All that pottering in the garden yesterday was barely enough to keep me warm. To get the blood flowing I split some kindling, enough to get a few more wood stove fires going. I tore into a few rounds of of choke cherry cut this time last year when I cleared my wood line. It felt really good to split this beautiful red wood that I knew when it was still a living tree, festooned with honeysuckle and girded with wild brambles.

I was heavily supervised by the quality control team, which didn’t seem too perturbed when an errant piece of cherry clocked one of them in the head. That Griz (rooster, lower right) really keeps an eye on everything. He’s a personable rooster if I ever saw one—maybe because as an embryo he was rescued from a refrigerator and I held him in my hand within seconds of him kicking free of his eggshell?

That makes me think of one of the most unexpectedly wonderful, and sometimes heartbreaking, aspects of this whole farm life. Whether it’s working to turn a living tree into fuel to heat my house or raising generations of homegrown chickens, it is beautiful to see cycles, and lifecycles, complete themselves under my watch.

I started stacking the kindling and this one, my English shadow, maneuvered himself right into portrait position and smiled for the camera with no direction from me. The Cora photobomb was similarly unscripted.

Speaking of Cora, she’s another country heard from with yesterday’s egg collection. Along with two small green eggs, and one large brown Dahlia egg, I found a pointy blue egg that could only have come from Cora. It’s one of less than ten that she’s ever laid in her life, which makes each of her eggs worth probably $100 when you figure in the cost of feed. If I hadn’t felt this little dear die and resurrect under my fingers, if I hadn’t become intimately acquainted with every muscle and vein of her skinless head as I fought to keep infection and fly infestation at bay, she would have long been Craigslisted by now.

But Cora still here, and once in a blue moon she lays a pointy turquoise egg. To my appreciation and great delight.

Sunday morning dawned just a beautifully as Saturday, though it was cooler and substantially more windy. After lunch I headed outside to keep working at the vegetable garden cleanup. Unfortunately I had overdone it the day before and reactivated an old injury, a muscle spasm in my upper back next to my shoulder blade. In addition to being constantly uncomfortable, it makes turning my head to the right, such as when backing up the car, downright painful. Farming. Let me count the ways it hurts.

Regardless of any physical discomfort, the garden still needed more attention. First I dug out a couple dozen dahlia tubers for winter storage in the garage. I was amazed at the size of most of these tubers—just gigantic. Seeing this, I am suspicious that something caused this year’s dahlias to put their energy into making tubers instead of into flowers. More research on my theory to come.

I moved the dahlias’ labels, which are attached with twist-ties, from the wire support cages directly to the tubers to keep them properly labeled.

I stacked the custom-made cages and wired their ground pins to them for safekeeping. When I get around to it I will layer the tubers in boxes of peat to keep them from either drying out or rotting during winter. Last year I hung the tubers in mesh bags in the garage and lost some of them to drying out, so I will try a different technique this year.

Then I had to figure out what to do with the Glass Gem corn stalks. I tried digging one stalk out, but the root ball that came with it was so massive and full of soil and beneficial worms that I realized I’d be transplanting most of my hard-won, improved garden soil directly into the woods if I chose that route. So I decided to chop each stalk off at the ground and hope that the root balls would just decompose and continue to feed the soil without the major disturbance of digging. We’ll see. I figured that come next spring, anything I’d want to plant in this area can be tucked amongst any stalks or root balls that may be left over.

I am undecided about what to do with the stalks. I am heading toward leaving them on the ground over the garden. They will form a nice mulch layer to protect the soil below during winter, and if they’re still around in the spring they’ll be easy to pick up and remove to the compost pile. I plan on putting down a layer of compost then heavily mulching with straw anyway, so these corn stalks perform much the same function and help stretch the straw budget.

I still need to get the tomato stakes out, and then the next step involves shoveling compost into the garden and spreading straw. But as I was not in great compost-shoveling condition with this muscle knot, once I got the dahlias up and the corn down I quit garden cleanup and headed to town for an hour and half of vigorous vinyasa yoga in a warm studio, followed by liberal application of the gym’s hot tub jets to my back muscles.

It’s been raining and grey here for about the past week. There are three inches of rain in the gauge, all collected during the last few days. It feels like the sun will never shine again.

So, let’s look at something bright and colorful today. My dahlias are coming into their prime season, mid-October, and the extra rain is making them especially happy. I picked an assortment a few days ago to make a record of how these named varieties performed in my garden.

Above, from left to right: ‘Fire Magic,’ pale pink and white ‘Chilson’s Pride,’ Unknown—possibly ‘Fire Magic’ again, the very cool raspberry and white collarette ‘Bumble Rumble’

Above, from left to right: ‘Bumble Rumble,’ orange ‘Kabloom,’ purple ‘Optic Illusion,’ orange and white ‘A la Mode’

Above, from left to right:  ’A la Mode,’ huge coral ‘Mango Madness,’ unknown yellow and unknown purple and white from hardware store grab bag

‘Kabloom’ has really stood out this year. Not only did it overwinter from last year, it was the first to flower and grew taller than me. Of course I should have pinched it, but I didn’t. Thus, it’s fallen over now but still continues to pump out these spiky orange blooms.

I really love the color, size (11″), and blowsiness of ‘Mango Madness,’ but its blooms are quick to fall apart.

