Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Solstice Climax
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Asparagus through zinnias pay homage. Leaves, blooms, and vines clamor. Eager for nourishment, plants transform solar energy emitted 93 millions of miles away from Earth into myriad forms of life. Photosynthesis absorbs carbon dioxide from our thin atmospheric envelop and contributes oxygen for us to breath. Breath deep friends, turn your faces to the sun, within the fathomless complexity of our precious planet there is much joy and wonder. Now is the longest day, its anticipation palpable throughout. Without fanfare, fancy clothes nor pompous circumstance, the solstice is dawn to dusk celebration.
Gravity draws us, our feet firm upon soils full of nourishment, the meager band of humus from which we are created and ultimately, return. Wheels upon wheels offer opportunities to nurture carbon binding soils. Our gardens proliferate where once pavement was king. Whether our focus is beloved containers, raised beds in community plots or a backyard patch, we participate in the grand solar cycle. Majestic, so powerful we cannot look directly into the source, each plant we cultivate has unique virtues. Urban gardeners match plants for direct sun, indirect sun, and for many, shade. Darkness is banished from the world today.
The briefest night follows. Maroon Bibb lettuces introduce the intrepid gardener to the finest salads. Cool spring endive, roquette, and spinach burst with nutrients spun off the photosynthetic chain. Coriander, cosmos, amaranth, cone flowers, zinnias, chamomile and verbenas have all sprouted and into headlong growth. It’s a good time to test out favorite salad dressings, mix your own from the herbs thriving just now, rosemary, parsley, chives, sage or thyme.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTBright green peas are ripe for picking. These mornings I eat them right off the vine before crossing the city to work and afterwards harvest the premier Asian sugar pod peas, some page like, the peas hash tags on the leaf. Delectable fresh or frozen they enrich winter meals. It’s time to snip all into smaller pieces and roots and all, turn under. Beneath the overturned humus the peas feed worms, larvae, beetles, and all of the inhabitants of a well fed micro community. Last winter’s and spring seaweed mulch? Buried too, now all but seagull feathers without identity. Reveled? Fine smelling dark loam, soft to tred, moist and pleasing to the eye.
Sunshine has warmed the soil to 65-70 degrees, select sun-loving beans. Forget market varieties and enter another world of heirlooms or those from regions of the world famous for diverse flavors, colors and habit. Scratch the surface and join cohorts of enthralled bean lovers. Community gardens are terrific introductions to the beans to our cities. Our cultural heritages cultivate beans from widespread homelands. The humble bean is one of the Three Sisters Corn, Squash and Beans Europeans found in the gardens of Native American peoples. Beans are bountiful. Straight from the garden? Superb taste and joyous harvests with children or friends. Listen, birdsong, binds us closer. Leave the best and brightest on the vine to mature. Remove when withered and shell. Beans store well in brown paper lunch bags hung in the closet, please mark name and date! They are hardy, a neglected basketful from last fall were found in the cellar and tossed onto the compost heap. Presto, germinated!
My experience confirms that a garden teeming with insects and the gamut of smaller creatures rarely suffers complete plight. I have never applied insecticide. Yankee heritage is laconic, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Primarily, there is no need after simple reverence for all life within our gardens. The peas former bed is perfect for planting yellow, purple or green bush beans or French horticultural pole beans for their flamboyant scarlet, pink or red blooms. Successive plantings of three 10 day intervals will ensure a Mississippi of gourmet food well into September.
