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!