Weekly journal of a Midwest gardener, which includes sowing seeds, mowing, potting up, weeding, reading, and rain.
It hasn’t rained for over a day and the sun is shining, finally. But I didn’t rush out to the garden. Instead, I acted like it was a holiday, which it was. First order of business was to put out my American flag in honor of Memorial Day. Second order of business was the HVAC spring tune-up, rescheduled from last week due to rain. Most important order of business was a family gathering at my youngest sister’s house.1 Final order of business was to water plants on the porch under cover and to check the other containers to see if they needed watering.2 After all, we haven’t had rain since Saturday!
And just like that, after noting in last week’s newsletter how behind I was with spring planting, I’m now somewhat caught up. That’s because this morning, I got up early and headed straight out to the garden. I planted out a few annuals, potted up herbs on the back patio, weeded the flower border in The Vegetable Garden Cathedral3 and sowed seeds for zinnias, a few marigolds and a spot of sunflowers.4 Then I came inside, cleaned myself up, and ate lunch.5 But my garden-waiting days aren’t over. Now I’m waiting for some marigold, zinnia, and basil seedlings that I started indoors to grow big enough to plant out in the garden and in a few pots.
Before leaving for an appointment and a few errands, I went out to the garden and poured out just over a half inch of rain from the rain gauge. Perfect for settling in everything I planted and sowed yesterday.6 Yes, it’s nice when Mother Nature does something nurturing like that. By lunchtime, the sun was shining and I briefly thought about doing a few things in the garden. But then the skies opened up and we got another inch and a half of rain.7 More than I thought we needed, but who am I to judge? All that rain means no gardening today.8
Sunny, but oh my, the garden is soaking wet. I had hoped to mow the lawn early in the morning but it’s going to take a day for it to dry out. Every single blade of grass is holding onto a little droplet of water. Pretty, but drats. It’s really growing now.9 I did plant out the perennials I got yesterday, so I’m back to “nothing to plant here.”10 Does that mean I can just sit around reading and drinking tea? Absolutely not! I did a bit of weeding, removed more old foliage from spring bulbs, and cut out some deadwood here and there before other activities of the day pulled me away from the garden.11
Sunny, and the lawn was dampish, but I mowed early anyway. One must! I also took the extra time—as I always do—to trim and then blow the clippings off the driveway and sidewalk.12 Once I finished mowing the lawn, I checked on progress in the Vegetable Garden Cathedral. I found more strawberries to pick and harvested the last of this spring’s lettuce crop. Most of the seeds I planted way back on May—checking calendar for actual date—18th have come up, except for some climbing cucumbers. Admittedly, those particular seeds were old and a bit crushed so I didn’t have high hopes for them. In their place, I sowed seeds for scarlet runner beans.13
Today was the official start of the summer reading program at my library! Let the reading begin. But first, let the shrub trimming begin. After planting some annuals at my sister’s condo, we went to my nephew’s house and trimmed their shrubs. Lots of “big” help from the two-year old!14 In other gardening news, according to the weather forecast, we aren’t supposed to get any rain all next week. We’ll see if that holds true. In the meantime, I need to remember to water containers. I’ve been getting lazy about watering since we’ve had so much rain in May.15
I went out early and made sure all the container plantings and newly-planted-in-the-ground annuals were all well-watered.16 Then I watered my sadly neglected houseplants and decided that I need to give each houseplant a bit of one-on-one time to assess its overall health, repot it if necessary, and maybe put it outside for the summer. I also added to my to-do list a big project in the Vegetable Garden Cathedral, but I’ve run out of room here to go into details. This week’s update is already almost too long for email, so I’ll tell all about it another week.
