Mums Away! September Song....

Oh its a long long while 

from May to December.

But the days grow short 

when you reach September...

...And the days dwindle down

To a precious few....

September....

September Song (Anderson/Weill)

Way back when, a couple of calendar pages ago, the greenhouses were full of fresh tender young things; the people began walking and watering and picking up and setting down when the day was young and rested but briefly before beginning the whole process over again the next day.  Mornings were cool but middays were bright and hot inside the greenhouses when the next season's boxes arrived via FedEx just after Mother's Day.  Those boxes held the germ of fall in the form of stems and leaves: the essence and scent of fall without the root, the flower, the hue, the mass of color that the cuttings portend.  Each sandwich baggie held 100 cuttings and a thin piece of plastic with their name.  One hundred and eighty baggies.  Eighteen thousand potential mum plants.

Mums themselves are both tolerant and tough.  But not without roots.  From May 12 to the first week of June, the cutting lived in sheltered comfort, as climate controlled as we could manage given Mother Nature's vicissitudes in late May and June.  The cuttings were watered in gently and lined out on the floor of the greenhouse where the groundcloth was still cool and damp.  The greenhouse was covered with shade cloth and the mister ran twelve hours a day providing humidity and lowering the temperature and stress level of plants and humans.  After a couple of weeks, the cuttings ceased to wilt at midday and began to put out some new leaves.  Growth on the top meant growth underground; underneath the six packs clean white roots poked out of the drainage slots.  Time to move outdoors, to be pinched, to be potted  and lined out row by row like the soybeans planted in the field surrounding.


Mums grow fast.  They are vigorous and will fill just about any size container given enough time. Mums come in multiple sizes naturally; some stay compact enough to flower and flourish in an 8 inch pot.  Others billow and branch and need more ballast to balance out their enormous bouquets atop. Mums are both daylength and temperature sensitive, meaning they are prompted to start developing buds when nights are long enough.  In the very early spring, mums in a greenhouse can set buds and bloom because the nights are long enough to send that signal.  Growing mums out under the sun and stars like we do is always a gamble.  A June toad strangler followed by July heat can put the new roots under stress and bring on some pretty nasty fungi to attack the crowns and what lies under the soil.  As the soybeans grow, the number of pests they host and protect expands exponentially as well.  No one buying soybeans has any idea what ravages the foliage of the parent plant has endured.  Not so your garden mum. If there is more than a critical mass of damage from beetles, caterpillars, grasshoppers and all other crunchings and munchings , the mum won't reach its full potential as a blooming machine. Mums in one's garden have the luxury of being laissez faire with regards to pest control, but mums contracted for sale, a certain number of a certain color for a certain job at a particular location cannot afford the natural state. We usually have to spray for pests with six or more legs twice and maybe three times.

Watering is a daily chore unless Mother Nature intervenes with at least a half inch. At the start of July, watering is an every other day affair...but by the end of the month, the mums have fulfilled their destiny, have filled their containers with roots and are reaching down through the groundcloth.  A pot bound mum needs water every day....I repeat, a pot bound mum needs water every day.  Mums are resilient but not designed for a xeriscape.  We walk the lines as the pump motors whine and the swallows do cartwheels over the greenhouses grabbing snacks off the hot plastic.  The crops in the field this year reward the temperate conditions with glorious extravagant explosive vegetation, the likes of which we haven't enjoyed for these last three dry years.  When I lift my eyes from the rows, checking for the tell tale fountains of leaders chewed off by goodness knows what small annoying thirsty creature, I follow the velvety curves of the soybeans, regular as corduroy around the terrace, 

This July's summer nights dropped into the 50s and sure enough, our mums, with no eyes to read the calendar, sensed fall around the corner and started the blooming process.  Hmm.  That is going to result in a compressed season with the mid season bloomers joining the chorus of early bloomers in a glorious explosion of color.  Not what we drew up last winter when we ordered the blend of varieties we have, but flexibility becomes a virtue when wedded to circumstance.  The moderate, wet August keeps folks from hunkering down under the air conditioning unit and makes football season and fall less a futuristic figment, so mums away!  Let the deliveries and September begin!  Harvest is upon us all....

