balance up. And even with all that, he didn't attempt to assemble more than one of the two planters he had planned. But that's enough to show you how it was done.

He started by lining up all the cut pieces in the driveway, like this:

Then he attached the leg pieces together and connected them with long two-by-fours that would form the tops of the the planter's two sides, like this:

Then he unfolded it again and started attaching additional two-by fours to  complete the sides. Once they were all in place, the frame was much heavier, so we had to work together to fold the two sides into place. To hold them that way while he worked on attaching the end pieces, Brian applied a couple of clamps and pushed the legs into a set of little foot brackets he'd made for them. (Later, he plans to remove the end pieces and turn these into the feet of the second planter.)

He ran into a slight complication when he tried to insert the bottom piece. According to his design, there should have been just enough room to slide one intact two-by four into the V of the crossed legs. But since the boards he was using weren't perfect (some wider than others, some slightly warped), there wasn't. So, rather than try to shave down the side of one of the two-by-fours, he simply slid it in with its shorter edge facing up. That left a bit of a gap in the bottom, but since we're filling up the bottom with rocks for drainage anyway (or, to be more accurate, chunks of the old concrete barriers), it shouldn't matter.

I helped hold the end pieces while he drilled the pilot holes and screwed them into place. Then, working together, we flipped the now very heavy planter upside down so Brian could attach the feet. And finally, we got it back upright and maneuvered it into the spot where he wanted it. That was when he discovered one final complication: since our driveway is neither level nor flat, one end of the planter was floating nearly an inch off the ground. He had to shim it up with a couple of the boards stripped from of our old patio set. Some additional, smaller shims were needed to stabilize the planter from side to side.

This project took up the entire morning and about an hour of the afternoon, but we managed to get it done before the long-promised thunderstorms finally hit. Of course, "done" doesn't mean completely done, because we still have to assemble the whole second planter and fill them both up with dirt and plants. (I've been doing some research on suitable perennials to keep in an outdoor container year-round, but we haven't made any firm decisions yet.) But already, even this single planter sitting there empty looks much better than the dilapidated fence behind it.

Quick updates

On this blog, I tend to focus on what's new and different in our ecofrugal life. This makes sense, but it has a downside: you hear the beginnings of a lot of stories without hearing the endings. I tell you that I've tried a new homemade conditioner, but I don't think to tell you that it turned out not to work all that well with everyday use. I tell you that we've added a strawberry bed to our garden, but I don't remember to follow up and tell you whether we got any actual strawberries out of it. 

So for this week's blog entry, instead of telling you what's new, I'm going to fill you in on the latest updates to some older stories. I'll start with the most recent stories and work my way backwards, so we're going from the smallest updates to the biggest ones.

Update #1: Potato plants

Last summer, when we got our new rain barrel, I mentioned that Brian was planning to use the old one to grow potatoes. We'd tried before to grow them in five-gallon buckets, but the results were disappointing. Brian thought that a bigger vessel, with plenty of room for the stems and tubers to form, might give us a better crop.

It's too early to say yet what our harvest will look like, but the plants themselves are flourishing in their new home. The stems have already reached the top of the barrel and are loaded with lush green foliage. They just recently flowered, as well. Brian snipped off the flowers because apparently you get more potato production that way, but I got a picture of them first. The trimmed-off blooms are now in the bud vase in our kitchen, so we've already gotten some benefit out of the plants regardless of how the potato crop turns out.

Update #2: Garden paths

Over the years we've had our garden, we've struggled to find a suitable covering for the paths between the beds. I thought I'd hit on the perfect solution with the leftover stone dust from our patio project, but within a year, weeds (and a few stray vegetable plants) were forcing their way through it. So, last winter, I decided to try a new approach: covering the paths with leaves. Using all the leaves we raked up in our own yard, as well as a bag or two of our neighbor's that we scavenged from the curb, we managed to cover all the paths a couple of inches deep.

This approach has been a moderate success. The blanket of leaves hasn't managed to suppress weeds entirely, but we're getting far fewer of them, and the ones that do pop up are easier to remove because they're rooted in loose, leafy soil rather than solid clay. (I'm only bothering to do this with the tall weeds, like crabgrass and dandelions. Ground-hugging weeds like barren strawberries, I figure, can just get walked on. If they pop up in the garden beds themselves, I'll yank them, but otherwise, they can stay where they are.) And since the leaves cost us nothing, we can simply keep replenishing them year after year.

Update #3: Strawberry bed

Last year was our first attempt at growing strawberries. Our new seed supplier offered seeds for the small Alpine variety, and we decided on a whim to add a packet to our order. The plants grew faster than we expected, and we actually managed to get a small handful of fruit off them that first year. But this year, they have really come into their own. The plants are flourishing, and we have already harvested 6 cups of tiny red and white fruits. (They're supposed to be red and yellow, but it's a very pale yellow. Alongside our honeyberries, which ripen around the same time, they make a very patriotic-looking fruit salad.) 

