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 I blinked and the patch of winter greens shot up flowers. On CBS News Sunday Morning yesterday, Charles Osgood called the season just passed (we hope) “the winter that wasn’t.”
 A collard as tall as my grandkid.... I waited months for frost on the collards, to tenderize them (the old folks say), but it didn’t arrive until February. Two weeks later, the collards bolted and went to seed, before I got around to cooking more than just a mess of them. (That’s a Southernism, for those of you that don’t know: around these parts, we cook up a ‘mess’ of collards or greens. Yum.)
The salad greens planted this fall have bolted and gone to seed too, but aren’t they beautiful? Perhaps I should rip them up and get the bed ready for hot weather crops — but not just yet — the honeybees like them, and we should do whatever makes honeybees happy.
 Fresh spinach all winter long... you won't hear me complaining. This is the first winter in memory where we had spinach and lettuce all season, without a break — so honestly, I didn’t really miss the collards. We could have salad with supper every night, and we almost do, although the red leaf lettuce planted in October is beginning to taste a little tired. I’ll be glad when the fresh lettuce planted a week or so ago is ready to eat.
 Yep, those are baby strawberries. As pleasant as this mild winter and early spring has been, it’s a little unsettling. There are blossoms on the strawberries, not so surprising, but actual strawberries, in mid-March? We planted one peach and one pomegranate tree this fall; they are blooming too. The blueberries are leafing out too — will this be the year for berries that actually turn blue?
Maybe, as long as the winter that missed us doesn’t decide to boomerang and wipe out all those tender blooms and buds with a fast frost or hard freeze. That would be disastrous, especially for our local farmers.
I think I’ll wait a bit before putting out any tomatoes, just to be sure. But maybe, just maybe, the winter that wasn’t has passed us on by.
Irene brought us wind and rain, shredded leaves and scattered branches, but not much more.
 There was one casualty Behind the Fence... Sometimes it’s a good thing when the weather forecasters are wrong, although I wonder if the damage to their credibility results in complacency when a monster storm really is headed our way.
Major flooding, the worst in decades, swamped the Outer Banks, but here in Elizabeth City, even the floor of Salvage Guy’s garage stayed dry. In the past, a minor tropical storm has flooded the garage with several inches of water.
We were as prepared for Irene as we were for Isabel in 2003. That storm downed hundreds of trees in Elizabeth City, blew out storefront windows, took out a corner of a historic brick building, and obliterated a little pink church near the Museum of the Albemarle. The roar of chainsaws was background noise across town for weeks, the water didn’t recede for days, and blue tarps became the new fashion in roofing materials. Continue reading Compared to a ‘real’ hurricane, Irene was just a puff of wind
If you want to see a bunch of Southerners do the hustle-bustle, predict a hurricane. Hurricane Irene is making a beeline for northeastern North Carolina, and I’ve never seen folks at the Food Lion move as fast as they did this morning.
 The end times have arrived for the sunflowers. There was a cashier at almost every register, (something else I’ve never seen) and people were loading their snacks and ice and sodas into their vehicles and pulling out of the parking lot so fast you’d imagine the sky was set to drop any minute — even though the sun was shining.
I found myself adopting the same sense of urgency, and had to remind myself that we had all day to get ready for the storm’s estimated arrival on the Outer Banks, some 50 miles away as the crow flies. Elizabeth City won’t get inundated by the tide or lashed by the same high winds our oceanfront friends will likely experience, but it’s fairly certain we’ll get battered by some wind gusts of the 100-mph variety, strong steady winds of 80 mph or so, and plenty of flooding.
Most Elizabeth City residents don’t bother with boarding up windows, but you won’t find a porch swing swinging anywhere in this neighborhood. Most have been taken down, although a few are tied securely to porch railings. We’ve tied the trash cans to the fence, picked up the grand-kid’s outside toys, brought in the wind chimes, and told the unripe cherry tomatoes and the sunflowers goodbye.
Continue reading Irene’s on her way, but we’re ready, I think
What an odd experience yesterday: I was sitting at my desk, and the glass wind chimes my girls gave me began to tinkle and chime.