Perhaps the biggest gardening news of the week is that after not having a lawn care service for two years, I signed up for one this week. Prior to two years ago, I used a service that fertilized once in the spring and twice in the fall, but only killed weeds with an herbicide in the front yard. Never in the back where my beloved crocuses grow wildly throughout the lawn. Then two years ago, I stopped that service and went a year without a lawn service at all. The lawn held steady, more or less. Last year, I decided to apply organic treatments myself and managed to apply three of the four treatments in the kit. It wasn’t a lot of work to do, but it was one more thing I had to do. Plus, now that I’m in my spinstercore gardening era,17 I don’t need one more thing to do. So I signed up with an organic lawn care service this week and will go with their full treatments for a year to see how it goes. Their focus, rightly so, is on improving the soil so the lawn grows better than the weeds. They will be here Monday for the first application of fertilizer, etc.
“Don’t get away the ending too soon. Don’t reveal what is in the shadows until the reader is primed. We don’t know what is coming and from where and at what time, but mark my words—when it comes you’ll know it, and there will be goose bumps covering you from fingertips to toenails.” - John R. Kelly, The Inklings Detective Agency.18
Until next week,
With a shared love of gardening and reading,
Carol
While at my sister’s house on Monday, I may have instructed my nephew on which branches of a couple of trees to prune out, and at one point someone might have handed me some loppers and I may have cut out a few smaller branches and an invasive tree of heaven, Ailanthus altissima. You definitely do not want that tree to ever grow to any size in your garden.
And in between events on Monday, I made two trips to the greenhouse. The first was a quick visit to buy three more variegated basil, ‘Pesto Perpetua.’ While there, I also bought a curry bush plant, Helichrysum italicum. It’s not the curry that you use as spice, and it might not be hardy here, but why not give it a go, anyway? Thanks, I thought it was worth trying too. Then just as I got home from that first trip, my sister texted me asking about impatiens, so I went back to the greenhouse a second time on my way to her house to pick up a flat of impatiens for her.
One of the worst weeds in the flower border of The Vegetable Garden Cathedral is pink evening primrose, Oenothera speciosa. Dreadful, horrible perennial. I have no idea what I was thinking 25 plus years ago when I planted a wee bit of it in my garden. Oh how it spreads! Never ever should I have planted it. True story… I once saw a woman in line at a garden center and she had TWO gallon containers of pink evening primrose in her cart. I told her it would spread and one was plenty, but really she shouldn’t plant it at all. I think she took part of my advice and bought just one container of it. I wonder if she recalls that crazy gardening lady (me) who warned her all those years ago as she, too, is weeding out bags full of it from her garden.
Forgot to mention I also picked a few more strawberries on Tuesday. Plus the first of the snow peas. Yum!
I also forgot to mention that on Tuesday, while I was weeding in The Vegetable Garden Cathedral, a robin came and sat about ten feet from me for a bit. Now British gardeners might be thinking, “What’s the big deal?” because I hear-tell that robins are pretty social over there. Well, the big deal is here in the U.S., I don’t often see robins coming that close to people, at least not that close to me. So I was quite pleased that one sat nearby while I was weeding. Hmmm… do you think it was waiting for me to unearth a few worms for it? I did my best to do so… Now, here’s more robin info than you ever thought you cared about… In England, robins are a different species than our U.S robins. They are smaller bird and at least in my mind, I think they often hang out close to gardeners.
I decided to go to Menards and maybe a few garden centers in the afternoon on Wednesday. Skies were overcast when I went into Menards and then I heard a most unusual rumbling, which was the sound of heavy rain on their metal roof. My shoes and socks got soaked going back out to the car because of course I didn’t take an umbrella into the store. No matter because when I went in and out at the next stop, the umbrella didn’t really keep me dry. Plus my shoes and socks were already wet. I went home and didn’t check out any other garden centers.
