Note: we're back in action! We are now back at the Thursday mid city market (3-7pm on the Greenway x the bayou) and the Sunday City Park market (8am-noon in the Tad Gormley stadium parking lot), as well as resuming Open Hours at the nursery (2817 N. Roman) on Saturdays from 9am-3pm
It's Go-Time, People.
Even though, really, we've got a twelve month growing season down here in SE Louisiana, the heat can be pretty rough on the gardener, and so for all intents and purposes we can consider the summer our “off season.” Fall, however, is some of our best growing and, because unlike most regions in the country we take off the summer and not the winter, it kicks off a good nine months at least of solid garden time.
Fall and spring, bookending that long stretch, are thought of as twin “shoulder seasons” (I myself refer often to Fall as a “second spring”). There is utility in the comparison, but mostly insofar as it serves to illuminate their differences. In the fall the days get shorter rather than longer as the season gets on. The shift in temperature throughout the season is of course reversed as well. Rather than bolting to flower or seed, in the fall many plants tend to gradually peter out as the daylight decreases. Whereas for spring we start our tomatoes in darkest December under plastic or on heat mats, our fall tomatoes were seeded in July or August under shade cloth or in our homes, cooled by fans or AC. The same or similar holds true for many crops.
Right now, before summer has yet loosed its grip, weve got time for a quick round of warm weather crops. Realistically it doesn't really cool down till Halloween down here. Now is the time, as alluded to, to put out our fall tomatoes, as well as for other sweaty, fruiting crops. We can squeeze in some peas, cucumbers or beans, as well as to put out starts of other solanaceous crops like peppers, ground cherries or tomatillos. It's a good time for flowers as well. We will need pretty soon to get started on the long-season crops that will grow into or even all the way through the winter. These will include broccolis and cauliflower, head cabbages and brussels sprouts, garlick and bulb onions. For many other vegetables such as quick-season root crops like radishes, and certainly for leafy greens, we've got a pretty wide window for planting, and if we really want to maximize our yields we can even do successions of plantings into the winter. Leafy greens in particular are super flexible since all we need is that green, vegetative growth and don't need to time them out to be fruiting, flowering or going dormant etc at any certain time of year.
If we have indeed taken the summer off from gardening, we likely have our work cut out for us. The garden may well be swamped with vines and other weeds that need pulling. Beds will need to be cleared, flipped and prepped for planting. Most likely, if we have any annual crops still hanging on from spring or early summer, they will still be alive and growing (if not thriving), and so we will need to make the call of what to pull and when. It is my belief that we should not be precious about this — if the space could be better used then pull it — but I do always advocate for sparing one or two choice specimens from each crop, if space is not at too much of a premium. These few plants can be saved for seed. They will maintain some continued habitat for beneficial insects and other organisms. Besides, it's just generally best to minimize bare and denuded bed-space where possible. (To reduce disease in the garden, we should definitely however pull any infected plants, and as much as possible should rotate crops, or at least give beds a rest period before planting them with any closely related crops.) Any growing space that is cleared but which we are not yet ready to plant should be mulched or otherwise covered.
How we prep a bed depends on several factors, and ultimately on our own gardening philosophy. You may be familiar with the idea of “no-till” gardening, but if not I recommend giving it a google. It's not always feasible to go full-on no-till, but it's good to keep it in mind as a kind of north star, and just generally not to disturb beds any more than necessary, to allow where possible for complex structures to develop in the soil over time. This will increase the water holding capacity of the bed, the population of micro- and macro-fauna in the soil, and beneficial networks of fungal mycelia. It will serve as well to feed the whole soil web by allowing roots and other plant fragments to decay in place. Should we go for the no-till system, we will likely still want to add some organic matter or other amendments, either by top-dressing the bed, filling shallow trenches, or adding the amendment directly to the holes when we plant.
In many ways, this is the time to think in general about our philosophies in the garden, and to set some intentions for the coming season. What do we want to accomplish? What new things do we want to try? What do we want to learn? Whom is our garden for, and whom will it feed? How much time can we realistically spend on it, and to what degree does it need to care for itself? We'll be getting more into this stuff in the essay portion of this newsletter (this is a gardening newsletter).
What I've decided to do is to alternate month-to-month between the essays and more technical/instructional write-ups on various garden tasks and topics. September is an essay month (remember, last month we did that compost how-to?), and I went pretty hard on this one. You may or may not have picked up on this, but I'm working out some ideas here and really trying to build toward something with these essays. I truly believe that we can get at some profound and paradigm-shattering stuff through writing, talking and thinking about, and of course working in, our gardens. I am incredibly grateful that you have thus far as least been willing to come along with me on this.
