Flowery May seems to have come our way, although spring drags its feet a bit more than we, impatient for sunshine and warmth, might wish.
The shadbushes create delicate clouds of blossom in woodsy places; treasure one if it shares your space. The frail blossoms’ ephemerality in the Island year is as much cause for pensiveness as are the famous flowering cherries to the Japanese sensibility. Dramatic emergence dominates woodland-style gardens, with new tree leaves in the near distance and, close by, Solomon’s seal, mayapple, Jeffersonia, fiddlehead ferns, and more busting up through their covering of old leaves and debris. These settings seldom need cleanup in the usual sense, maybe just keeping an eye out for weeds. Soil temperatures are slowly on the rise. The soil thermometer registers different readings in different spots, having borderline readings between cool and warm in two places, and of barely warm (60°) in one more. With more sunshine and less overcast, soils will rapidly warm.
If this is similar to your soil, it means, impatient as we are, that dahlias, beans, sweet corn, peppers, and other warm-season plants should wait — there is no advantage in planting warm-season seeds and plants into cool soils. Go ahead with cool-season crops: lettuces, cole crops, spinach, peas, onions, and potatoes: All fine.
Dark skies
Suzan Bellicampi recently publicized the mission of the dark skies movement in her “All Outdoors” column in the Gazette. The struggle against light pollution and light trespass is an uphill battle.
Here, it seems our many new Island neighbors think it is cool to string bright lights everywhere, to turn nighttime into day on decks and patios, and even to uplight trees, and then to never turn them off — leaving them burning all night long.
Islanders who travel out West or down under return home extolling the wonder of the billions of stars they have seen in the dark skies of these distant latitudes and meridians. However, here at home there is a disconnect: no awareness of nonstop, 24-hour synthetic daylight we impose on ourselves, on our neighbors (light trespass), or on our living world.
Instead, it would be very cool if Island residents and people newly moved here were to become delighted and entranced with the Island’s still relatively dark nighttime skies — they do remain lovelier than the mainland’s.
What would be very cool would be truly recognizing the gift of darkness, or becoming educated about the living world’s many natural processes that require nighttime darkness. While it is biologically correct that almost all life on earth is light-driven, it is also biologically correct that the diurnal turn to darkness is equally necessary.
Rather than duplicating the conditions that far too many urban and suburban Americans live under, where light pollution causes nighttime skies that are sort of grayish, with only the brightest stars and planets visible, we could be far more proactive in protecting the natural wonder of dark nighttime sky.
In fact, Nantucket, Chilmark, and West Tisbury already have dark sky regulations in place. Nantucket honors the Nantucket-born astronomer, Maria Mitchell, with its bylaw (bit.ly/MA_DarkSkiesTowns). However, as with many bylaws already on the books, enforcement is dilatory, and people are often reluctant to rat out their light-trespassing neighbors.
Leeks
At Thanksgiving, when my dinner contribution was to be braised leeks, I was horrified to see dark specks of insects on the perfect vegetables I had harvested only days before. It looked as if the entire large crop would be ruined by allium leaf miner. The leeks recovered, however, and grew well through winter under the snow. They could well have been a component of the old-time “hungry gap” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_gap).
Blue-violet coloration signifies cold hardiness, which the leek ‘Bleu de Solaise’ exhibits. Look for the characteristic when selecting for seed-saving. Now, though, some are beginning to bud, and need to go into the kitchen ASAP. They are easy to turn into leek and potato soup, a culinary standby of many variations and cuisines and, depending on the individual recipe used, an alpha-gal-congruent one.
In the garden
Forsythia has no pollen or seed production. Its reproductive strategy is to tip-root: Branches root where they touch, quite quickly. Prune them now to shape and to prevent forsythia creep. These rooted pieces may also be used to start a forsythia hedge or room, if you have space or inclination.
Pruning after flowering of other spring-flowering shrubs happens now, to avoid losing next spring’s flowers. An exception (There is always an exception, right?) is lilac. Avoid pruning lilac until after the egg-laying phase of active lilac borers has passed, usually July; the pruned woods’ scent attracts the female lilac borer.
Flowering magnolias are signs of longtime residency and continuity. Today’s ownership mode appears to preclude planting one of the loveliest of flowering trees. Seasonal residency or short-term? Perhaps no one is there to see it in flower.
It is ironic, therefore, that we see many flowering plums, and weeping cherries grafted onto standard trunks. These trees are cliché, and often become ungainly or exhibit disease problems that magnolias do not, even though many magnolias are also grafted.
Mark narcissus and early spring bulbs such as snowdrop in need of dividing. Snowdrops transplant best “in the green,” before foliage withers. Screen and spread compost; every bit of it produces great results for soil and plants such as peonies and bleeding heart. Shearing early-season bloomers, such as creeping phlox, arabis, and iberis, immediately after flowering makes them shapely for the rest of the season.
Start a feeding program for roses: one to two cups of low-number, organic soil food scratched around the base once a month. These plants need adequate moisture to produce bloom; give one inch of supplemental water weekly if it is dry.
Tick check every night. Don’t scratch — investigate!