These little berries aren't as plump and juicy as regular strawberries. Their flavor is more concentrated, with a sort of floral undertone to it. They also don't keep nearly as well, which explains why you don't tend to see them in stores. We have to eat them up within a day or two of picking or they turn into mush. This means we can't use really use them in recipes, since we only get a cup or so of berries with each picking, and we can't save them up to get enough for a fruit crisp or a batch of jam. But eating them fresh every day (by themselves or in salads) is certainly no hardship.

So, all in all, I'd consider this experiment a success. The question now is, how long can we keep it going? According to the seed packet, these plants will only remain productive for about two years. But other sources on Alpine strawberries recommend dividing the plants "every four or five years" to keep production high and prevent overcrowding. That suggests that we should be able to expect them to last another couple of years at least. I guess we'll keep an eye on them next spring, and if it looks like they're not coming up, we can pick up a few strawberry plants of the more conventional type to replace them.

Update #4: Homemade deodorant

Over the years, I've tried various alternatives to commercial deodorant in an attempt to avoid both animal testing and excess packaging. Plain baking soda, vinegar, rubbing alcohol, and peroxide didn't work very well; milk of magnesia did but turned out to have an undesirable laxative side effect. The best of the bunch was alcohol-based hand sanitizer; it wasn't strong enough to keep me fresh as a daisy on hot summer days, but it was good enough for light activity in mild weather. 

However, this sanitizer deodorant had a few drawbacks. It still produced some plastic waste; the bottle was recyclable, but the pump top wasn't. Also, annoyingly, the pump was never able to extract all the sanitizer from the bottle, and it also made it impossible to turn the bottle upside down to get the last drops. And it became difficult to obtain during the pandemic, though I was able to get by with a homemade version made from rubbing alcohol and aloe vera gel.

So when I came across a recipe for another homemade deodorant with just three ingredients—one part baking soda, two parts cornstarch, and three parts coconut oil—I thought it was worth a try. True, straight baking soda hadn't worked that well for me, but neither had straight rubbing alcohol, yet the alcohol-based gel worked fine. In any case, it wouldn't cost much to mix up a small batch and test it out.

Well, as it turns out, this baking soda mixture works at least as well as the hand sanitizer. Like the sanitizer, it doesn't always last all day, but it's no big deal to reapply it. It also produces no plastic waste whatsoever, and it's easy to get every last drop of it out of the container. And it's cheap—less than 25 cents for that initial batch (6 tablespoons total), which has already kept me going for a few weeks and is nowhere near running out. Can't get much more ecofrugal than that!

Update #5: Patio furniture

Back in 2013, we furnished our DIY patio with a cheap patio set from IKEA. At $120 for a table and four chairs, it was a much better deal than anything available at Home Depot or Lowe's, where outdoor furniture sets started at around $500. We refinished it once in 2014, but after that we decided to just live with the weathered look.

After 11 years of use, though, the furniture was starting to have problems with more than just its appearance. The pieces had become rickety, wobbling noticeably when we sat down, and tightening the bolts didn't solve the problem. We finally concluded that we were going to need a replacement.

The obvious place to look for one was Craigslist, which we now prefer to IKEA for home furnishings. But there was a snag: unlike IKEA furniture, pieces on Craigslist come fully assembled. How would we fit a whole patio set into our little Honda Fit?

The answer: we didn't. We already knew we'd have to rent a truck at some point to haul home the lumber for our laundry room renovation (which, yes, is still in progress) and for another project that Brian wants to do outdoors (more on that one in a future post). So, once we'd booked the truck for that, we took advantage of the opportunity to haul home a $135 patio set from Craigslist as well. We were still able to get the truck back by the end of the day, so the rental fee was the same; all it cost us was a little extra for gas.

Our new patio set is superior in almost every way to our old one. The glass-topped table is larger and includes a center hole where we can add a patio umbrella, should we ever feel the need for one. The chairs, with their woven plastic seats, are quite comfortable even with no added cushions. And both table and chairs are made of materials that should stand up better to the elements than our old wooden pieces. The previous owner had already kept them outdoors for several summers, and the table during the winters as well, and they're all still in good shape. So, given the same treatment, this new set should serve us for many years to come.

