Fairy Day and Your Summer Food Garden

Today, June 24, is International Fairy Day—here’s to a happy day for fairies and fairy lovers everywhere!

My friend Laine lives and breathes fairydom…she writes and illustrates children’s books featuring fairies and she designs fairy toys and fabrics. But her latest accomplishment is her garden. Which is, naturally, a fairy garden!

Being an immensely talented artist, she designed and installed it herself. It’s full of charm and whimsy: delicate little flowers like sea pinks, tiny works of art, colored pebbles, a small labyrinth shaped out of stones, and the piece de resistance… if you look carefully at her fence, you’ll find several fairy doors!

As much as I would love to tinker-doodle with a fairy garden of my own, my gardening efforts are focused on raising food—not that I could create such an utterly unique and delightful garden like hers even if I had all the time in the world! So now, in the early days of summer, food-crop maintenance is front and center, particularly in terms of blueberries, garlic, and apples. If you raise these crops too, here are a few chores to consider.

Blueberries:

Bottom row shows what to watch for!

My bushes are currently full of robust-looking greeny-white berry clusters—which makes it a great time to look for “mummies.” They’re grayish-purple, shrivelly-looking berries that indicate a fungus called “mummy berry,” which uncontrolled, will decimate a blueberry crop. For the home grower, the remedy is to remove the mummies either from the bush, or from the ground beneath after the mummy has fallen off.

Thus, every other day or so, I go into my 2 berry patches to look over the shrubs, and pick off or pick up any mummies I see.  It doesn’t feel like a chore to me—I love just hanging out with my blueberry bushes!

Note: to break the life cycle of the fungus, it’s best to dispose of the mummies in the trash and not in your compost.

Garlic:

If you raise hard-neck garlic, like I do, several weeks before harvesting, you’ll find a sturdy stem with a bud among your garlic foliage, called garlic scapes. In the bud are developing garlic seeds, which look like teeny-tiny garlic bulbs. To keep the plant’s energy focused on growing and enlarging the bulbs beneath the ground, clip off the scape. You can compost them, but some folks cook ‘em.

Apples:

A previous year before we learned orchard management!

Part of good management for your orchard is thinning excess apples. In a good year for fruit set, you might have hundreds of apples developing on your tree, but it’s best to allow fewer apples to mature. With less competition for nutrients and water, the fruit left on the tree will be larger and healthier. 

When the little apples develop to about the diameter of a quarter, remove the excess so you have about 1 apple every 5 inches of branch.

Although I enjoy this task, I’m a little behind on getting started—my Akane variety are bigger than a silver dollar. But this week, I’ve been going full out preparing for a major heat wave. Our region is looking at unprecedented highs this weekend—over 100—and I’m anxious about my carrot, parsnip and beet seedlings surviving.

So I’m heading outside to mulch the beds with leaves and compost, then deeply water them. Then I’ll drape row cover (an ultra-light, polyester sort of “blanket”) over the beds. I’m crossing my fingers these 3 measures will keep the seedlings alive. Whatever happens, the mulch will help build the soil for the next crop.

Free at stores and my web site!

For more tips and strategies for your food gardening, I hope you’ll look at my free ebook, Little Farm in the Garden. It’s available on Amazon, Apple and all online bookstores, as well as in PDF on my website, www.susancolleenbrowne.com !

PS Speaking of fairies: if you love fairy folk and you need an escape from summer heat with a wintertime story, you might take a look at my middle-grade kid's book, The Mystery of the Christmas Fairies!

Tips for Growing Strawberries

Yesterday's picking

For the first time in years, we have a bumper crop of strawberries! Big, healthy ones too—and with no artificial fertilizers!

Our large harvest has shocked me, to be honest. The last few years, our yields have been dwindling, and last year’s crop was so pathetic we had exactly ½ quart to freeze for winter eating. So this spring, as harvest time approached, my expectations were modest.

But I believe several factors come into play for this year’s berry success.

First, these berries are from the new crowns I planted in late winter of 2020—and the first harvest is always the healthiest, with the largest berries. I follow the recommendations to remove the blossoms from new starts the first summer, to give the plants a chance to build their root system.

Glossy, plump berries!

I also rotated the beds. This is more important than I realized.