I might not have done any gardening on Wednesday due to rain, but the rain didn’t stop FedEx from delivering a box of trial perennials from Darwin Perennials. They sent me three plants each of Rock Candy® Series Penstemon, Pink Improved; Candy Cloud™ Series Phlox, Blue Cloud; and Suntacular Rudbeckia. I’ve figured out spots for all of them: the Penstemon goes in the Pink Garden and the Phlox and Rudbeckia go in front around the bird feeders. The back garden is getting to be too shady (and admittedly a bit too crowded) for perennials like these that prefer full sun
Yes, the lawn is growing, but it hasn’t become overgrown to the point that one of those guys who cleans up “the worst yards in the neighborhood” so they can shoot a video of the clean up and put it on YouTube is going to be knocking on my door anytime soon.
“Nothing to plant here“ almost sounds like a confession of some kind, like maybe I’m trying to hide exactly how many plants I bought and planted this spring. Ha! There’s no way of knowing because I take the flats and pots—aka “the evidence”— back to the greenhouse as soon as possible.
Of course one of the Thursday activities out of the garden was Trivia Night. At the end of the first half, we were tied for second! Would we be able to catch the first place team in the second half? Possibly, but we didn’t. However, we left the team we were tied with for second behind and won a solid, solo, second place! Go Team Indygardeners! Did you know that Martin Van Buren was the first president born after the U.S. declared independence in 1776? He was born December 5, 1782. Keep that little tidbit under your hat, just in case. Also, we do not like questions about Taylor Swift because we know virtually nothing about her! But the way other teams jackrabbited out of their seats with the answer to where she grew up showed us just who the “swifties” were!
While mowing, I started and abandoned my first choice of audiobooks and switched to Death of a Smuggler by M. C. Beaton with R. W. Green, which I checked out from my library. I searched later and saw that this was the 35th book in the series, and I hadn’t yet read the 34th in the series, Death of a Spy, so I queued up that audiobook to listen to after this one, and put on hold the 36th book, Death of a Groom, which will get me caught up on these mysteries! No, I will not tell you what book I abandoned! Yes, I have read the other 33 books in the Hamish Macbeth mystery series!
Never fear that I think I can substitute scarlet runner beans for cucumber vines and miss out on homegrown cucumbers. As if I’d do such a thing! I do have some bush cucumbers planted in that same bed, so I will have cucumbers to pick later this summer in spite of the failed climbing cucumbers. I just didn’t have anything else to climb up the supports I had put in place for the climbing cucumbers, so scarlet runner beans it is!
They don’t have too many shrubs at my nephew’s house, so it doesn’t take long to trim them up, plus my sister helps clear up the trimmings, which makes the work go faster. It’s also nice that in their town they can pile branches by the curb and the city crew will come pick them up, eventually, and turn them into mulch. All good. After pruning, I used their electric mower to mow their small front yard to clean up the last of the trimmings and make everything look nice and fresh, and discovered my nephew has been mowing the grass way too short. Men! I raised that mower blade up two notches, was tempted to go three notches higher, and told his wife to let him know he should let the grass grow taller.
Total May rainfall was .10+.86+1.19+.81+.02+.13+.29+1.94+.57+.17+.37+.54+1.43=8.42 inches! Average for May using data from 1992 - 2021 is 4.73 inches. Average for June is slightly wetter at 5.19 inches. What rain will we get this June?
I’m making an effort to water in the early mornings this summer, which is the better time to water. Past Carol watered in the evenings for some reason, probably one of those habits acquired during her working life from which she retired ten years ago. Present Carol will water in the mornings. Future Carol will reap the rewards of this new habit!
Remember, I’m trying to start a new trend with spinstercore gardening. I wrote about it on my blog and also here on Substack in this post and this other post. You do not have to be an unmarried woman of a certain age to adopt spinstercore gardening as a way to thoroughly enjoy your garden!
I’m still reading The Inklings Detective Agency by John R. Kelly (2026) on my Kindle, scrambling to finish it before my loan expires in just six days! I am also still reading the same two paperbacks as last week: Random Commentary by Dorothy Whipple (1966) and The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (1950). I read a bit of each of them every day.
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