When you leave the garden for a few days. 🍓
Week 4: Growth
Welcome to 🍅 GARDEN NOTES 🥬
A gardener lite logbook of weekly learnings & findings as I tend to my garden this season. Receiving guidance primarily from my elders; my neighbor, mother-in-law, grandparents, and greenhouse friend. Secondary resources are the Old Farmer’s Almanac and Google.
Logbook:
Week 4: Growth (you’re here.)
WEEK 4 | JUNE 11 – JUNE 18, 2023
Remember how last week’s baby leaves reminded me of my newborn? This week that newborn turned 3 years old! I was tending to her festivities so beyond nightly watering, I’m unsure what the plants are up to this week. In an ironic twist of fate, River loves bunnies thanks to Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Her birthday was full of fruit, wildflowers, & bunnies. The mother’s arch-nemesis becomes the daughter’s most beloved. May this not be a foreshadowing of future beaus…
Once the plants are planted, watered, and given food, you do have to let go of the early-season routine where you have a hand in everything. Let the plants breathe, give them space to grow at their own pace. No, I’m not still talking about River but I might as well be.
I learned from my neighbor that my 2 strawberry plants won’t fruit this year. I’ll need to prune back the blossoms when they sprout. They’re a perennial, & they climb like ivy over the soil, so they’ll be establishing their roots this season without bearing fruit. He’s hesitant that I have strawberry plants in the bed since they shoot out all over & may overtake my cucumber, zucchini, & radishes nearby. We may transplant them to the ground next year for a true strawberry patch yet everyone but River knows the bunnies of the neighborhood take no berry prisoners.
Week 4’s growth is in big thanks to my neighbors and my mother-in-law who kept up the daily watering routine while Joel & I took a weekend away to Traverse City. My own strawberries may not have been June-bearing this year but the roadside stands along M-22 were full of ‘em. *special thanks to @hwyrobbery57 for telling us the hulls won’t do shit when thrown in a ditch as we grabbed a couple quarts of strawberries from his stand.*
When you drive along M-22 with a quart of sun-warmed strawberries fresh from the patch, get at me with your experience. It is divine.
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