Honeyberry trellises (and a bonus recipe)

Last week, I told you about how we mulched the slope where our honeyberry bushes are planted. That took a fair amount of effort, but when it was finished, our work still wasn't done. We also needed to cover the bushes themselves with netting to protect our berries from hungry birds. In the past, we've simply thrown the nets over the bushes, which keeps out the birds all right, but also makes it very difficult for us to get underneath the nets and harvest the berries. This year, I wanted to put up some proper enclosures that we could climb into without having to remove the netting entirely.

We had various odds and ends of material to work with for this project—a few scavenged bamboo poles and some old pieces of PVC pipe that had formerly served as trellises for our garden before we built the wooden ones. However, Brian and I had a difference of opinion about the best way to use them. His idea was to build boxes to fit over the bushes with netting on all sides.That would have made very secure enclosures that were also easy to put on and take off again, but they would have taken a lot of work to build, as well as a lot of material. 

My suggestion was to build a little teepee over each bush instead, using three poles tied together at the top, with the netting draped over it. This wouldn't be as secure as a box, but it would require less material and less effort. This idea won out mainly because Brian realized that if he built boxes, he'd have to find a place to store them in the off-season. Our garden shed barely had room to store all the mulch we'd bought at the Co-Op; we'd never be able to fit the frames and a load of mulch in there at the same time. The teepees, by contrast, could be broken down once the harvest was over and stowed away in a corner.

After a little experimentation, Brian figured out a way to build a teepee from three lengths of the PVC pipe that would stand up pretty well on the slope, with one foot planted behind the bush and two at the bottom. He used a hacksaw to cut the pieces to the appropriate length and lashed them together with a section of our old clothesline. Then we loosely draped the netting over it. We held it down at the corners by planting the feet on top of it and added a brick in front to keep it from blowing open.

We only had enough of the PVC pipe to build two of these teepees, so we placed those over the two largest bushes. We wrapped two others in our remaining netting and left the smallest one uncovered, figuring that there weren't that many berries on it to lose. As the bushes get bigger, we can always acquire more pipe, or perhaps some sturdier bamboo poles, to build enclosures for them.

So far, these little tents appear to be doing their job pretty well. I can easily remove the brick and duck under the netting to harvest berries, and I only have to stoop a little bit. And there are always berries to harvest, which suggests that the teepees are succeeding in keeping the birds out. Mind you, the two bushes that are simply draped with netting have their share of berries as well, so it appears the tents aren't actually necessary to keep the birds out. But they certainly do make it easier to get at the berries. We easily gathered a cup of them that first day, and we're getting at least a couple of handfuls every time we go out for more.

We were so pleased with our honeyberry harvest that we decided to celebrate by making a honeyberry fool, something I'd been hoping to do ever since we first got the bushes (mainly because I find the phrase "honeyberry fool" so entertaining). We had to go out and buy some cream for this, since all our attempts at making dairy-free whipped cream have been so-so at best. We didn't have a recipe for it as such, so Brian had to guess at the proportions of fruit to sugar to cream. His first attempt, using twice as much fruit as cream, came out a bit too liquid, though still quite edible. But we had plenty of cream left after that, so he kept experimenting and found that combining equal parts fruit and cream produced a dessert with just the right fluffy texture while still delivering plenty of honeyberry flavor. For anyone who has honeyberries at home and would like to try it, here's the recipe:

HONEYBERRY FOOL

Add 2 Tbsp granulated sugar to ½ cup honeyberries and mash berries with a spoon while mixing. Place in the refrigerator for 20-30 minutes, stirring/mashing occasionally.

In a chilled bowl, add 2 Tbsp powdered sugar and ¼ tsp vanilla extract to ½ cup heavy whipping cream, then beat until soft peaks form. Fold in berry mixture until fully combined.

Serve immediately or refrigerate until ready to serve.

Mulching on a slope

When we first got our honeyberry bushes five years back, we covered up the entire hillside where we planted them with groundcloth and mulch to protect them from weeds. This turned out not to be one of our more brilliant ideas. Apparently, groundcloth is very slippery stuff, and if you put it on a steep slope like the one in our yard, anything you put on top will slide right off it. So, instead of a nice bed of mulch, we ended up with an expanse of bare groundcloth with pools of mulch (and some ambitious barren strawberry plants) around the bottom. 

The mulch might have stayed in place without the groundcloth underneath, but Brian was reluctant to remove it. There was no guarantee the mulch would stay put without it, and even if it did, it probably wouldn't do as good a job of deterring weeds by itself. Instead, he thought we should lay down some deer netting between the groundcloth and the mulch, giving the mulch a rougher surface to cling to. And since we had to net the honeyberries themselves anyway to protect the ripening berries from birds, we decided to take advantage of Memorial Day weekend to tackle both jobs at once. 