For years, after pulling out spent strawberry plants (which need to be replaced every 3-5 years), I would just replant the new starts into already existing strawberry beds. But a couple of years ago, I noticed withering plants that were just a couple of years old. Even first-year plants were struggling, and seemed to be afflicted with what looked to be viruses or fungus.

So I planted the new crowns into beds that hadn’t contained strawberries for 3 or 4 years. My current plants look vigorous, with no signs of disease.

Additionally, I focus on building and feeding the soil. Each fall, I top-dress my planting beds with leaves and compost. The size of these berries tell me I’m on the right track!

Mother Nature has been cooperative too. Our spring was a little on the drier side, but rainfall throughout the season has been frequent.

But here’s something else I can’t take credit for: this year’s crop is not getting hit by any serious predation. Which really surprises me, given the fact I just sort of schlepped the nets over the fencing. Because true confessions: the predators had been pretty much winning so I figured, why bother?

In past years, we’ve battled birds, mice, voles, chipmunks and even rats to get any kind of harvest. These days, seeing so many gorgeous, un-mutilated berries, I will give the credit to two of our neighbors. Even though our garden is some distance away from both—several hundred yards or so, with lots of woods between our properties—one neighbor has a cat that occasionally patrols our place. It seems to be taking care of our rodent problem!

The other neighbor has put out a bird feeder. I think the neighborhood birds (also squirrels) are feasting at their place instead of here—since they don’t have to worry about trying to get through a maze of poultry wire and netting to have a snack.

I won’t count on this kind of harvest every year, or being so casual with my netting. But for now, John and I will revel in every beautiful berry!

Country Life: the bitter and the sweet

Giving Baby a bath

I came home from a lovely visit with friends to find our dining room window had been attacked: a little hole punched into the outer glass of the double pane, cracking the whole window in a star pattern.

Clearly a bird was the culprit. John and I guessed that a robin (since they've done this before) had seen his reflection in the glass and took it for a rival. The window company can't come out until August, so we have to look at this ugly duct tape for most of the summer!

But the sweet: the next day, who should stroll through our woods but a mama deer and her baby! The fawn couldn't be very old, since its little legs seemed a bit wobbly, and Mama bathed her little one by licking it from tip to toe. 

Bird brainwave: kill the window

They apparently felt safe and secure enough to stay in sight for a couple of hours--happily, the neighborhood mountain lion isn't in the vicinity: it's been sighted a few miles down the main road. 

Watching the two of them, I could forgive that stupid country bird for what will likely cost several hundred dollars to fix the window.

More of the sweet: I picked out first strawberries last night--8 nice big ones! (We ate them too fast to take a photo.) Their tips weren't yet red, and could have used another 2 days of ripening. But I figured, eat them now or let the slugs, voles or mice find them! 

Easy rhubarb recipe for breakfast

When it comes to fruit, if you like eating local, late spring doesn't give you a lot of choices.

First picking is the best!

The apples in the supermarket have either been stored for many months or are from South America, and around here, the berries aren't ready to harvest. 

If you're willing to look further afield, citrus is out of season and tropical fruits have been shipped such long distances who knows if there's much nutrition left in them. 

Happily, that's where spring rhubarb comes in! While our strawberries--the perfect accompaniment--are still a creamy white, in early June rhubarb is happily producing. If you're watching your sugar intake (while I'm all for desserts, I don't want to eat too much refined sugar for breakfast), the bad news is, it takes a LOT of sweetening to make rhubarb palatable. 

Blueberries mellow the rhubarb

But good news: adding a few berries from the freezer can lighten rhubarb's uber tartness. And with a dollop of a "natural" sweetener, you can still keep the fruit modestly healthy. 

Here's a simple, yummy fruit idea:

5 Stalks of rhubarb, chopped into 1/2 pieces 

2 cups frozen blueberries or blackberries (we still had one sack of blueberries left in the deep freeze from last summer)

In a medium size saucepan, add an inch of water to the rhubarb and bring to a gentle boil. Turn down to low and simmer until the fruit is soft.

Stir in the frozen blueberries, bring to another simmer until they've thawed and melded into the rhubarb a little. 

Let cool a little, and add a generous dollop, maybe 3 tablespoons (or more, depending on your taste) of local honey, and a sprinkle of cinnamon. Serve warm!