Lippety, Lippety

It isn’t just about getting it IN the ground. It’s the maintenance. Like the asparagus bed. It is at the end of its season (Mother’s Day to Father’s Day) and I’ve spent yesterday morning and this morning moving the straw from it to the tomato bed and once exposed doing a final asparagus pick and then weeding the bed to within an inch of its life, then feeding it with manure ( this year I used “Moo Doo” and finally spreading fresh straw on it. It is a satisfying process. Now the asparagus gets to finally do what it has been wanting to do … grow tall, fern out and use the sun for energy. The asparagus is one of the few plants that will add height to my garden this year as my mantra is “If it doesn’t grow below, let it go.”

Every time I turn around the potatoes have grown another 3 inches and so I had to spend part of today moving dirt into the potato beds to hill them up. I am keeping the CPB’s at bay by picking them off by hand and removing any egg clusters I find. With the exception of the Yellow Finns this year’s potato crop is an experiment in varieties of fingerlings. I have Banana, Red Thumb, La Ratte, and Rose Finn. I’m not much of a potato fancier, but twice I’ve won blue ribbons for my Yellow Finns. Maybe I will like the taste of these fingerlings.

Then tonight when I was staking the tomatoes (the exception to the “grow below” rule) I found way too many aphids for my liking on them. I’ll address that tomorrow morning when the wind is calm.

There is a young rabbit in my view now on the lawn moving casually from one clover to another. Beatrix Potter had it right. The only word to properly describe this movement I see before me is “lippety.”