On Saturday, we got out our collection of deer nets and started cutting pieces to fit around the bushes. Rather than cut holes in the netting and try to squeeze the bushes through them, we just cut one long rectangle to place on either side of each berry bush, angling them to achieve maximum coverage and tucking in any excess around the trunks of the bushes. (We did have to cut holes in a couple of places to fit them over the concrete boulders that dot the slope.)

The trickiest part was removing and then replacing the hollow concrete blocks along the fence line. We didn't want to take them all off at once, because they were helping to hold down the groundcloth. So Brian had to repeatedly perch halfway up the slope between two bushes, removing the concrete blocks and handing them to me so he could place the netting, then putting the blocks back in place to hold it down. He also added long spikes to the center of some of the concrete blocks to help hold them in place. (We couldn't treat all of them this way because some of them had rocks in the way, and anyhow, we didn't have enough spikes.)

We also decided, sort of on the spur of the moment, to make a border for the mulched area with some old slate pavers we had sitting around unused. The idea was to create a flat, smooth path for rainwater to flow down so that it would be less inclined to cut a channel through the mulch. We laid the pavers out along the edge of the mulch zone and pounded some more of those big spikes in to hold them in place. Then we spread the last of the mulch from our most recent trip to the Belle Mead Co-Op over the slope and went inside for some well-deserved showers. 

At this point, the hillside was pretty evenly covered with mulch. However, I wasn't confident yet that it would stay that way. That slope had looked pretty good the first time we tried mulching it, but it didn't take long for the rain to start wearing paths through the mulch and leaving bare patches. So I knew the first rainfall would be the real acid test.

As it turned out, we didn't have long to wait. We had a brief thundershower that very night and a couple of additional squalls over the course of the following week, and so far, the mulch has mostly stayed put. There are a couple of tiny bare patches around one bush on the far end, but that might just be because the mulch wasn't laid very thickly to begin with. We've since returned to the Co-Op and hauled home another half-yard, so we can add another layer and cover up those bare patches in the process. Then we'll keep a sharp eye out to see if any more appear. If they do, we may need to come up with a different solution. But for now, fingers crossed, this seems to be working.

Of course, after finishing this job on Saturday, we still needed to put up some additional netting to protect the berry bushes themselves. But that's a topic for another post.

Local deforestation

This was a sad week for the environment in our neighborhood. We just lost two big, beautiful, healthy trees — and as far as I can tell, for no good reason.

Some background: on the opposite side of our street, there used to be a small ranch house. It wasn't in great condition and couldn't find a buyer for a long time. But when the real estate market went nuts during the pandemic, a developer bought it up and started trying to sell, not the house itself, but two new houses that they planned to build on the property. Both of which were quite a big bigger than the original house, and presumably quite a bit more expensive. 

Now, the catch was, the developer apparently couldn't get approval to begin construction on the new houses until they had buyers lined up for both of them. And a house that big on our street, which is kind of out on the edge of town, is a tough sell. But eventually they must have found a couple of buyers desperate enough to pay what they were charging, because over the last few weeks, they got to work demolishing the existing house.

To me, of course, knocking down a perfectly good house in order to build two new ones seemed like an unfortunate waste. But at least there was one encouraging thing about the process: the demolition crew carefully worked around the two mature oak trees in the front yard instead of knocking them down. We assumed this meant that the developer was planning to keep the trees on the new property, since we couldn't see why they'd go to such trouble otherwise. And it made sense, since a big healthy tree like that would surely be a nice selling point for the house.

But apparently, in this market, the developer didn't need actually a feature like that to sell an as-yet-unbuilt house on an out-of-the-way street. Because when we got up on Tuesday morning, we saw that there was a crew of workers across the street preparing to take the trees down.

This was not just depressing to me but also puzzling, since Highland Park has an ordinance dictating that you can't remove any tree above a certain size (which these two definitely were) without a permit. And I couldn't figure out why the borough would grant one for two beautiful, healthy trees like this, especially when it was clearly possible for the construction to proceed without them.

I tried calling up the borough's code enforcement officer to find out if these folks actually had a permit, but I couldn't reach anyone. Then I went out and asked one of the workers, and he assured me they did. The owner, who was there to supervise, even came over to show it to me when he saw me out there with my camera taking this picture. He showed me the plan of the property and explained that the two trees "had to" come down because they were planning to install two gas lamps in the exact spots where they stood. But he assured me that there would be new trees planted in the rear of the property to make up for it. (Of course, these new trees will be little dinky ones, rather than hundred-year-old oaks, and won't be visible from the street anyhow. But the ordinance says as long as you plant one new tree at least 2 inches in diameter for each one you cut down, no matter how large, that's good enough.)