 Big chimes, little chimes, I don't want any chimes to be blown away. Not so odd, you say? Maybe not, except that the glass wind chimes are hanging inside, and all of the windows were closed. This old house took to swaying a bit, and my first thought was, earthquake? Rational brain said, no, we’re on the East Coast, silly, not the West. A big truck rumbling down the road? Nope, none approaching. Big Dog being extra exuberant with her tail-thumping? No, she was still outside.
My daughter called me from Raleigh a little later: “Did you feel the earthquake, Mom?” She certified it — it was indeed a fluke of an earthquake here on the East Coast, not some bizarre mystic experience, my only other explanation.
Now, it appears that all of the wind chimes should come inside, as Hurricane Irene is to expected to rumble up the East Coast this weekend. Hurricanes are what we expect here, not earthquakes. While eight or nine sets of wind chimes of various shapes and sizes can make a glorious cacophony in 20 to 30 mph winds, if we get 90 mph winds like we did with Isabel, they’ll be gone, gone.
Like many of the rocks and all of the yard art, the wind chimes each have a story. For a few years (maybe eight) my kids believed that what I wanted most were wind chimes, so that’s what I got for Christmas, Mother’s Day and my birthday. Continue reading Wind chime warning: First an earthquake, then a hurricane?
I’ve been resurrected.
 So much depends upon a green wheelbarrow (with apologies to William Carlos Williams). A few posts ago, I wrote that my garden looked like it may when I’m dead — wild and weed ridden, diseased and dying plants obscuring a few straggling perennials struggling to survive. Salvage Guy’s interaction with the garden is limited to walking through it on his way to the garage, so we can’t expect much if I check out first.
However, a couple of days with only moderate heat and not so much smoke, along with a bit of ruthlessness tempered by some patience, have brought the garden to the point where it appears this plot’s gardener is still alive and weeding. In addition to our prolonged heat wave, a fire in the Dismal Swamp north of Elizabeth City has made outdoor exercise unpleasant, if not downright stupid. Continue reading Weed whacking war rages on, when it’s not too hot or smoky
It’s time to get ruthless.
 Buggernut squash, anyone? Have a little stored up vengeance? Now is the time to put it to work. Feeling a little destructive? Head out to the garden.
My garden mentor used to say that the beauty of gardening was that if you planted something and didn’t like it, you could always pull it up and plant something different. In the August garden, if you planted something and you’re sick of looking at it, rip it out and carry it to the garbage — especially if it’s diseased. It’s time to surrender, and then begin your reconnaissance.
Cleaning up a late summer garden often involves admitting defeat. I really like butternut squash, but I didn’t pay attention and the squash bugs got the upper hand. There are too many to battle, so the vines and their bugs are going away from here.
Some folks say it’s OK to put sick plants in your compost, as the heat from the pile will kill the bugs or diseases. Maybe, if you have a perfect compost heap that hits about 160 degrees in the center, but I’ve never had a perfect compost heap (much less a perfect garden). Continue reading Late summer the time to get brutal, then start over
I’ve been slack about updates to Behind the Fence, but it’s hard to blog about gardening when it’s too hot to be in the garden.
 This plant made promises of big, juicy maters, but barely delivered before disease took over. It’s come down to survival of the fittest out there, and the weeds and the grasses seem to be the most fit.
My garden looks the way I imagine it will when I’m dead — overgrown and neglected, with a few hardy perennials showing their colors amid the weeds. (OK, maybe it’s not that bad, but no one is invited Behind the Fence until it’s been tamed. Which might be a while, unless we get a miraculous cool-down.)
The big losers in this prolonged heat wave are the heirloom tomatoes and the cucumbers. Heirloom tomatoes are a yummy, trendy variety of this summer staple, but I have a theory about why they are “heirlooms,” common in the past, but rare now. Why? Because they lack tolerance for heat, drought and pestilence, and were replaced by hardier varieties. Ultimately, less tasty tomatoes are better than no tomatoes — but I might be short on heirloom luck.
Cucumber beetles, along with too much heat and too little water, have had their way with the cukes, but we were about tired of them anyway. If you forage around a bit under the crispy leaves, you can still find one or two. The squash has surrendered and gone off with the garbage, but even my neighbors were tired of zucchini. Continue reading Weeds win out during scorching days of August
 The garden can be a discouraging place right now -- just ask this bunny. In early July, I wrote a post about how pleasant surprises can be a tonic for discouragement.
