I don’t think lilacs like this weather. All the bushes around my house and on my neighbor’s property (though leaning over into my yard) have leaves that are curling and turning brown. The grass underneath the bushes is covered in brittle leaves. Walking through the yard sounds like autumn. It is hard to tell from online resources what this means in terms of water. Some seem to say that brown, wilted leaves indicate too little soil moisture, while yellowing leaves mean the roots are drowning. One garden advice website said to feel any exposed roots for mushiness that would indicate rotting from too much water. But I don’t have any exposed roots. I rather feel that the bush would be upset by that. However, the soil is waterlogged, so I really doubt this is a case of too little water. Maybe there was a yellowing stage and I wasn’t paying attention, but somehow I don’t think so. The bushes are right outside my dining room window. I see them every day. I think I would have noticed yellow.
I know the internet is about as reliable as the guy selling 24K gold jewelry out of the back of his Subaru. And lately Google feels perpetually broken, too focused on all those tracking metrics to actually generate an accurate list of search results. But shouldn’t it be possible to ask for indications of too much water in a lilac bush and come up with some reasonably coherent responses? Nothing doing. I finally had to direct myself to the Old Farmer’s Almanac to see if they had an answer. Of course, they did… And yes, crunchy brown leaves are a good indication that the plant is drowning.
There is nothing I can do about this, but it is good to know. If lilacs can’t handle tropical levels of precipitation, then I won’t put too much effort into keeping them alive. There are plenty of shrubs that are better adapted to modern weather, and I like nearly all of them better than lilacs anyway. Lilacs are attractive for the approximately two weeks a year that they are in flower. But even then, I don’t much care for the scent. If the bush would tone it down a bit it might be appealing, but that is not the case. It’s overpowering and, to my nose, just over the edge of that line between sweet and cadaver.
And that’s the high point of the year. After blooming, the flowers turn brown and slimy and then ugly seed heads form, usually up too high to dead-head without hauling out ladders. Then in the fall the leaves turn brown and crumbly — as they are now — and yet hang on to the bush until the weather knocks them off sometime in December. But the worst aspect of lilacs is that throughout the summer the bush sends up leafless suckers, creating a thicket of sticks, most of which the plant cuts off before they ever put out a leaf because — duh — they aren’t photosynthesizing. So all winter, the bush just looks like a mess. Dead stick branches and those ugly seed pods. Even the healthy branches are gnarled and twisted, but not in a charming manner, more like they’ve been cursed by an irritable deity. Probably because that deity had to spend so much effort managing stick thickets.
All this is to say that I will not be heartbroken if the lilacs do not survive. What worries me is that I will try to remove them and they’ll come back from roots that I can’t reach — because the roots are under the front porch. I’ll have undead lilacs, nothing but stick thickets without even the mixed blessing of spring flowers.
The lilacs are in the minority though. The rest of the garden is… well… tropical. Everything that isn’t being eaten by the fat marmot is lush. I have cucumber vines that must be over twelve feet long, undulating back and forth around the trellis supports. The tomatillos are making a bid for escape to the jungle where no doubt they plan on colonizing the maples. The potatoes, still green, have left their beds and are heading for the garage. The herbs I planted this year, most from plugs that barely had a thumb’s height of green when they went into the ground, have put on what looks like three years of growth in a few months. The monarda are in full bloom. I’ve never had monarda bloom in the first season.
Tomatillos heading for the jungle
Cucumber & tomatillo
Jacob Cline monarda <1 growing season old
This was dirt in June
All this green would be astonishing enough, but the plants are also producing. Imagine that! A veg garden that is filled with veg! I have to pick cucumbers and summer squash every day. This weekend I made a vat of cold cucurbit soup. It is mostly just puréed cucumber and squash, but the garden has also yielded up shallots and garlic. So those were sautéd in butter and added to the pot. I needed to retire last week’s yogurt, so that went into the pot, along with eight ounces of Vermont Goat cheese. A bit of thyme, marjoram and lemon pepper rounded out the flavor, and a couple quarts of broth from the freezer turned the purée into soup. I also made a quiche with broccolini (from the co-op, because rodent) and tomato (from the garden) — and eggs from a co-worker’s hens. And there is still pickled cuke and onion salad in the fridge. So I will be eating well this week!