So I'm forced to admit that the developer did indeed have permission from the borough to take down these trees. What I can't figure out is why. Why, why, WHY would the borough give this guy permission to remove two irreplaceable trees in order to install two gas lamps — a feature that clearly isn't necessary, isn't anywhere near as desirable as an old-growth tree, and oh yeah, burns fossil fuel and produces carbon emissions rather than removing them? Does the local government consider gas lamps more important than trees? Or does it care more about the needs of developers than those of local homeowners? Is it just so desperate for more property owners to pay taxes that it's willing to grant any concession at all to get more homes built?

To make matters worse, our next-door neighbor also just decided this week to cut down all the bushes in his front yard. So on both sides of the street, the area to the south of our house is now a bleak, bare, clear-cut expanse. And the absence of the shrubbery merely draws attention to the half-rotted fence between our yard and his.

But this, at least, is a problem we can potentially do something about. Brian already has plans to ask him if we can replace the fence (which we think is technically on his property) with some trellises. If he says yes, he plans to break up those crumbling concrete bars currently lining our driveway and replace them with some trellised planter boxes (sort of like these), in which we can plant some sort of climbing vines to grow up the trellis. He also has a notion to add another trellis to the end of the planter nearest the house, so it can partially conceal our trash cans from view. If this works, it will add a little shade and greenery back to our landscape and help block out that desolate view to the south. 

We can even use the concrete chunks from the broken-up bars to provide drainage on the bottom of the boxes, so nothing will go to waste. Because unlike some people, we don't believe in wasting perfectly good resources.

Staking our plum tree

A couple of weeks ago, I showed you the jury-rigged solution Brian and I cobbled together for getting our plum tree upright in the wake of Tropical Storm Isaias. At the time, we knew it wasn't really a permanent solution, because the wooden stake we'd belted the tree to wasn't dug in deep enough to stay put in the face of another severe storm. So we began a hunt for equipment that could secure the tree in place more permanently. After examining several types of stakes that could be used for this purpose, Brian settled some 30-inch "earth anchors," which have a spiral-shaped bit that bites into the earth as you turn the spike. These came as a set of four — more than we'd need for this job — along with some short bits of fastening wire, presumably intended for use with a tent (which we wouldn't need) and several clamps for tightening it (which we would).

This four-stake kit had to be specially ordered from Home Depot, so we had to wait about a week to pick it up at the store. Once it arrived, we made one trip into the store to pick it up and ferry it out to the car, then went back in to pick up the other items we needed. First, we bought 30 feet of wire rope that said it had a "working load limit of 340 pounds." The entire tree may weigh more than this (we can't really get it onto a scale), but since we planned to install two cables and neither one would have to support the tree's entire weight, we figured it would be adequate. Brian also spent an extra 25 bucks on a tool specially for cutting the wire rope, having learned while constructing the raspberry trellis that neither tin snips nor a hacksaw is really adequate for this job. Even if we never used them again after this job, it would be a worthwhile investment to minimize the hassle involved in what was likely to be a pretty tricky task. We didn't bother spending extra for protective sleeves to keep the wire from cutting into the tree trunk, because Brian figured he could just cut a couple of one-foot lengths off our old garden hose (which he'd already needed to cut down once already to eliminate a leak at one end). If the hose ended up becoming nonfunctional, eh, we'd just go back and buy a new one.

Before he could get started with the staking process, Brian pruned off one more low-hanging branch from the tree, since he'd determined it would get in his way while he was installing the ropes. After that, he moved on to the first step of the actual staking: finding appropriate locations for the stakes and screwing them into the ground. And, unexpectedly, this proved to be the hardest part of the job. Upon close examination, the stakes said that they were suitable only for use on "uncompacted soil," and the heavy clay in our yard fits this description only marginally at best. But since it was what we had to work with, Brian decided to just set a stake in, start turning, and hope for the best. However, his first attempt was a bit of a disappointment. Pictures he'd seen of these stakes showed them drilled right down into the ground with only the eye sticking up, but the first stake he selected hit a rock or some other barrier when there were still about 7 inches of it above ground level, and it simply would not go any farther.

So he gave up on that one and hoped he might do better with the second stake, which he set at about a 90-degree angle from the first. But the longer he struggled with this second attempt, the more apparent it became that the first, which had managed to get about two feet of stake below ground level, had actually been a rousing success. The second one got stuck while it was sticking up by a good 10 inches, and despite his attempts to gain more leverage — first with his wrench threaded through the eye of the stake, and then with another of the 30-inch stakes — it wouldn't budge. It turned, but it didn't go in any deeper. Thinking perhaps he'd just chosen a particularly bad spot, Brian tried again with a third stake a little distance off from the first. This one was even less successful, getting stalled while the eye was about a foot above ground level. He tried again with the fourth stake and managed to get it in a little farther than than the third, but not as far as the second. So he ended up pulling the third and fourth stakes back out, leaving little dimples in the turf, and using only the first and second.

