By Alison Collin, Master Gardener Volunteer
August can be a very busy and challenging time for gardeners – the fruit and vegetable harvest is in full swing, squash bugs need to be monitored daily, several species of weeds begin to germinate, and many plants that flowered earlier in the season are in dire need of deadheading. Then there is also the summer pruning to attend to, and seeds to be sown for fall and winter crops. It is hard enough to keep up with these activities at the best of times, but with the temperature hovering around 100°F most of the day, and sunset becoming noticeably earlier daily, gardening time is limited to just a few hours a week.
I have found that it pays to take stock of these tasks and work out an “order of service,” with the most pressing things at the top, followed by those that need to be done but are not critical, and noting things that can be done quickly whenever one has a little time to spare, but not enough to embark on a big project.
Since mid-July my chief stress producer was an enormous peach tree, which has produced a couple of hundred pounds of good fruit and about the same amount of windfalls and bird-pecked peaches. Earlier in the year I had spent numerous hours thinning as many branches as I could reach so that the fruits were well spaced, but even so, I needed to support many of the branches with props. Ripe peaches wait for no one. I hate waste, so daily I was picking fruit, calling people to say they were welcome to come by and take as many as they liked, keeping my “produce stand” outside the front door stocked for neighbors, canning, dehydrating, freezing, making jam and chutney, and delivering fruit to elderly friends. Fruit trays littered the kitchen, living room, and spare bedroom. Every morning I picked up windfalls – usually well over 50 per day – to clear the lawn so that the peach pits would not destroy my lawn mower blades. They were added to a special compost bin where the soldier fly larvae had a field day, producing a writhing mass of bodies and efficiently changing the peach flesh into a thick, black, tarry mess, leaving just the pits behind. I never had time to actually use any of this fruit to make one of the tempting recipes that my husband found on the internet! Now I only have two peaches left. What a relief!
I am determined not to have another summer like this, and so need to aggressively summer prune the tree now in order to substantially reduce its size. The new growth produced this year includes many 3–4 ft branches right at the top of the tree, which replaced similar ones that I removed last year, and also masses of new growth all over. I am not sure where this old tree is getting its nutrition from because it is in grass, and although I have never fertilized it, it acts as though it is on steroids.
Once I was able to “come up for air,” I noticed just how much the rest of the garden had deteriorated during this activity. Spotted spurge, purslane, and seeding Bermuda grass were winning the weed war, and I really must cut the yarrow and valerian down before they take over the entire pollinator garden!
But even that might have to wait because the Gravenstein apple tree is now in full production, and is dropping carpets of fruit.
Here we go again!