Summer squash and surprise beans. Also a bush of volunteer summer savory in the lower left.
Elder flowers & tiny berries
There are still tomatoes on the vines. I haven’t even begun to dig the onions that are everywhere. Nor the potatoes. There are beans in with the summer squash; I didn’t know the beans even sprouted. The winter squash are flowering and there are even a few melons that have survived marmotgeddon… I’ve never seen such abundance. And this is just the veg patch. I’ve also got a glut of apples that are going to make gallons of apple butter and sauce. The elderberries, planted just last year, are covered in tiny berries — while there are still some branches in flower. I’ve heard that when you encounter trees loaded with both flowers and fruit, you’ve found Avalon. Perhaps I should be on the look-out for the Good Folk.
So disastrous as this summer has been, this garden is proof that we can still feed ourselves in times of adversity. Though we might not be growing lilacs.
More garden photos…
Agastache & calendula – two of my favorites!
Basil bushes
Joe-pye weed
The front bank heading into fall – not quite aster season…
It is not all roses and overzealous cucumbers. There are still problems… The hops are only just now starting to recover from groundhog destruction early in the summer. And there are still active patches of marmotgeddon… even inside the siege walls. The image below right was thick with daikon radishes a week ago… now I seem to be radish-less.
Hops… barely
Marmotgeddon
But the hog has not yet moved into the adjacent bed to eat the beet and turnip greens. So those are all doing magnificently. I pulled a baseball-sized white-top, purple-globe turnip out of that bed last Thursday. It was perfectly spherical and so smooth. I almost didn’t want to eat it… almost…
I was reading a gardening book Friday evening while Debby was crying all over the town (but, notably, she did not destroy us… only got about 5″ of rain in a bit over 24 hours). It is one of those “play nice with the locals” re-wilding garden books. I wholly support being lighter on the land. Never use anything with -cide as the final syllable in its name. Never use fertilizers that come from a factory. Come up with ways to manage droughty weeks without turning on the hosepipe. Grow soil, let the soil grow the plants. Just common sense stuff. But I don’t know that I’m up to re-wilding my garden.
For one thing, it isn’t re-wilding. It’s always been wild and rather untrammeled territory. I just try to keep up. But the thing that bothers me is that a garden that welcomes in the deer and raccoons, rodents and rabbits, to say nothing of pigweed and artemisia and crabgrass — and my personal nemesis, wild clematis — a garden that has all that is not actually a garden. There will not be a harvest. Little of what could feed you will survive in such conditions. Even the critters will go hungry after a season or so, because they don’t eat the weeds. That’s why those plants can take over. Nobody eats them.
I was reading this book and thinking, “This is written by someone who pays someone else to manage the actual gardening.” No gardener would gush about the adorable bunnies in the veg patch. And squirrels are just objectively obnoxious. Watch them for five minutes and you know you’re seeing evil intent. And, apologies to the foragers out there, but weeds are weeds and should be summarily dispatched when still young enough to kill. Because plants that aggressively seed and spread and choke out everything else are also objectively obnoxious. They are not “free plants”; they cost the lives of every other being in the garden.
But it occurs to me that we don’t have very many books about dealing with actual gardens. I don’t think I’ve ever read in a book that lilacs don’t like heavy rain. I’ve never read an account of coping with groundhogs by anyone but Michael Pollan — and he lost… after deploying the flame thrower… As things break down, we’re going to need garden books that talk about how to be neighborly in your gardening habits, but leave the romance to the fiction section. Deer are not cute. And the fact that they are invading suburbia is not evidence of living in harmony with nature. They are in your backyard because they have lost their home, because your backyard is one of the few reliable food sources left to them. This isn’t cute. It’s a tragedy.