The 4 or 5 inches of new soil is replete with last season’s nutrients. Gardens are never static. The summer stars emerge to fore and our attention turns from planting towards tending. The delphiniums are at their peak during the solstice. There is no rival to their rhapsody in sapphire blue. Punctuate your plot with these legendary garden flowers. I am building on last season’s success. Blind to admonitions that smacked of laziness, I rolled 48” green clad wire fencing into tight cones. Like trellis’s, I put them in before planting, the green color camoflages the wire cone and offers many locations to tie off twine or strips of burlap bag cut into 2 inch ribbons. I mixed plenty of bonemeal into the soil and planted 3 transplants. Delphiniums, when established in rich well drained loam bloom into top heavy 3 or more foot spires. It’s a delightful experience to guide the plants upright with the burlap ribbons looped into the wire cone, now into its 2nd season. Last year’s plants have tripled in diameter. They will bloom the first summer, this vigorous perennial also will form lots of seeds. Deadhead as needed now for a second, third and ultimately, mine offered a last single bloom late in October. Nearby, always in prime numbers are set out six new “dells”. All thrive with year round thick hay or seaweed mulch pushed right up to the stem under the leaves. For delphiniums and also, cardinal flowers or other transplants it is a short moment to tear up brown paper bags, pull back mulch, shape a collar around the plant and over the bare soil. Replace the mulch. Volunteers of any sort will be scarce and easy to spot. Attentive gardeners often find themselves thinning rather than tedious weeding.
Volunteers introduce serendipity into the garden. Our urban lives are none too subtly a sequence of red lights, devices, and office hours connected by hard pavements for busy feet and so many single driver cars. Whimsy is important. Chaos is the father titan of Time. Between paper collars under mulches right up to cracks in the sidewalk are legions of volunteer cleome, verbena, jonny jump-ups, chamomile, mints, and other charming plants. Years ago Mammoth Sunflower did well from seed. Volunteers persist in the general location. They are over 3 feet tall at the solstice. I thin wherever thickly grown, removing any spindly or crooked stems as they become evident and remove lateral growth for more compact bases. Mammoth sunflowers are true giants. They solemnly observe the sun’s arc during the day and peacefully fill platter sized seed heads irresistible to flocks of gold finches. Later this summer the volunteer sunflowers will watch over the garden. Brilliant black and gold finches blend into the colors of the sunflower.
Maroon Love Lies Bleeding, the garden amaranth eatable from sprout to seed, thrives in the garden margins. Who could devise such an array of harmony within complete independence? The passage between pavement and soil blurs away, softened by chicory, purslane, tumbling kiwis wave above for support, all welcome gardeners into being. Now is the time to pinch back apical meristems, the central stalks of coleus or lemon verbena, remove spent roses to encourage lateral growth. Establish a regular time to water containers. Fuchias are particularly vulnerable to drying out, alas to those who do not respect their thirst! Use this time for yourself, this is not labor. The solstice is the longest day. Celebrate life’s prolonged glory as Earth tilts once more towards the sun. Maybe get your feet wet or gaze spellbound for humming birds among the delphiniums. Savor a fresh picked strawberry. Sense the soil beneath. Breath. Today is a day to last forever.
Leonard Moorehead is a life-long gardener. He practices organic-bio/dynamic gardening techniques in a side lot surrounded by city neighborhoods in Providence RI. His adventures in composting, wood chips, manure, seaweed, hay and enormous amounts of leaves are minor distractions to the joy of cultivating the soil with flowers, herbs, vegetables, berries, and dwarf fruit trees.
Related Slideshow: 10 Things to Do In New England Before Summer’s Over
Related Articles
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: All For Love
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Seeds in the Snowbed
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Hope Springs Eternal
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Patience is Virtuous
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: The Great Melt
- Leonard Moorehead, the Urban Gardener: Spring’s Snowy Prelude
- Leonard Moorehead, TheUrban Gardener: Snow is Good for Gardens
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Before and After
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Bless Garden Catalogs
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Icy Grip? Pass the Salt
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Winter Blooms
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Let’s Go Green
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Vernal Equinox
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Peerless Pears
- Leonard Moorehead, the Urban Gardener: Everyone is a Gardener
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Sweet Memory
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Celebrate Roses
- Leonard Moorehead, the Urban Gardener: June Smiles
- Leonard Moorehead, the Urban Gardener: Asparagus at Last
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Spring Busts Out!
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Spring Poised on the Equinox
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: April Opens with Kindness
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Spring into Action
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Container Gardens for Urbanites
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Strawberries and Love Divine