What's G(r)o(w)ing On Out There??
We may take the summer off, but the plant kingdom certainly does not. All the tropicals are thriving and lush, of course, and the hot weather vines like luffa, mirliton, melons and squash are doing their thing, as well as all the passionflower and jasmine, sweet potatoes and yams. Summertime trees like bananas, papaya and moringa are poppin off. Many of the veggies have petered out by now, but of course there's always a few standbys that can hack it in the heat, like eggplants, peanuts, hot weather greens like molokhia and malabar spinach, and mallow crops like okra, cotton and hibiscus.
Speaking of mallows, there's some kind of (presumably native?) marshmallow that's been blowing for weeks along the banks of the Industrial Canal. The flowers are super pretty, as well as the pods or calyxes.
In the wide world of animals, there's also a huge (by Orleans Parish standards) alligator that's been chillin in the canal all month. It's been fascinating to check in on her every day when I walk on the levee. Most of the time, she hangs on the up-river bank of the canal, but sometimes on particularly sunny days she comes to the down-river side, where there's better rocks to sun herself and stretch her jaws. In rain storms, she hides in the marsh. The trippiest thing about the whole situation is how she keeps an eye on you as you walk along, changing direction when you do, and diving when you approach.
In other animal news, everywhere is totally infested with every species of ants imaginable, making outdoor work of all kinds quite the hassle. But those populations will decline soon enough. Maybe my favorite bit of animal activity though is how, for some reason, all the street cats and street chickens appear to be on the same birthing schedule, and so the streets are swarmed by kittens and pullets, all 2 to 4 weeks old, and of course sworn natural enemies. I couldn't say why exactly this delights me so much; it just seems so comically disastrous.
these are obviously adult cats and an adult bird, but I walked by em while writing this and thought hey — why not snap a pic?
Aaaanyway, on to the main event —
Establishing a Garden Practice
Our friend and cross-the-street neighbor, Robin, keeps 5 or 6 hanging baskets of flowers and herbs over her front porch. It’s the only gardening she does, so far as I’m aware, but every day I see her out there watering — and the plants thrive, even in the blistering heat of a New Orleans summer.
My best friend and erstwhile roommate back home in the PNW inherited from his dad a penchant for houseplants (and some of the plants themselves). He would ritually unpin and unhang them from around the apartment for regular dousings in the bathtub and kitchen sink — a task that exhausts me even to contemplate. That same friend’s mom, who doesn’t drive, filled instead the allotted parking space at her apartment building with 15-25 dwarf apple trees in 20-30 gallon pots. Every winter she would make pies for her friends and her children and even her children’s friends (I only got one that I can remember. Quite the honor).
My Mamaw, always game for a new health fad, for a while got into sprouting her own legumes in jars, in her closet, in the dark. She explained this to me at great length when we visited one year, pulling books from her shelf and making me look stuff up on my phone.
I once had the delightful and unforgettable chance to meet another friend’s dad, Fritz, and to see the sun room of his otherwise gloomy central Oregon home, which he had dedicated to his collection of beautiful, mature potted cactuses. Such a collection may not require constant attention or irrigation, but it does take years of loving dedication — effort that can abruptly and irreversibly go South, whether due to negligence or to forces beyond our control.
At the crunchy preschool that Maggie and I used to work at, I would every day water and primp the long-suffering patch of lemon balm by the porch, only for it to again be trampled, grabbed and pecked at, rooted around and stripped for tea or potions, whether by the schoolyard chickens or rabbits, the children, or all three working together.
Now I spend my days caring for seedlings and other young and tender potted plants — vegetables and herbs mostly, of course — plants that will hopefully soon move on to other homes in other gardens, to be cared for by other gardeners.
What are we doing? What can these Practices, so different and so much the same, rightly be called? In some cases the plants are tended for food; in others, for purposes more aesthetic or (dare I say?) spiritual. In some cases one might be hard-pressed to name any reason at all.
Plants can be grown in the ground, or in pots or hanging baskets, or in jars in a dark closet. Some require active and ongoing input from their gardeners. Some need only a little help to get started, or in being protected from the most extreme of temperatures and elemental shifts. Some even prefer neglect.
In some gardens it is the Particular, the Unique Individual Instance of a plant that is of interest to the gardener. Sometimes though it is whole populations to which we are oriented — generations rising and falling quickly and successively. Such is the case certainly with those jars of sprouted legumes.
We are doing something here. What is it?
The idea of a Practice, foundational to so many spiritual and religious traditions, can be of some use here, I think. Think of meditation, prayer, yoga, or the sweeping of the monastery floor. Think of how they may be taken on not just as tasks or means to an end, but as a personal and collective Practice, whose purpose is contained within itself. We do it because it is Good to Do.