 

G' Day..and the Pictures to Prove It

 Happy Tuesday to us all.  Fall comes to mind as I debate how many layers and what shoes to wear to work this morning.  I opt for an extra t-shirt against the 57 degree start but stick to my work sandals, figuring the dew is heavy and my feet will dry faster than my shoes.

Luminous Jacqueline Orange

We have two trailer loads of mums to load before we water...one to Kearney, NE and one to Fremont, NE.  These loads are a pleasure to pick: all the plants are big, busting to bloom, and the customers will love them.  They are still heavy from yesterday's watering though, so our arms are stretched thin when the second truck is full.  This is still a good thing: we know these plants were never stressed yesterday, a far cry from last week's late season furnace.

Corn row on the edge of the mum patch

Even though the corn looks pretty tough from my standpoint facing south, several of our neighbors have put up pictures on Facebook with ears that are short, but nicely filled.  I don't pull any ears on my survey of the rows, but there are ears and they seem to have some weight.  Better than last year, I figure.

Josh's sandwich, payoff for a plant trip

It's Tuesday so Josh is helping us in the mum patch.  He decides he wants to ride with his daddy to Fremont.  The trailer is full so Josh's chair is sandwiched between two gallon pots.  I know Matt will not lack for conversation on his way north today.

Watering done, Lee and I cope with the abundant produce September has granted us.  We have three buckets of unstemmed grapes in one refrigerator and a patio table of ripe tomatoes.  The tomatoes threaten to become mush first, so I gather them, half a table at a time, into a 5 gallon bucket.  The kitchen is still cool and there's a nice breeze through the east window.  This is righteous, grasshopper vs. ant type work. We are making "chili" tomatoes today and I have no difficulty summoning the vision of a fragrant bubbling pot of chili in this self same pot on this same burner during the cold dark months to come.  The tomatoes are firm, clean, and easy to peel.  

Levi in the tub!

Always a bright part of the day when my phone dings and there's a picture or video of Levi. Sometimes he's munching, sometimes playing with his toys, sometimes dancing to a Thomas the train melody...today he's laughing in the tub.  Happy boy equals smiling grandma!

Laden Ozark Gold branches

Tis the season when snacks hang low on the tree.  I pick a Blushing Golden to see if its as ripe as it looks.  These apples are good keepers, better than the late summer Ozark Golds. This Blushing Golden is juicy and creamy clear to the core: just as ripe as the Ozarks.  But the Ozark Golds are falling from the tree and I don't want any of the laden branches to break in the next strong breeze.  Gotta make time to pick the apples...so we can line the shelves with applesauce...and know that Levi will enjoy it in Louisville just like his cousins in Missouri will.  And then there's the vision of loaves of apple bread to be stacked in the freezer, building blocks of holiday happiness. Yep..don't want to waste any apples.

 Four o'clock and the yellow bus delivers the older four grandkids.  They disperse to their outdoor fiefdoms.  The boys have built a fort near the driveway.  The girls are dissecting a zucchini with Lee's Felco pruners.  This is pretending, play acting on a grand and ongoing scale.  Today, Abbie is harvesting a bouquet of the feathery plumes of the hardy pampas grass; these props become camouflage for the boys' fort, a spear or some other projectile for Josh, and garnish, or salad, or other unknown ingredient for the girls.  If one is a country kid, after school, on a gorgeous September afternoon, the whole out of doors is your toy room.

The first batch of chili tomatoes are out of the canner.  The second five gallon bucket of tomatoes fills another seven jars and leaves three to four quarts worth in the stew pot. I set the timer on the second canner while Matt, Lee and Blake deliver mums to the HyVee in town.  Lee needs bread and dog food; she's happy to hear about the extra chili sauce...with leftover grilled hot dogs, we are set for chili dogs tomorrow!

 Its hard to pry the kids away from their imagination so they can help load tomorrow's first mum truck for Ryan to deliver to Lincoln.  He's still an hour or two out on his way back from Kearney.  After a while though, they forget to feel picked on and pitch right in.  We may not have the fastest loading crew, but we have the cutest and most boisterous.  The big heavy Husker mum combos are planted in 14" pots and watered this morning.  It takes two kids to hoist these monsters and haul them to the trailer.

Their enthusiasm when the truck is full and the days' job done is nothing if not contagious.

Grandpa's mum crew

It's been a good day.  Just another good day.