Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 376
I haven’t had to water my garden or flowers this week as rain kept coming every other day keeping things green and healthy. Picking plenty of Swiss chard, beet greens, zucchinis, cucumbers, radishes, and this week a few tomatoes and green beans. The sunflowers are over six feet tall and still growing. The flowers at home had grown past the deer chewing that occurred while I was in Alaska and they are blooming nicely. My morning glories are the slow ones to bloom, none yet but there are flower buds so there is hope. I bought a clematis that was marked down and near dead with one green leaf which took a while to perk up but it also bloomed with four nice flowers so far and a few more buds.
The holly hocks came back from the deer munching and they have produced several nice blooms. The Tansy is just starting to bloom yellow, and it is deer bullet proof. I picked up some seeds along the causeway in Tupper Lake last year for a new variety that has come up along the driveway but won’t bloom until next year like all wildflowers which have a floret of leaves the first year then bloom the next year, some for several years and others only for a year or two. With these flowers you must collect seeds and plant them after the first year of blooming to keep them going. The pink and white fox gloves are that way, but the yellow fox gloves just keep blooming year after year. Both of those are deer bullet proof also. Sweet William, wild geraniums, and wild bleeding hearts are left alone by deer in my flower gardens as are the wild carnations.
The Old Forge Garden Club visited Constable Hall and gardens this week. We got a great tour of the hall upstairs, downstairs and the cellar. Then we had a nice order out lunch there and a walk though the redone flower gardens. The last time I was there they were redoing the gardens, and they did a fantastic job. They tore out a two-hundred-foot hedge of invasive buckthorn and replaced it with an evergreen hedge that is just starting to grow and deer resistant. Right along the entrance garden fence is a double row of forty varieties of dahlias from tubers given to them by our own Garden Club member Harry Rissetto of Inlet. He shares tubers with club members and the Inlet Community Garden each spring for planting. I have several growing in my back yard. The Constable Hall gardens are broken up by paths into triangles, and they have several volunteers who plant, weed, water, and deadhead all the flowers in the gardens. These gardens are open to the public, but you might call ahead as they maybe having a special event like a wedding going on there.
In the Pacific Ocean Hurricane Lala hit the Hawaii Islands. Only a tropical storm with winds of sixty miles an hour hit the big Island of Hawaii but there were rains of 28 to 35 inches which fell on the island. One person was killed but over one hundred homes were washed away and many bridges and major roadways collapsed. Over 140,000 people are out of power on the islands.
Last Thursday evening my son Mitch and I had a history program at the Old Forge Library for the Old Forge Historical Society on our columns written for the local papers, his Growing up Adirondack and mine started Daybreak to Twilight. I started in October of 1986 at the Adirondack Express and switched papers several years later to the new paper in town the Weekly Adirondack for which he was writing his column. We filled the meeting room and told stories about our columns and the many happenings along the way. We had a great evening, and it was nice to see and visit with lots of old friends.
Check the swamps and shorelines those red maples are turning color but that’s another story, See ya.
Photo above: Dahlias-Constable Hall