The other day The Last Farm was talking about some of the things that permaculture gets very wrong. The utter failure of leading by example and a rather cozy relationship with plastic were both on the list. But number one was the nonchalant attitude toward introducing known invasives, along with a host of other potentially disruptive plants. I understand permaculture’s stance on this. This is an Australian garden design ethos and these plants are rugged survivors. If they can thrive on country they can grow wherever you live. Only… that’s not the best measure of what ought to be planted in the garden.
I have been to some wonderful permaculture farms. I myself follow many permaculture precepts, such as insisting that thing must meet more than one goal if it’s going to be introduced into my garden. And who doesn’t love the idea of a food forest? No-work food growing year-in and year-out right by the back door. Except, like re-wilding, I wonder how much this idea has been field tested. Forests are generally not rich in human food unless the local humans are actively grooming the entire ecosystem.
When you look at permaculture books, there is much less about the harvest than about the design process — which is usually rather rigid, with much earth moving and plant replacement regardless of a specific ecosystem’s needs. Similarly, I don’t think I’ve read one permaculture book that talks about food storage or even processing the harvest. I should think goji berries take a good deal of work to be turned into nutritious food (unless you are also a raw food enthusiast, I suppose). In any case, these are not books about gardening, which is working with nature to nourish and shelter your body, to produce a useful harvest, and, most especially in these latter days, to lighten your footprint on the world by managing your own needs in your own small space. These are books about applying an Idea to the natural world, regardless of that idea’s utility. In other words, they are most often books about building up human ego… not about reducing human impact.
The book I was reading on Friday was also not a book on gardening. It was about ideas. Sort of naive ideas. It was not talking about gardening… it was talking about The Garden… which is a fairy tale. But it is certainly not helpful in these days of weekly hurricanes and ravaging rodents and the increasing costs of acquiring or doing everything.
Truthfully, I think the majority of garden writing is about The Garden, the pursuit of a perfect Eden in whatever way the author defines perfection. There are no pictures of water-stressed lilacs or marmotgeddon radish patches and, similarly, no tips on how to cope with these increasingly common exigencies. Very few garden writers talk about what to do with the produce from the garden, nor even how to plan out a garden so that what you produce can be harvested and used. How many times have you read detailed instructions for growing artichokes or heirloom tomatoes that seemed to stop at the ripened produce? How many obscure varieties of potatoes are lovingly described in the weekend gardening column of your local newspaper and yet never one hint of what to do with that huge pile of newly harvested spuds? The usual narrative in garden writing is focused on human cleverness. Look what we can do! It’s not about why you would do it nor how to use what you’ve done. The goal is to make something impressive, not useful.
I want my garden to be useful. And that means it should produce a harvest that I can use. It also means it should provide home and shelter to as many other beings as possible. This might mean that those plants and critters that will ravage an ecosystem, the opportunists like humans (and always spread about by humans), those things need to be minimized or eliminated in as gentle — but firm — a manner as possible. If I let the groundhog just do his thing, he will destroy the garden. Groundhogs are adapted to a world where clover and wildflowers always grow in such abundance that there is no need to be concerned about over-eating — which is impossible in a warm-blooded creature that goes without eating for over five months every year. Over-eating is not a thing for groundhogs. The only way to keep a groundhog from eating everything in your garden is to keep the groundhog out of your garden. You can’t accommodate something that is programmed to eat everything within sight — and I think if you spent ten minutes watching groundhogs or even reading the misinformation online you’d soon conclude that groundhogs and gardens can not live together. You would certainly not burble on about making room for all creatures. Some creatures take up too much room. Humans have quite a lot of experience with this and really should recognize this trait in others.
But anyway, I think we need more practical garden books. Writing that talks about the challenges that we all face every day of the growing season when the seasons are turning chaotic. More about using the harvest, less about creating visual perfection. And I, for one, would like someone to give me some pointers on ridding the garden of marmots… preferably without pulling out the flame-thrower…
