Into the Earth

hot, humid, heavy day. worked outside all day today, my son up with his great-grandparents in the house behind ours, they in town from away.

planted another round of lettuce & mustard seeds; re-planted zucchini & summer squash seeds again (i'll remember to water this time!); planted butternut squash seeds. tomorrow will plant: bush beans, pole beans, cucumbers, more parsnips (a few didn't come up).

spent a while expanding my cut-flower beds with the "weedless gardening" technique we use & love: lay down 4 layers of newspaper, wet them with the hose, then lay down at least 2" of soil/compost on top, and plant into that. this technique preserves the waterways under the earth that support roots, keeps the microorganism communities intact below the surface of the soil (which also support the roots of the plants) and saves you from "waking up" all of the dormant seeds lying under the ground that otherwise start growing after you till. into this expanded bed (8'x10') i happily planted my flower seedlings: dahlias, statice, and strawflower. the bed only accomodated about 1/3 - 1/2 of the seedlings, so i'll need to find more space for them elsewhere, but at least these can start sending their roots down. still need to plant various sunflowers, and zinnias.

an update on the saga of our plum grove: we learned last week that american plums are not grafted onto rootstock, which means that the new little shoots from our dead plum are the same sort that we want to have grow, so today we lobbed off the dead stalk and are now watching the two little replacement shoots make their way into the world. being our main pollinator, it stands in the center of our little plum grove. so now our circle of 7' saplings, which looked scrawny a week ago, absolutely tower over the new little shoots growing in their midst. they have a way of leaning inwards over the little one, so that it looks like they're guarding and monitoring the growth of their new little relative.