Finding Rhythm in the Chaos of Summer

It’s here. The frenzied, manic summer garden life. Screw sleep. It’s for winter. Put down your knitting needles. Those too are for colder days. Forget TV. It’s for dreary and snowy days that are sure to return.

Living and breathing alongside a garden is a test of elasticity. It doesn’t even request your presence, it demands it. The days are long and the tasks are endless. The food is maturing and the fridge is full. It’s a true balancing act deciding each day what to prioritize. It’s sort of awesome. And can also be more than a bit overwhelming.

It is only going to get more intense, more beautiful, and more hectic day in and day out. And it’s exactly what I love about living with a garden.

On the one hand, I love this lifestyle. I am maybe a little ADD (self-diagnosed, but have you watched my Stories?!), and so playing ping pong with gardening tasks leans into my intuitive strength. (Shiny object, go fetch, Meg!). It’s like going to work and having no plan until the plan presents itself.

My weekly tasks from last week didn’t all get done (the ones I list on the MGG homepage). But I got A LOT done last week; I let the garden remind me what needed to get done. I am feeling as productive and energized as my garden.

This is living alongside a garden.

I’m soaking up the sun and long days, and despite feeling a bit under the weather (possibly you-know-what has infected me), as soon as I step into the garden, I do. It’s like an uncontrollable urge to be in the space and to listen to its call and heed its direction. It wills me into action every time. It’s so motivating.

So how do my days form right now? I definitely take inventory everyday. Writing a list is aspirational for me most days, but when I do it works wonders. (I should write that down so I do it more often.) But sometimes you wake up and see an issue that you didn’t anticipate and you have to drop your list and act. There are 5 main areas of focus for me for the next month or two.

Pests are top of mind right now, and will be through sometime in August. The next six weeks is a daily crawl for larva: Colorado potato beetles, three-lined potato beetles (they feed on tomatillos and cape gooseberries), squash vine borer (no better feeling than killing those beautiful moths!), Cabbage white (aka, cabbage moth or imported cabbageworms, though it’s a butterfly!), and soon the Japanese beetles. I’m on the lookout for cucumber beetles but they are suspiciously absent in our garden so far this summer.

After the pest patrol, I water any seeds I may have miraculously sowed recently. Right now that’s the cover crop in the raspberry bed and soon I’ll add more flowers to some open spots as well as another round of sweet corn (third and final sowing!), and my direct-seeded brassica bed.

Sowing seeds in summer is the singular most challenging thing to do — and it’s the singular best thing to do as a gardener, securing extended harvests well beyond tomato season. I am loving hearing from so many of you who are taking steps toward a fall garden this year. It will be a delicious fall for so many of us, and it makes me just delighted to hear from you!

I am not hand-watering anything other than newly planted seeds; the rest of the garden is on drip irrigation that runs every other morning for 20 minutes in each bed. I’ll share more about our irrigation system later this week.

Managing the garden for trellising issues, pruning, and deadheading flowers is a less critical but also necessary task to maintain a visually stunning garden throughout summer. I prune my indeterminate tomatoes every 1-2 weeks, weather dependent. I am currently working on training all my cucurbits up the various trellises to get them going vertical.

Because it’s a burgeoning grocery store, the third major task of the day is harvesting, especially delicate food. So that’s definitely strawberries and to a lesser degree, our peas and lettuce. We are at the tail end of spring head lettuce season and quickly moving into heat tolerant summer lettuce territory — they will be ready to harvest in another week or two.

Amid and between and during these tasks, I am working to keep my phone away from my hands and really immerse myself in the sheer joy and wonder of the garden, the seeds we sow, the environment all around us. The hoverflies are doing their typical June thing, reproducing by the thousands in our garden — they are an aphid-eating machine in larval form, and they are so tiny you’d miss them if you didn’t know I’m making friends with this adorable robin who’s sort of taken up residence in the garden. It has a ruffled feather and a few nights ago we watched and waited while it chipped away at the ripest, most beautiful strawberry in the blueberry bed. The birds are definitely thirsty right now, so providing water outside the garden is a great way to deter this kind of snacking — but we grow enough to share, so I don’t worry. Unless this robin brings their friends, families, and friends of family … then we will have a problem.