MichaelP

I don’t have air-conditioning at home.  Some summers, there are a handful of days where, to sleep at night, I have to run a fan drafting air directly over me from toe to head.  Last summer I did, but this summer not yet.

Last summer, our "dwarf" okra grew over six feet tall.  This summer it seems resigned to at most two feet.  I think it’s the lack of truly hot nights that has held back the okra:  it just hasn’t triggered it’s growth spurt.  It’s already beginning to flower, so I think now it’s too late.

Plants can "observe" their environment, and integrate (sum up and average) such things as daylight and temperature, by accumulating certain chemicals.  When they build up enough, that triggers a change.  Quite possibly, okra is observing the average temperature, and nightly lows, in order to decide whether to switch to giant growth mode.

So next year, let’s hope I have a few insufferably hot nights in July, so our smart okra decides it’s okay to be a giant!

 

When we expanded the garden between years one and two, we added a parcel with a drop in elevation that was evident the day we paced out what our request to the Rec department would be.

It turns out that the drop is about 16 inches, as measured early this season by Alan Jones and I (mostly Alan). We weren’t seeking data for its own purpose, but to assess how high to stack stones to make a level bed in our southeast corner.

We found the rocks, it should come as no surprise, while double-digging other beds (which may well be my next blog-post topic). Just for this one bed, whose walls fade away to nothing about two-thirds up the slope, we used not only most of the big rocks we excavated this year, but reclaimed some we’d relocated along the park perimeter.

The stacking is as rudimentary (skill-less) as you can imagine. Steven Lee and I put the biggest rocks in the corners, the next largest along the bottom row, and for the rest, tried to match shapes that “interlocked” as best we could. We can say that, so far, the rocks are still standing.

One reason we wanted to try the raised bed is that last year, downhill flow during a rainstorm actually washed away some garlic we’d planted. By making a level planting field, we thought could mitigate, or redirect, any such future torrents. And, it looks nice, in a rustic, New England sort of way.