Next, he had to thread the wire rope around the tree. He had previously cut two sections from the garden hose without issue, so he ran the wire through one piece of hose, then around the tree, and secured the loose end with not one but two of the nuts provided with the stakes. He figured this would add an extra layer of security, since if one nut came loose there would still be one holding the wire. The other end of the wire ran down and through the eye in the stake, passing through a little metal trough that came with the kit, and was likewise secured with two nuts.

After snipping off the end of this first wire — and marveling at how easy this was to do with his new wire shears — he repeated the entire process with the second stake. Through the hose, around the tree, two nuts to hold it, then through the stake with another two nuts to secure it. (He did all this while leaving the original wooden stake and strap in place, since it had to keep the tree upright until the new lines were installed.)

The last part of the process was to tighten the clamps on the wire ropes. Having two at each end also made this step easier, since he could let one fastener hold the rope in place while he adjusted the other. To increase the tension on the rope, he kept the outer clamp fastened, loosened the inner one, then clamped onto the rope with his Channellock wrench and pulled more of it through the hole into the gap between the two clamps, thereby shortening the part that was between the clamp and the tree. He then twisted this segment of rope to hold it taut while he tightened the nuts on the clamp back up again.

Once both ropes were tightened up as snug as they would go, Brian loosened the luggage strap that had been holding the tree in place, removed it, and pulled out the wooden stake that had been holding up the tree. And since the tree did not promptly fall over, we can declare the staking process a success for the time being. But we won't know for sure until the next big storm.

In the meantime, we had one new gardening problem to solve: what to do with the patch of lawn that was now unmowable on account of the wires. And this was where I came into the process.

Since we have tons of barren strawberry plants growing wild in our back yard, it had occurred to me that maybe if we could successfully establish some of these plants in the front, we could get them to take over that corner of the front yard as they had in the back. (Heck, as far as we were concerned, they could take over the whole yard, barring the new flowerbed, and then we wouldn't have to mow it at all.) So, earlier that weekend, I'd gone out back and pulled out a whole bunch of these plants (which needed thinning anyway, as they were starting to impinge on the area set aside for our honeyberry bushes) with an eye to transplanting them to the front.

Brian helpfully turfed out a section of grass for me (and by "grass," I mean "mostly weeds") roughly two feet in diameter, and I got to work planting the strawberry plants in it. These are all long runners with clumps of little, shallow roots at various intervals, so I just sort of stretched them out across the bare patch in various directions to cover as much of it as possible. Then I dug a tiny hole for each clump of roots, buried it, gave them all a nice top-dressing of compost, watered the patch thoroughly, and crossed my fingers.

Two weeks later, the strawberries seem to be reasonably happy in their new home. They haven't filled in the area entirely, let alone spread beyond it, but the individual plants look green and healthy. If they continue to hold up well, I'll try turfing out and replacing more sections with them, with an eye to eventually getting at least that corner of the yard filled in with a no-mow ground cover. If they don't, maybe I'll look into filling in the gaps with clover or some other "no mow" lawn alternative (though I have my doubts as to whether any of them can truly live up to their name).

Re-plumbing a plum tree

Brian and I were lucky enough to come out fairly unscathed from Tropical Storm Isaias. Unlike Sandy eight years ago, it didn't take out our power, and we'd had the foresight to stash our recycling bins and patio furniture in the shed, so we didn't lose any of those. However, there was one casualty. As we watched the storm from our kitchen window, we could see our plum trees swaying in the wind, and we realized that one of them, the Mount Royal, was actually listing to one side. By the time the storm was over, it looked like this.

It hadn't actually been uprooted, but it was completely blocking the sidewalk, and we obviously couldn't just leave it there. But at the same time, we didn't want to lose the whole tree when it was still more or less undamaged.

Brian went out and tried pulling on it from the house side, and even with his full weight on it, it wouldn't budge. But we thought there was a chance we could right it if we could sort of put it in traction: apply a continuous pull on it from the house side with a band around it attached to a stake. We could push it from the other side at the same time, and once it was upright, the stake would help keep it that way.

So Brian started hunting for tools to do this job with. And lo and behold, he found a cargo strap he'd once received for Christmas, with a ratchet attached to it for tightening it. We'd never used it for its intended purpose, but it looked like just the thing for the present task. He also found a two-by-four that he was able to cut to a point on one end with his miter saw (another Christmas gift, received from his dad) and pound into the ground with a sledgehammer (also a gift, this one from our late friend Tim). So, in a way, all of them were helping us get this job done.