For that post, the point of reference was potatoes — they hide their goodness under the (parched, here) earth, but can usually be dug up when you want something to eat.
Recently, I’ve been thinking way too much about how blogging doesn’t pay, at least not for a long while, and my time might be better spent trying to generate some income. My discouragement has been compounded by late summer’s extreme heat and scant rainfall; recently, I’ve even considered throwing in the trowel.
Dear Jean has designated Behind the Fence as Blog of the Month! That’s a big boost to the ego, and the resulting new page views should puff me up even more.
 A little boost makes surprises like this more noticeable. If you get a chance, take time to pay a visit to Jean’s Garden and help me return the favor.
She blogs the way I try to write for Behind the Fence: Random garden tips served up through experience, not through lists of dos and don’ts. Often, my garden tips fall into the “do what I did if you want to kill it” category, but I hope that’s useful to somebody.
For example, check out Jean’s post about building her Serenity Garden. It’s like a field trip to Maine (cool weather!) that sneaks in some great suggestions on soil building and bed digging.
I’m going out in the heat now to water my poor bedraggled garden and pull a weed or two.
And thanks to Jean, I guess I’ll blog on.
A couple of years ago, I put the fish pond in the reducer.
 The shade from the plants cools the pond down some. The frozen bottles of water -- I'm not so sure. (At one time, my kids and I called the dryer the reducer, because it made things smaller. Eventually, use of the word became code for making anything smaller, and an idle threat: If you don’t behave, I’ll put you in the reducer.)
But I digress.
My first fish pond was too small for the reducer; that’s where it came from. It was the smallest prefab molded plastic pond (basin) you could buy. Summer meant algae blooms and poached fish. After the first year, I paid my son $10 to dig a bigger pond, invested in a pond liner, and began the arduous task of finding enough rocks to go around it.
The new pond was 5 feet wide and 8 feet long, and about 3 feet deep at one end. That’s pretty big for my little 35- by 40-foot garden space, but there were no more problems with high water temperatures, algae blooms and fish with heat stroke. However, it took two pumps with filters to keep the water clean and moving around.
When you build a pond, you should include a shelf near the top all the way around it. That creates a place for plants, and for rocks to hide the liner and protect it from the sun’s UV rays. We didn’t do that, and there was nothing to keep the rocks from sliding into the pond. My little dog was constantly knocking off rocks during his frog hunts, and I made them slide off when doing routine maintenance, like reaching to scoop the sludge off the bottom. Continue reading ‘The reducer’ makes for a safer, but warmer pond
It’s time to come clean. I am an irresponsible gardener. Don’t believe it? Here’s proof:
- A butternut squash vine is climbing up and over the deck railing, even though I know the monstrous growth habits of this unruly vine.
- Okra turns to wood before I remember to cut it.
- Tomato plants are allowed to tumble. They don’t get suckered either.
- Things I didn’t plant are allowed to grow, like the pumpkins that appeared in the watermelon patch.
- I dribbled moon flower vine seeds around the base of the mangled plum tree.
- Knee-deep grass has taken over a potato patch at the community garden.
- The zucchini could substitute for baseball bats.
- Some of the cucumbers my granddaughter finds are too big for her mouth.
- Butterfly weed has been allowed to grow wild.
- The hose is in a pile behind the fig tree, and hasn’t been used for weeks.
Want more proof? Have a look. (Click on the pictures to make them bigger.)
In my defense, we like butternut squash, and it’s too hot to sit on the deck anyway. It’s also too hot to fry okra; Ruth Stout didn’t tie up her tomatoes; lots of people never remove the little shoots between the branches of tomato vines; pumpkins are nice for Halloween; the mangled plum tree is ugly; the potatoes don’t mind the grass; my neighbor welcomes zucchini of any size; if Hailey can carry a cucumber, it’s not too big, butterfly weed attracts butterflies (duh), and hey, it might rain.
Just call me a laissez-faire gardener. It’s too damn hot out there anyway.
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In his garden, every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation.
Louise Beebe Wilder
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Dee Langston shares her private garden, which is behind a fence in Elizabeth City, N.C., USDA Zone 7-A.
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