Although all these dahlias are pretty, in general I think the previous two years were better dahlia years. Perhaps dahlias, being native to Mexico, didn’t appreciate our very wet, humid and relatively coolish summer. I had my first case of powdery mildew show up in the dahlias this year. And, I know they were too crowded in the garden. Everything was—that’s what happens when you decide to grow a corn patch and expand the dahlia planting in the same year. Some of my favorite dahlias from year’s past didn’t make it through the winter—their tubers got too dried out and died. So, I missed those this year but one of the most exciting things about growing dahlias is trying new varieties each season.

I am torn about whether to dig up these tubers and overwinter them indoors (properly this time, so as to not lose as many as last year) or let them overwinter in the ground. I suspect that if they stay in the ground they will get growing sooner next spring, but I also run the risk of losing them to the damp and cold. And, if I run the chickens in the garden again this winter, the birds may scratch and peck the tubers into oblivion. I haven’t decided yet—we’ll see. But in the meantime, and for these last few weeks before the first frost, I will be enjoying these bright and favored flowers.

This lovely fuzzy white caterpillar came in on a bunch of dahlias. I’m not 100% positive on the i.d. Correct me if I’m wrong.

The “Glass Gem” corn is now taller than I and just beautiful. All this rain has created a great year to trial corn for the first time. And I am definitely seeing the benefits of all the soil building I have done during the last three years. Thus far the insect pest load seems lighter than in years’ past, which is a good indication that the plants are healthy enough to defend themselves. Running the chickens in the garden during the winter probably helped too, as they no doubt ate up overwintering eggs and larvae.

I had a moment of sheer joy the other day when I went to transplant a dahlia into the veg garden. My shovel blade sank all the way into the soil without any effort from me. This is nothing short of a miracle given the solid, almost impenetrable clay soil I began with. Now if only the soil in the ornamental garden around the house was in such good shape. I still need a pickax to plant in it, and my plants suffer for it.

Corn and beans and cosmos

Several of the dahlias are now blooming. Starting them in March really gave me a huge jump on the season, and I think the second-year tubers are also quicker to get out of the ground than first-year tubers. Makes sense. When I dug some of my first-year tubers last fall, what began as a piece the size of my thumb had, in some cases, become a clump so large I needed two hands to hold it. All that stored energy has got to go somewhere, and thus the big, early plants I am seeing this year.

I love being able to have beautiful cut flowers whenever I want them. It’s one of the best things about summer.

Finally, I am starting to see progress with the plantings around the front of the garden, where I haven’t developed the soil. I stuck some lavender in there last year. It’s horrible soil for lavender, straight clay that holds water all the time. I lost several lavender plants over winter to these poor growing conditions, but a few came back and have bloomed. In the holes made by the dead laveneder I planted some of last year’s bee balm, just chunks I hacked off a main plant that overwintered in a bucket behind the shed with no love from me. Well, each hunk has turned into a good-sized plant and they’re blooming. Everything planted out here needs to be unpalatable to deer and attract more pollinators. I definitely am on the right path now with the lavender, bee balm, and a bit of cat mint. Soon the sunflowers planted within the garden, just in front of the tomatoes, will bloom and join the party.

The garden tour continues with a pepper patch, in the foreground below, some dahlias, and giant volunteer pumpkin. I couldn’t figure out where all the pumpkins were coming from, as I’ve never successfully grown any in my garden. And then I remembered that all last winter I split my Halloween pumpkins open and fed them to the chickens as they were penned in the garden. A ha!

It was a tough call, but I just ripped out all the volunteer pumpkins. I’d love to grow them, but I just don’t have the space. It’s only June and the vines were already overtaking the garden, shading plants I actually am trying to cultivate (like the dahlias). So out they came.

You can also see my squash experiment, above, growing up a post. Ever since I’ve had this garden I’ve battled squash bugs, which have always killed my vines about the time they set their first fruit. This year I said no more squash—too much a waste of resources and space for something that’s bound to die and also cheap to buy in the grocery. Then I came across something that suggested growing squash vertically, as the squash bugs multiply more rapidly when hiding under leaves near the ground. So I used these volunteer squash plants as guinea pigs, tying them up the posts with strips of plastic bag and trimming off the leaves closest to the ground. Despite seeing (and killing) just a handful of squash bugs, the vine below has already succumbed to something. Le sigh. The vegetable that most people can’t give away fast enough eludes me. I think I will do a post-mortem and cut open the stem looking for squash vine borers.

My little “Glass Gem” corn patch is doing well. The stalks have about doubled in the days since taking this photo. The several inches of rain we’ve had in the last week are working wonders in the gardens. More caged dahlias, too, just budding out. The trick of starting them in pots in April has really worked—they are many weeks ahead of where they were last year when started in the ground.

One of my new favorite plants, borage, below. I don’t know why, but I am so drawn to this plant that it’s kind of nuts. It has wide, fuzzy leaves that taste just like cucumber. 

That was exciting enough for me, but then I planted it out and it pulled this trick—blooming with one of the most lovely flowers I’ve seen. There’s something magical about this plant for me. I am just waiting to learn from it.

A better shot of my new dahlia cages. They seem to be working extremely well—we’ll see how they do when the plants get five feet tall!

Since taking these photos, I ripped out the old spinach, took out the volunteer pumpkins, weeded, and mulched the entire garden with rotted straw. All the recent rain at the start of the growing season, and more on the way, helps put us in good shape heading in to summer. Up next, a tomato-only tour.