Before attempting to hoist the tree, Brian thought we'd better lop off that one big low-lying limb that was blocking the sidewalk. This would reduce both the overall weight of the tree and the distribution of that weight toward the sidewalk side, making it easier to push in the other direction. But I was hesitant about removing such a big limb all at once, so I persuaded him to try just cutting off the three longest branches extending from it. If that wasn't enough, we could always take off the whole limb later.

So he got out his trusty pruning saw (yet another gift, this one from his brother) and started sawing away at the branches. And even without removing the whole limb, this took off quite a lot of mass, as you can see from the pile of branches we were left with.

Then he put the belt around the tree on one side and the stake on the other and started tightening it with the ratchet, while I pushed on the tree from the street side. As it grew tighter, it looked at one point like it might slip upward off the stake, so he got out the saw again and cut a notch in it to hold the belt securely in place.

Eventually, with a combination of pushing and ratcheting, we were able to get the tree to a nearly upright position. With the belt holding it in place, it didn't look like it was in any immediate danger of going over again, but it was still a plum out of plumb. We didn't feel entirely confident that it would remain upright if another strong storm hit.

Brian had sent an email about this to his brother, who has some training in tree health, and he sent a response saying he thought that entire large limb was going to have to come off. His view was that the top of the tree was too heavy for the roots, and it was going to need some "tough love" to cut it down to a size its root system could support.

So, a couple of days later, we were back out there with the saw, slicing off the tree limb piece by piece. We trimmed off all the remaining branches, then cut off the main limb itself in two big chunks. While we were at it, we took off all the other branches below the level of the belt, since we knew some of them were going to have to come off anyway (one of them was sticking out far enough to obstruct the driveway). By the time we were done, we had an even more significant pile of branches...

...and a rather denuded-looking tree, which we were able to ratchet up another couple of notches, to the point that it was approximately vertical.

So far, the tree is showing no ill effects from its surgery. However, what we have now clearly isn't a permanent solution. Brian is convinced that even with its lower branches shorn off, this tree can't be trusted to remain upright in any kind of heavy wind and rain; because of the way it's boxed into a corner of the yard, its root system simply can't stretch out far enough to support it. So we'll probably end up having to secure it with a more permanent anchor-and-cable system, which in turn will make it pretty much impossible (as opposed to merely inconvenient) to mow the grass in that part of the front yard.

So, one lasting effect of this storm will be forcing us to make up our minds and select a ground cover for the front yard, or at least part of it. We already have some barren strawberry plants in our back yard, and we could try to take cuttings from those and get it established in the front. They don't actually grow densely enough to block out all weeds, but pulling a few weeds from between the strawberry plants should be better than trying to cut down a whole forest of them with the weed whacker without tripping over the tree cables.

Another possible silver lining: trimming off those lower branches means fewer routes for squirrels to get up the tree, which could make it easier for us to protect the plums from squirrels by applying Tree Tanglefoot to collars around selected branches. We could even try applying it to the cables themselves, which would pose no risk of harming the tree. If these changes allow us to get more plums off this tree in future than we did this summer (though perhaps not quite as many as we had last year), it could be a blessing in disguise.

Gardeners' Holidays 2020: Renewal

Although I'm not putting too much stock in Punxsutawney Phil's prognostications of an early spring, I can definitely say that the first Gardeners' Holiday of 2020 was much warmer than it was in 2018 or 2019. Even in the morning, the temperature was well up into the 40s, and we didn't even get chilly as we headed out into the yard to kick off our gardening year by pruning the plum trees.

As I predicted, this job has become much easier than it was the first time we attempted it in 2018. Many of the most problematic branches on the trees have already been cleared away, so it was mostly smaller offshoots that we had to lop off this year, not whole limbs. We cleared out the ones that were overhanging the sidewalk and the flagstone path, then pruned away any that were in direct contact with other branches and any that were pointing inward toward the center of the trees. In the end, we cleared away enough branches to make three small bundles for burning in our backyard fire pit once the weather warms up...

...and to make an indoor display to tide us over until we have flowers to gather in the spring.

And not a moment too soon, it appears, because our backyard trees look like they're ready to jump the gun on spring any time. When we went out in the back to put away our tools and the bundled sticks, I saw that our cherry bushes are already starting to bud. Which leads me to hope that the marmot soothsayer was right after all, because otherwise, these poor little tender buds are going to get nipped as soon as winter reasserts itself.

Pruning the plums was only the first of many spring chores we have to do this year. We also plan to take the trimmer to the big hedge in the front yard and cut it down to a size that won't obstruct our path to and from the house. (If taking that much off the bushes turns out to be fatal, just as well; we'll pull them out completely and replace them with a nice little low fence that doesn't need nearly as much maintenance.)