A healthy Garden Practice does not have any particular outcome. It is a space where one may examine oneself as one actually exists: as one Being among uncountable others, whose every breath and impulse interacts infinitely and unfathomably with all other points on that vast matrix of life and Being. It provides us also with a general up-or-down axis of evaluation:
A healthy, diverse and self-regulating garden = Good
An aenemic, homogeneous garden requiring constant external inputs = Not So Good.
Approached in this way, the garden can serve as our point of connection to deeper reality: the World Navel that we talked about a couple newsletters (this is a Gardening Newsletter) ago. But what we will find, once a healthy connection is established, is that it will spread to encompass more and more of the world until our Garden Practice may be applied to all of our surroundings and experiences as a means of observing and interacting with the universe and all of its contents.
First we will notice how our garden is affected by forces that transcend its geographical boundaries, in the form of weather, environmental pollutants and soil health, etc. Then we will notice that we are ourselves a part of the garden, and that our efforts (e.g. weeding and pruning) are internal to it. As such, all of the inputs that our bodies or selves require are also necessary to the garden as it exists. Any additional inputs that we must purchase are dependent on the money to buy them, and thus, on our bank accounts and the incredible ecosystems that those entail. And of course the inputs that we purchase are dependent on inputs of their own, and so on.
A healthy garden is one which, as any of its players or inputs increases or decreases or disappears altogether, is quickly able to achieve a new equilibrium. That new equilibrium may contain drastically different dynamics between its constituent parts, even huge swings in population levels, or the change may be barely perceptible. In any event, while we may petition for one outcome or another, the forces that govern these processes are mysterious and ultimately beyond our control.
So now we come to the sticky issue of the Supernatural, unavoidable in any such conversation. But the thing is that everyone, up to the most hardened materialist, believes in some idea of the supernatural, if we take that word to mean “something unexplainable by science” or “beyond comprehension.” Our most advanced science, mathematics, logic and philosophy will only ever be crude systems cobbled together within something, and unable to conceive of whatever that thing truly is, in any real sense.
But, because we can only act on what is knowable to us, we do employ our human understanding to study what goes on in the garden and the greater universe, and act as we gather to be best. Through our Garden Practice, we can inhabit that space that is within our understanding but right up against the unknowable — reality as it actually is — the other side of the membrane revealed through Practice.
That we should live and think “ecologically,” with a more proper concept of our place and function in the web of life, is hardly a new idea. Broadly, this is all that we’re advocating here, but it is in disciplined and active participation in those processes through our Garden Practice that they will become discernible and manifest to us. Though each of our Practices is deeply personal and quite unique to us, we will soon discover that no one human animal can exert enough force of will to bring meaningful change to the broader system, the Garden of Gardens, and shift the equilibrium in a way that benefits us.
Without such Collective Will, make no mistake, an equilibrium will be found regardless. But to achieve any outcome that includes us as members of the World Garden worth preserving, we must take conscious action upon it, as active participants.
Reality is of course not flat or mappable. Rather, it is woven and folded into itself, and no thread is traceable to any end or beginning. Knowing this, it would be a fool’s errand to attribute any ultimate cause, purpose or solution to any thing that we encounter, in our garden or any other part of the universe. All things, all ideas and all events bleed into and metabolize one another. Thinking this way, we can identify some shortsightedness (to say the least) in the “quick fixes” of reliance on herbicides and unnaturally potent fertilizers, etc.
The path to health and success in our garden, and in the garden beyond that, and in the garden beyond that, is to be found in Practice — in patience, diligence, openness and generosity. This is how we will open that portal, the World Navel, expand its orifice, and pierce the veil to the other side. This is as close as we can get to perceiving things as they Really Are, but it is a path without end. The universe is inconceivable, and all we can possibly hope is that we can get a little closer every day, through Practice.
Bee Report
By Maggie
“We got a new hive from the North Shore! I don’t know them very well yet, but I’m hoping they’re happy in their new environs. And we’re working on arrangements with Colin and Monica to get a second hive. They’ve picked up the bee boxes to clean them up, just in case that was a contributing factor to their disappearance.
Stay tuned for future bee magic!”
Orchid Corner
Not a whole lot to report here, mostly just that we’ve belatedly moved all the orchids outside, where they really should’ve been all summer. They’re hanging over the porch now, where they can absorb some of that sweet, outdoor 1000% humidity.
Beyond that, I must say that they’re all growing quite well — particularly the vanilla orchid, which has, like, doubled in size.
Lastly,
Maggie’s Jam of the Month
totally spaced on including this in last month’s newsletter (so really this shoulda been the august jam..), but better late than never: