July Garden Advice
an island of pure summer, off the coast of the academic year
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July, as I’ve written before, is the only month entirely untouched by school. It’s an island of pure summer off the coast of the academic year, inviolable and apart, but still within sight of the coast so that we can increase our delight by looking up occasionally from our books or fishing rods or plates of ripe tomatoes, and remember all the things we don’t have to be thinking about at the moment. June has its regal serenity, packed with light, and August its golden-edged tristesse, but July is the pure distillation of summer, ripe as a plum and clear as a sun-blanched sky.
It is amazing, too, how nature herself seems to take up entirely new routines right around the beginning of this month. Many of the regional songbirds settle down, as it were, from the desperate game of finding a mate to the quietude of domestic life, and switch their music accordingly. Two weeks ago, when I arrived at school to get ready for the Friday volunteers, the purple finch that habitually pirches near our vegetable garden was singing its familiar, hungry, mating-season song. Last week, the same bird, or one of its brothers, was perched in the exact same place, but had transitioned to the second movement. That is just one of a thousand signs that, with the tipping of the light, creation has shifted into a new mood. For humans, that mood is mostly recreational and adventurous. For nature, it is all about growth and homemaking.
Annual and perennial plants alike are greedily feasting on the sun, converting as much energy as they can into food and sending it to fruit and roots, the only chance for survival or procreation next year. The local rabbits and squirrels are brooding in abundance, and a chance look out of either of my boys’ bedroom windows will see the young ones cavorting and rummaging, driven by insight or instinct into the play that will train them to survive when the other shoe drops and everything goes cold. The brevity and grace of a New England summer is something all of us fantasize about for the long dark of February, and it’s impossible, it seems, to maximize every day as much as you’d like. I find that the best way is to try to live in tune with it as much as possible, keeping the screen doors and windows open, letting the smell of cut grass and the cries of the seagulls in, and eating fresh out of the garden or the woods as much as you can. In July, that sort of life comes easily to hand, if you’re willing to pay attention and look closely.
The last few nights, my wife and I, who had grand plans to read books and watch boatloads of classic film while our kids were away, have been instead been paralyzed by nightfall. Out on the porch at evening with cups of coffee or steaming tea at hand, we light a candle or two and talk, watching the broad light crane and lengthen, until some instinct makes us quiet. The catbird and the robin are the last to sing out of the dark maples, but finally they go silent, too, and a gibbous, brie-colored moon rises through the leaves, and the world is given over to nightsounds under the prevailing silver-blue. You can’t make moments like that last forever, but you always wish you could.
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In the meantime, there are plenty of ways to keep yourself and your garden healthy during this island month of summer:
1/ Go Foraging
While not exactly gardening advice, consider the encouragement to forage a prompting to go have some summertime adventures and live in tune with the year. I’ve written before, both here and at The Enthusiast, about chantrelle hunting in the northern woods, which is at its most promising from July to September. But there are other foraged delicacies—and I use that word advisedly—much closer to hand for even the casual forager. I found out recently that daylilies are delicious, especially their pods and petals fried up with a little lemon and butter (though you have to make sure you are not eating a true lily, which is poisonous). Dandelion greens are as tasty as they are healthy, sunchokes are universal, perslane is no doubt growing in your garden as we speak, and makes a superb garnish or element in a feta-spiked salad, Elderflowers are delightful in champagne or simmered into syrup for your pancakes, and Juniper berries are great with shellfish, or garnished over chicken. Foraging doesn’t have to mean putting on wellies and a mosquito-net hat and heading for the woods—it can be something you do on a neighborhood walk with your kids.
2/Fertilize Potted Plants and Tomatoes
I am rapidly becoming a maximalist, more-is-more sort of person when it comes to potted plants at home, as the cover image of this article will show you. Every spring, I snap up a few more terra cotta pots and fill them with whatever I can grow from seed, grab at the store, or pull from the ground. This year, I’ve doubled that delight by embracing a potager philosophy of pots, mixing edibles like herbs and hot peppers in with more decorative plants, so that even a nip out to the porch will furnish me with key elements for a stock or salad. It feels like a revelation and I do not foresee ever turning back. But more pots mean more watering, always keeping in mind that a potted plant’s access to water and nutrients largely depends on you. I always keep a bottle of Neptune’s Harvest organic seaweed fertilizer ready to hand, and you should, too. Once every couple of weeks, give your potted plants some of it, and don’t neglect your tomatoes, either, which want plenty of goodness to set good fruit.
3/ Keep Sowing and Propagating
With the frenzy of April now far behind us, it’s easy to slip into the mindset of tending plants rather than planting them. But we’ve all known the tragedy of coming back from a few days of travel to find that all our salad has bolted, with no hope of finding replacement plugs in the home and garden stores, which, absurdly, are already stripping their shelves in preparation for Halloween. The only insurance is to keep sowing salad crops all year, putting some new seeds in a tray every time you plant out the old ones. Depending on where you are in the country, and whether or not you have cold frames, this is a rhythm you could—and should—maintain all year long, a promise of delicious freshness that not even the fading light can take away.
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