And we have to pull out some garden soil and bake it to start our seeds in — not just our vegetable seeds, but also the flower seeds for the new flower garden I'm planning to put in this spring. Since our various attempts to plant a wildflower bed (first with a mixture of annual and perennial seeds that caused the plot to be overrun with bachelor's buttons, then with an all-perennial mixture that produced only scattered blossoms that quickly gave way to weeds) have been unsuccessful, I've decided to clear the entire bed and plant larger clumps of specific plants that I know are well adapted to clay soil. I've selected five plants:

• Confetti Cake hellebore (Lenten rose), which will produce white-and-purple blossoms starting as early as February;
• Early Sunrise coreopsis, with 18" tall yellow blossoms from April through July;
• Summer Pastel yarrow, with 1-to-2-foot blooms in yellow, pink, and red from June through September;
• Purple confeflower (echinacea), which will produce tall 2-to-4-foot purple blossoms from July through September and can go to seed after that, becoming an attraction for goldfinches;
• Autumn Joy sedum (stonecrop), with 2-foot-tall pink-and-copper blossoms through the end of October;
• And, to fill in the gaps, little clumps of  6-inch, yellow-and-purple Johnny-Jump-Ups (violas).

If this works, it will give us continuous blooms from February through October, so our garden will only be bare from November through January. We've ordered the hellebore and sedum plants from Wit's End Gardens (the only place I could find both of them), to be delivered in the spring, and we bought seeds for the rest along with our yearly order from Fedco. We'll start a couple of seeds for each plant, and when the others arrives, plant them in large clusters throughout the bed and fill in the spaces between with mulch to combat weeds. And if that doesn't work, we'll at least be able to tell where the actual flower clumps are, so we can identify the weeds and pull them out without taking the flowers with them.

All in all, we have our work cut out for us going into the 2020 garden season. There's more to be done than usual, but if it works out, we should have better results this year and every year going forward.

The ultimate ground cover?

One of the most popular posts I've ever done on this blog is this old one from 2011 on the topic of ground covers. It talked about the difficulty of finding a suitable ground cover for our front yard, which would need to have the following features:

• Able to grow in our climate (UDSA Zone 7)
• Able to grow in our heavy clay soil
• Tolerant of full afternoon sun, but not requiring full sun all day
• Low-maintenance
• Able to tolerate some light foot traffic
• Low-growing, so we would never have to mow it (this was crucial)
• Non-invasive

As it turned out, there weren't a lot of plants that ticked all those boxes. In fact, I'd been able to find only three: smooth rupturewort (Herniaria glabra), barren strawberry (Waldensteinia fragarioides), and Dutch white clover (Trifolium repens). Weighing the pros and cons of all three of these, I decided the clover was probably the most ecofrugal, and I had a go at planting some in the back yard, but sadly, it didn't thrive as we'd hoped it would. I went on to experiment with other ground covers, such as creeping thyme, but none of them really turned into the easy-care green carpet that I'd hoped for.

But now, eight years later, it looks like we may actually have found the ideal ground cover completely by accident. Or to be more accurate, it found us.

You see, we actually happened to have a little bit of barren strawberry growing in our back yard when we bought the place. And since it was nice and green and grew well with no effort on our part, we were happy to let it grow wherever it wanted. In fact, over the years, we've helped it along by pulling out the weeds (chiefly mugwort) that happened to be its primary competition. And by this spring, I discovered that the barren strawberry plants had more or less completely colonized one full corner of our back yard.

Just take a look at that lush blanket of green, growing thickly and evenly across the entire spread from the patio to the border of the honeyberry bed (and even climbing slightly up the wall). Left to its own devices, the barren strawberry did all this without any planting, feeding, or even watering on our part. It doesn't need mowing, but doesn't object to having the mower pushed over it in the parts of the yard that still have grass. It doesn't mind being walked across on a regular basis as we go to and from the clothesline. It has even managed to choke out most of the mugwort in that part of the yard, something I wasn't sure was possible.

Now, I know some folks consider this plant a weed. Even my gardening books describe it as aggressive (though since it's a native plant, it can't technically be considered invasive). But frankly, I think that aggressiveness (or shall we call it "assertiveness"?) is actually a benefit in our yard, allowing it to compete with all the other, much less agreeable weeds. As far as I'm concerned, with the exception of the garden and mulched beds, this stuff is welcome to grow anywhere on our property it likes. We'll even help it along, if we can figure out how.

One comment at Dave's Garden says it's "easily propagated by soft tip cuttings in water," so maybe I'll try clipping a piece or two and seeing if I can sprout some of these to spread to the front yard. If I can get it to spread there as exuberantly as it did in the back, in another nine years we might finally have the mower-free landscape we've always wanted out there.