June Turns Hot
June 16 - June 22, 2025
Weekly journal of a Midwest gardener…
Monday, June 16, 2025
Mow, mow, mow the lawn, don’t let it get too long. Merrily, merrily, merrily mow, then trim it all around. Of course, before mowing, I did some shrub trimming, mulched up the trimmings, and waited for an ever-so-brief shower to move on through. (Be a good cloud now, and sprinkle somewhere else today. Thank you.)
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
An unbelievable thing has happened, or rather not happened, in the Vegetable Garden Cathedral. I planted a trial cabbage plant sent to me by Burpee, and so far, the white cabbage butterflies have left it alone.1 I repeat. They have left it alone. I think they prefer the nearby row of kale, where I did find their little green larvae. Will they discover the cabbage? Or will they stay on the kale?
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
My gardening time was sandwiched between a morning thunderstorm that left about half an inch of rain and a late afternoon thunderstorm that delivered another third of an inch of rain, with a side of wind. In between, I applied a soil conditioner to my lawn2, suckered and tied up the tomato plants, and picked the first cherry tomato.3
Thursday, June 19, 2025
I got a late start in the garden, later than I had wanted, but I managed to weed the long border of the Vegetable Garden Cathedral, where I had sown seeds for zinnias and marigolds. I was pleased with the germination rate. Then I weeded a large bed at the east end of the garden where I planted a pumpkin a few weeks ago. I’m gradually converting this particular area over to self-sowing cottage-style flowers like hollyhocks, borage, bronze fennel, etc.4
Friday, June 20, 2025
Happy Summer Solstice! My plan was to bookend the day with gardening, but I puttered around indoors in the morning, ran a few errands, recorded a podcast episode, ate lunch, and never stepped foot into the garden except to check the rain gauge. Then, I ran a couple of quick errands after lunch, before finally mowing the lawn and watering container plantings.5 In between all that, I finished reading a friend’s upcoming gardening book via a PDF proof and wrote a blurb for it, at her request.6 No sign yet of that summer boredom I experienced as a kid!
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Family Pruning Day! I was up and out the door early with my truck loaded up with all my trimming tools… hedge trimmers, pruners, saws, and rakes. First stop was a nephew’s house, where I trimmed up shrubs, cut back low tree limbs, and edged around the sidewalk.7 My sister was a big help because she raked up all the trimmings. Then I went to another sister’s garden where we did some light trimming and discussed what they should have an arborist do with their trees. That was enough for the first hot day of summer! Still not bored, not one bit.
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Before the heat of the day arrived from its overnight retreat, I weeded and tidied up a bit in the front garden8, then headed out to the back garden where I bravely waded into Plopper’s Field to tame back some of the wilderness overtaking the perennials. I deadheaded, yanked out, and cut back. It’s still a bit wild-looking, but I have hopefully stopped some of the rampant self-sowing going on in there. It’s so prolific, it’s shameful. After all, how much straw foxglove does one flower border need? And I definitely regret planting that perennial sweet pea eons ago. Now the coneflowers, poised for their big burst of summer bloom, have a little more breathing room.
That’s a Week!
Queue up the hot days of summer! I enjoyed the relatively cooler days of this past week, when I could garden early or late without being too uncomfortable. But now it’s time to plan for some hot days with temperatures in the 90s. That means gardening in the early morning, starting at dawn if possible, and then quitting by mid-morning. Thankfully, I recently discovered a new-to-me refreshing, cool drink that is quite good and quite reviving. Coconut water! Why didn’t I know about it sooner?
What Else Did I Write or Show Up This Week?
I wrote nothing on my blog, and it isn’t time for a new Lost Lady of Garden Writing, so the only new addition from me to the Internet, other than a couple of random Notes and Instagram posts, was the usual new podcast episode and newsletter. But if you want a throwback video to watch because you missed it the first time, check out my interview with Noel Kingsbury on his Thursday Garden Chat on YouTube.
Quotable
“In the summer garden, time stretches out in weeding, watering, and watching. Mostly watching.” - Who knows who wrote it!9
Have a great gardening week!
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Burpee sent me ‘Golden Cross 40’ cabbage to trial in my garden. “One of the earliest maturing cabbages. Very flavorful, medium-green, uniform heads with a form, short core.” Days to harvest is 40, and that is generally counted from when it is planted in the garden, so I should be able to make some cole slaw from it for July 4th.
I applied the soil conditioner through a hose-end sprayer. One of my neighbors, out on her morning walk, walked by, chuckled with a little shake of her head, and asked if I knew it had just rained. Yes, yes, I did. The instructions said to water after applying if it doesn’t rain within a day or so. I knew it would rain later in the day so I decided to go for it.
The prize for the first cherry tomato goes to ‘Sugar Basket F1 Orange’, a variety Burpee sent me to trial. I planted it in a container on the back patio. For the record, it was delicious. Remind me again why I bother with buying cherry tomatoes, which, in comparison, are quite bland.
We also had a brief rain shower on Thursday afternoon. The kind that won’t really be measurable in the rain gauge, so if I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t know to record the day’s rainfall as a trace amount. I would have put zero in my rain tracking app!
I finished listening to The Skull Beneath the Skin by P. D. James. It was her second mystery featuring Cordelia Gray, and I enjoyed it. On to the third one… and then I realized P. D. only wrote two books featuring Cordelia Gray. The first one was released in 1972, and the second in 1982. Drats. I’ll have to find out why she stopped after two books. So now I’m listening to The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, by Laura Thompson. I decided on it because there is a new series on Britbox, “Outrageous,” based on the lives of the Mitford sisters.
My friend’s new gardening book is going to be published in 2026, which sounds like a way-in-the-future-date but is just a little over six months from now. If you want to find out more and keep track of when her book is published, you can follow her here on Substack. Or just follow her because she is a good gardener and a good writer.
My nephew and his wife have a small garden with mostly shrubs in front and a couple of trees. We finished it in about two hours, give or take. They have the added benefit of living in a small city where you can haul your branches and trimmings to the curb, and a city crew will come along and take them away, and turn them into mulch.
In the front garden, I cut off all the seed heads of the spectacular Allium schubertii. Seems a waste to compost or trash them, so maybe I’ll spray paint them and put them in a vase on the front porch? Or probably they’ll sit in the bucket I stashed them in and be moved around the garage to keep them out of the way until I have the heart to toss them.
I asked ChatGPT to come up with some quotes about summer from my gardening essay books, and it came back with “In the summer garden, time stretches out in weeding, watering, and watching. Mostly watching.” It said it was in my first book, Potted and Pruned: Living a Gardening Life. Really? Hmmm… so I pulled up the book from my files and searched for the quote and came up with nothing. Then I asked ChatGPT for the page number, and it said it couldn’t come up with one as my book hadn’t been indexed online, but I could search for it in the actual book. Then I did a general search online. Nothing came up. I searched on my blog. The closest I came to something I wrote was on this post about hortisma.
Here’s the post, which is short, with the phrase that I used to search on is bolded:
“hortisma: n
1. a special quality or power of a garden that makes it capable of influencing or inspiring large numbers of people;
2. a quality inherent in a garden which inspires great enthusiasm and devotion
Examples of its use in a sentence:
The Lurie Garden in Chicago had a special hortisma about it that caused people to visit there many times on a single visit to Chicago.
Or
Her garden did not seem at first glance to be anything unusual, but she was under the spell of its hortisma and spent hours weeding, watering, and watching it each day.
You don't see hortisma in a garden, you feel it.”
So to sum up this very long footnote, it is a fake quote. I can take no credit for it, but I do kind of like it. But it just goes to show that AI isn’t always accurate.