A Larrapin Garden

My Grandmother always said time speeds up dramatically as you get older. But I confess, I thought she meant when I got HER age, not mine now! Wrong. Time is going so fast my head spins. But come to think about it….I guess I could have grandkids, pretty respectably, at my age. Dang, that’s sobering….  Back to GARDENING!

Many of you know that I injured my right shoulder this spring somehow with a combination of digging rocks/tilling rocks/planting trees in rocky soil/breaking ground on new garden spot/ and a non-ergonomic desk set up.  As bad as the digging sounds, the desk may have been a primary offender! Thanks to a miracle-worker of a holistic physical therapist, a gifted massage therapist, and living with a master swimmer (who is getting me and my formerly-injured shoulder in the pool despite my natural tendency to love swimming as much as your average house cat)—I’m starting to believe my gardening days may continue into ripe old age, despite the speeding clocks apparently located there.

But how DID it get to be time for Fall Planting already?!

Since today is an official resting-the-shoulder-day I popped over to one of my favorite garden blogs, Skippy’s Vegetable Garden, and checked out the personalized planting calendar she has developed. You can put in your local frost date and generate a spring or fall  planting calendar of several types of garden vegetables. (When you visit the calendar generating page, note there are separate links for fall/spring plantings.)  I entered a frost date of 10/30 for Fayetteville and got these dates:

I’ve never been much of a fall gardener, but want to turn over a new leaf, so to speak.  Skippy’s garden is up in the Northeast…so I’m wondering if there are needed adjustments to make here in the northwest corner of Arkansas. Hmmm. Think I’ll send this post over to my gardening mentors Calvin and Jennifer and ask for advice. I’ll let you know what I find out. In the meantime, do you plant in the fall? What are the dates you start your favorite fall crops? Please post them in the comments if you are reading online, or reply to the email if you are getting this via email subscription! More later on this, but I feel very lucky to have gotten a new bush-bean bed planted just day before yesterday! We’ll see what happens.

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Tags: fall garden, how-to, seasons

For several years now, one of my favorite plants has been Gayfeather (Liatris). It’s great for growing on the sunny side of  the mulch ring around young fruit trees because bees love it. Great because the bees will then pollinate your fruit tree while they are visiting. Evidence of this bee attraction below! In mid-July the blooms are fading now, but just a few weeks ago when these photos were taken, every time I’d walk by there could be a dozen or more bees enjoying the long spiky blooms.

Bee bloomer shot:

These photos are of course bumblebees, but the wild honeybees have been showing up this year too, to my delight. (Next year we may become beekeepers! I’m so excited. Gotta take the class, etc. ) I have two friends now who keep bees who I hope will become mentors…  But back to liatris! It’s a native prairie plant and once established, is pretty tough and doesn’t need any coddling. It will get lanky and fall over if it isn’t in full sun for at least 5-6 hours (at least at my house this is true.)  It grows from tiny bulbs and once you have a clump, it’s easy to dig up in the fall, divide into several little bulb clumps, and suddenly you have many.

Liatris blooms, after serving as buffet and bounty to the bees, will attract goldfinches once the flower stalks turn to seeds. A good reason to not get all prissy and clip them off once the blooms fade!  Watching a sunshine yellow goldfinch plucking seeds off the top of a flower that still is purple along the bottom is a color frenzy I still hope to capture on the camera.  They produce zillions of seeds though I haven’t had them spread around here..though I wish they would!

And if all that isn’t enough to sell you on liatris (which you sometimes see on sale in the bulb bin of Lowe’s) then how about this: After watching the bees clamber all over the blooms in the daytime, at dusk you will find the same fat bumblebees curled up sleeping in between the blooms, looking as if they are dreaming of tomorrow’s sunshine and nectar.

A final shot of my furry friends:

Like my brother Stephen told me recently about his new garden, it’s just great shopping for groceries in your own yard! Over the last week we’ve harvested zucchini, acorn & butternut squash, plus the pretty white and green squash which came off a plant that was supposed to be an acorn squash… The bell peppers and italian sweet peppers are producing moderately. Meanwhile, the jalapenos are so loaded with peppers they were nearly breaking the plant with the weight!

Green beans and purple hull peas are producing great. Green beans are Kentucky wonder, the bush variety, and it’s won us over the long time favorite blue-lake bush beans. (I’m less fond of the flavor of a pole bean and have less luck with them…)

The purple hull pea variety is ‘coronet’ (from the farmers’ co-op) and they’ve been *the* most productive ones I’ve ever tried. We got a bushel off a 3 x 24 bed. This is the first year we’ve had any luck because purple hulls are the deer’s favorite, favorite veggie of all time it seems. So far, knock on wood, the fence-plus-Ada-combo is working. The tomatoes are Arkansas Travelers which have been wonderfully productive and disease resistant too so far.

Hope you are enjoying the mid-summer bounty! What are you harvesting this week?

Sometimes its hard for me, in the middle of one season, to remember what the opposite season is like! Hard to believe this bounty above all came from a spot that looked like this (below) back in January. Wow!

What a July! Temps in 90s…humidity about 90-thousand percent. A four inch rain last week, a five inch rain the other day…  A walk outside means you are drenched in either rain or sweat or both. But things are growing like crazy. Hey! That looks like a watermelon, um, growing up the fence!

Ok, I’d seen the edges of that vine making it’s way up the fence, but I was surprised to see the size of that little growing melon. They are a small variety…crimson sweet I think…but I don’t think the vines will support a full-grown melon hanging in air.

Hmmm. What to do?  Hmmm, how about…

Yes! Finally a use for pantyhose I can get excited about!

I’ll let you know how it turns out. Thanks so much for stopping by Larrapin Garden. I’m a bit behind at posting this month, but I’m going to try my best not to have my usual mid-summer lull!

A Bean Harvest! (14 pound Weenie Dog for scale...)

Today’s a quick and random post! I love my new giant red trug and I love all the beans I picked yesterday! This year we grew Kentucky Wonder Bush Beans and wow are they productive and delicious. We’d been Blue Lake Bush Bean fans for years, but Kentucky may have won out at Larrapin. This harvest was half of a 3 x 20 foot patch…which also has a row of sweet corn down the middle.  still looking fairly puny though…so I’m not sure what I think about that planting method after all. I’ll need to try it with another variety of corn and see if I just picked the wrong horse, er, corn, for this race.

The new garden spot continues to grow rampantly. Everything looked pretty parched in this shot, but it was just before a wonderful drenching rain soaked it all. It will be jungle-ish very soon!  (The purple-rake garden art is a work in progress…please stay tuned..)

Pumpking Seedlings on 6/21

I’d been unable to find pumpkin seedlings at any of my usual gardenstore haunts, so started these from seed. They popped up quick! I’m using a little wooded gadget that makes starter pots from old newspaper. I didn’t like it at first because the cups were so tiny, then I realized you can use wider paper strips to make nice deep cups. Now I love it.

And the pumpkins seem to love it too. These are the same seedlings six days later. The photo is washed out, they actually look very sturdy and green.  I’m preparing a bed for these now and planning a pumpkin/compost pile planting experiment…

In closing this ragged and random post, picture below is the little-known weenie dog weather detector. When Blue—who hates wet grass, being awakened early, late meals or weather below 85 degrees anywhere in his Princedom— stands nervously scanning the sky from the vantage point pictured below…it’s gonna rain. And it did!

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