Tuesday, May 13, 2025
a very 2025 mid-may yard & garden report
It got hot early. A harbinger, maybe. Close to 90 a little to the east of here. 80-something here where there’s some mountain shade and running water. We had a few days of real rain, so it’s green, but I’m not sure how long it’ll last. The tree pollen is just ecstatically blasting itself onto every available surface. (Pollen: My eyes are burning, my nose runs constantly, I’m stupid and disoriented, it feels a little like I’ve been punched in the head at all times.)
Amongst the considerable dandelions and the grass doing its best to run riot while the water lasts: Domestic honey bees, a few flies, grasshoppers in some early instar that’s still a later one than I expect. The spiders are out. It still seems like things are… Missing. The fruit trees flowered abundantly, and at least with the apples it seems like they got pollinated, but it’s hard not to wonder. Everything is at least a little out of typical sync, but it’s hard to tell how much it matters from up close.
There are eerily, distressingly, few birds — some starlings, a few crows, a little slender hawk of some sort, a single enormous crane that flies back and forth over town in the late afternoons, one pissed-off bluejay (chased the hawk out of the yard a bit ago) — and I guess it’s probably because a lot of the birds are dead now. I haven’t seen a single hummingbird in the yard yet, though they’re usually here before the last snow. This place being the way it is, I don’t know that we’ve had our last snow, but it feels more likely than usual.
The headgate is open and the ditch is running, with surprisingly little incident. I’m half ready to fill my reservoir cube and start running drip irrigation off it, but the remaining half is going to be an effortful one.
I had plans to expand the deer fence around the garden and put in another raised bed. At this rate… Well, maybe in time for a late season planting. I won’t get it done this month.
I weeded and turned a couple of the existing raised beds with a potato fork and put in some starts. A tomato, a couple of peppers, a basil, a swiss chard and some collards. I scattered 5 year old spinach and chard seeds around the bed. Maybe some will start. There are volunteers: Fennel (suspect that, like the oregano, I’m going to have to kill vast quantities of this stuff every spring to keep it from taking over the entire yard for the rest of the time I live here), peas, onions, potatoes I clearly forgot to harvest in the fall, cat mint (DO NOT PLANT), feverfew (SAME). Survivors include sage that’s wintered over twice, now graduated from a handful of twigs to something you could reasonably describe as a bush, the aforementioned oregano, a little patch of lavender, a set of ragged strawberries originally transplanted from Kansas by way of Nebraska.
I don’t have ambitions about producing any food this year. I want to draw in the tiny native bees to something flowering, and pick herbs and aromatics to cook with. Maybe some greens.