Leonard Moorehead, the Urban Gardener: Midsummer’s Eve, Festivus
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Leonard Moorehead, GoLocalWorcester Gardening Expert
No one is immune. Full Moon, planets and Sun align the Northern Hemisphere towards true North. Our cities ignore many natural phenomena and yet verbena and coneflowers claim cracked sidewalks and all of us feel special during Midsummer’s Eve. Various calculations reflect fluid cultural history, no gardener can deny the allure of Oberon’s Bower, or the impulse to burn an outdoor fire and pile sage branches onto red hot coals, a magic cloud flavors grilled food. Worries flee cleansed guests. Our gardens are eloquent celebrants, the wheel is our symbol, spring falls behind and summer is upon us. 
PHOTO: Leonard Moorehead
St John’s Wort is common along roadsides. Long ago St John’s Wort escaped the colonist’s medicinal herb garden. The uncanny St John’s Wort blooms each June 24, St John the Baptist’s feast day, calculated as six months before the longest night. St John’s Wort remains a treatment for mood, the cure being a miracle. As the cosmic wheel turns, our gardens respond.
Spring sown lettuce, mustard, arugula, kale, cress, beets and their leafy cousins, red, golden or white stalked Swiss chard are fully mature. Edible pod peas are at their best. Taller stalks with yellow flowers indicate bolt, as all energy concentrates upon seed making. Harvest your spring salad bowl. Add zest under your garden hat and eat fresh mustard leaves, follow with parsley sprigs. Bring a large straw basket, snipers or good scissors, gloves and kneel pad, a folded burlap bag upon permanent mulches or pathways between raised beds works for me.
Bed the knees, not the back. Breath from the pit of the stomach, consider the garden from lower heights. Beneath thickset strawberry leaves is where all the action is. Pick the last sweet berries, guide runners away from mother plants, pull back mulch, lay the runners natural span beneath, replace the mulch. Use both hands, remove any grasses, roots and all, and throw into direct sunlight upon the mulch. Immature or thinned leafy green vegetables are delicious. The home gardener enjoys true baby carrots, commercial ‘baby” carrots are mechanically produced from full sized carrots!
Gardens are actually large compost heaps. Many vegetable scraps will root, tomato seeds are frequent volunteers. Manures contain edible but partially digested seeds that germinate in tilled soil. Save time and re-purpose used brown paper bags, laid out on fast disappearing old mulches. Tear or fold into custom shapes, place over harvested salad beds and add grass clippings, hay, or compost. Short on mulch? Lay old garden stakes upon the paper to keep firmly in place, top off the paper covers when materials are available. Few unwanted plants penetrate paper barriers. Precious moisture beneath the paper encourages earthworms. Slugs anywhere? Sprinkle with a little salt and move on. Plant new seeds/seedling through the paper.
Sharp clipper blades or scissors are useful thinning tools. Plant seeds thickly, thin crowded beds by snipping. Leeks, shallots, and other onions may be gently pulled from humus rich soils, tuck in the smaller neighbors ready to fill in the open space. Snip plants such as kale, carrots, and beets and do not disturb shallow root systems of those left to fill in the space.
Daisies, coneflowers, and beebalm are Mid Summer’s magic. If Oberon’s Bower includes kiwis, grapes, or honeysuckle, prune back vigorous vines. Most grapes have flowered, future grape clusters are easily observed. Prune back fresh growth beyond the late August grape harvest. Enjoy slow Mid Summer’s processions along the garden path. Puck a friend of yours?
Pinch back chrysanthemums and asters, simply break off the main growing stem just above the next cluster of leaves. Each stem will rebound with lateral side growth. Shape the plants, pinched back plants develop sturdy stems unlikely to topple under future heavy blooms. Transplant any chrysanthemums struggling in areas formerly sunny into more sunlight.
Pinch back dwarf fruit trees. Customize the best picking height to your reach. Pears often form twin or triplet fruit clusters, remove the smaller immature fruits and encourage larger sized fruit for later this summer. Observe for infestations, prune broken branches, note the solstice apogee and gauge day length requirements for your garden. A distant fast growing curly willow casts a shadow on the asparagus bed. Asparagus has little tolerance for less than 6 hours of direct sunlight, cut back overgrown butterfly bush, Rose of Sharon, lilacs and Forsythia.
Open spaces in the garden? Once lush salad beds empty? Plant beans. Have fun and explore the fascinating world of beans. Bush beans fit into small spaces, separate varieties into clumps. Most yield 60-75 days from planting. Plant over the next few weeks for staggered harvests or raise multiple crops in one space. Pressed for space? Grow upwards, Kentucky Wonder is a classic pole type fully capable of filling 10’ trellises. Add variety and include the French horticultural multi- colored bloom types. Their scarlet-white bicolor blooms produce delectable beans.
Rather late to plant summer vegetables? Mid Summer’s Eve is a turn on the cosmic wheel, its warm weather vegetable heaven. Predatory insects do not have gardener’s discretion, crops planted outside of predators’ life cycle require little or no pest control. Replace peas, buried under on site or composted, and grow summer loving cucumbers, squashes, gourds, or flowers.
Zinnias, Tithonia, cosmos, and Four O’clocks are vibrant free blooming annuals for the summer garden. Mix up the varieties, zinnias offer wide ranges in color, form, and height. Note your favorite, allow a few blooms to form seeds late in October and save for next summer.
Add mulch. I use whatever is free or abundant. A good luck haul of wood chips free for the asking is piled up next to the long term leaf compost pile. Spearmint colonizes thick layers of slow decaying wood chips, I easily pull up the spearmint, cut the heavily scented foliage and hang under warm dry rafters. The roots go back into the wood chip pile or planted on top of the thick stand of mint already growing over the leaf pile.
Moist wood chips from last December are thick with mycelia. I heap the chips around and on the potato patches, each a separate type such as Peruvian blue potatoes. Potato foliage out distances the thick mulch, later, search for fresh “new” potatoes within the mulch, replace the mulch.
Walk barefoot along the seashore, carry along a bucket. Just above the high tide mark is a ribbon of dried seaweed. Amuse curious folks who also enjoy the cool sea air and ask, what is the seaweed good for?”, share our enthusiasm for all things summer, “seaweed makes fine garden mulch” “Feathers too?” “Yes, almost pure nitrogen”, wear your gardener’s badge with pride. Gather seashells and top off container plants with a layer of shells, no splashes to expose roots and improve drainage.
No summer solstice is without magic, as dear Bottom says:
O grim-look'd night! O night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not!
O night, O night! alack, alack, alack,
I fear my Thisby's promise is forgot!
And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall,
That stand'st between her father's ground and mine!
Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall,
Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne!
{image_2}Leonard Moorehead is a life-long gardener. He practices organic-bio/dynamic gardening techniques in a side lot surrounded by city neighborhoods in Providence RI. His adventures in composting, wood chips, manure, seaweed, hay and enormous amounts of leaves are minor distractions to the joy of cultivating the soil with flowers, herbs, vegetables, berries, and dwarf fruit trees.
