Almost everyone, upon taking their first step out my back door, glances upward and says, “What are those bags for?” They’re looking at my grape arbor from which dangle bunches of grapes as well as white paper bags. To me, the purpose of the bags is obvious: to enclose some of the bunches. Perhaps the fact that not all the grapes are bagged is confusing. Perhaps people are thrown off by the inscription “Fresh Delicious Wholesome Baked Goods” printed ini bold letters on the bags, which I bought in bulk from a bakery supplier.

Grapes are a luscious treat not only to us humans, but also to birds, bees, and some furry creatures. And disease organisms, such as black rot and powdery mildew, enjoy “eating” the berries as well as the leaves. The bags keep birds and furry creatures from eating the grapes or, at least, makes these creatures first figure out what is inside the bags and then work to get at the fruit. (I don’t think the bakery inscription throws them off.) The bags also keep the bunches dry and less susceptible to diseases that need moisture to flourish.

Bagging grapes fends off all these threats to let grape bunches be harvested when they are thoroughly ripe. And I mean thoroughly ripe, which is usually after the recommended harvest date for a particular variety. What a treat to tear open a bag to reveal a perfect bunch of grapes, dusted with their natural bloom, very sweet, and very rich in flavor! In autumn’s cool weather, ripe grapes hang in prime condition, bagged, for weeks.

Bag a bunch of grape by first making slits a couple of inches down each side of the open end of a paper bag. After snapping off the leaf or tendril opposite where a bunch attaches to the vine, a bag can be slipped up over a bunch and then its top folded back down over the stem and itself to seal out water and insects. Two staples, one on either side of the bag, hold it in place.

So why are aren’t all my grape bunches bagged? Because bagging all the bunches on the dozen different grape vines here would be too tedious a job. And anyway, not every unprotected bunch gets pilfered or diseased so we just eat the unbagged ones first.

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Squirrels seem to have receded back into the woods, and not because I played bagpipe music at them (which, I reported previously, was found to scare or otherwise keep rats away from tourists in Vienna’s historic sewers).

I still may resort to bagpipe music. For now, I have live traps ready, baited with peanuts and wired open for a few days so that any errant squirrels feel more at home wandering into them for a meal.

A few weeks ago, squirrels cleared green fruit from my one old apple tree, which was the one apple tree that did not get sprayed with Surround, a commercial clay product for organic insect control. Perhaps squirrels left my other trees alone because they don’t like the taste or feel of the clay. Just in case, today I gave all the trees still laden with apples another spray of Surround.

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Today, July 20th, we ate our first ripe fig, a Green Ischia, picked from the greenhouse and almost the size of a tennis ball. Halving the fruit reveals a glistening deep red, juicy, sweet flesh.

This first fig is of the so-called breba crop, the crop that ripens on stems that grew last summer. My Green Ischia breba crop is always light because I had to cut back many of the stems late last fall, as I do every year, to keep the plants from overgrowing the greenhouse.

The main crop should start ripening in about a month, and fresh figs will continue ripening well into fall. Main crop figs form and ripen on new stems, a bearing habit that makes it easy to keep a fig tree from growing too large and makes it possible to harvest fruit well north of fig’s subtropical origins. All that’s needed is a season long enough and hot enough for new stems to grow, develop, and ripen fruit. The more drastically a plant is cut back (or freezes back), the longer the season needed to ripen fruit.

My other two varieties — Brown Turkey and Kadota — bear only main crop fruits. Their large crops of fruits, nearing ripeness soon, are different from each other and from Green Ischia, but are equally delicious.

Summertime and the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high . . . I don’t know about the fish in this hot weather, but, yes, the cotton is getting high. High for New York’s Hudson Valley, that is. My cotton is now about 10 inches high.

The yellowing, old pages of my Farmer’s Encyclopedia of Agriculture, published in 1914, states that cotton “is successfully cultivated in the United States as far north as Southern Virginia.” I’m banking on today’s hotter and longer summers for a cotton harvest this far north. Not that I’ve invested much in my crop; only 4 plants, started from seed sown in April and each now in its own 2 gallon pot.

Any cotton would be special grown around here but I’m growing the especially special variety ‘Earlene’s Green Cotton’ (from www.reimerseeds.com). With a 150 day maturity, the bolls — naturally olive-green! — should be ready for picking sometime in September. Neither the boll weevil, made famous in song and sculpture, nor any other major cotton pest should be a problem around here, so count my production in with the more than quarter of a million bales of organic cotton now being grown worldwide.

If yields are sufficient, I’ll perhaps try to process the harvest into a small handkerchief. At the very least, I’ll enjoy the pretty flowers, which look similar to okra and hibiscus, two of its relatives. And I’ll be carrying on an agricultural tradition that stretches back thousand of years with the growing of various species of cotton in Central and South America, Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and India and Pakistan.

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The thermometer reads over a hundred degrees F. The forecast is for days of almost the same. It’s hard to believe the weather will ever cool off. But it will, and I’m planning on it. So much of gardening is not living in the moment!

The peas finally petered out. They’ve been cleared away and their bed sprinkled with soybean meal, mostly for nitrogen, and topped with an inch of fresh compost, for other nutrients and all sorts of other good things. In the relative cool of morning, tomorrow, I’ll plug into the ground broccoli transplants that I started from seed about a month ago. The plants should grow large through summer and then explode into giant, tight buds ready for harvest during cool weather that brings out the best flavor in this vegetable.

Planting also continues in other beds. I pulled up all the turnips, which, for the first time this year, I planted in spring. Turnip is another vegetable that thrives in cool weather but I figured it would be nice to have some in early summer also. We had plenty. They tasted awful. They are in the compost pile. Carrots, from seed, or kale, from transplants, will make better use of that space. I’ll put off planting turnips until the middle of August, which experience tells yield delectable roots in October.

Without any basis at all, I’m banking on warm weather now boding for warm weather into September. One more planting of bush beans, from seed, and cucumbers, from transplants sown early this month, will capitalize on that late summer warmth.

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Every garden year has its themes. Last year’s themes were late blight of tomatoes and rain, which — with cool weather, which we had — go hand in hand. This year’s themes are shaping up to be heat, drought, and squirrels.

There’s nothing to be done about the heat and drought except garden early morning and late afternoon, and water as needed.

As for the squirrels: Don’t they know they’re supposed to eat acorns and other nuts? They enjoyed many of my peas and almost all my gooseberries and cleared one old apple tree of green apples. Now they are working on the raspberries and eyeing the blueberries. Other gardeners have been similarly lamenting their losses to squirrels. In desperation, I may investigate a remedy that goes beyond the usual and obvious remedies of dogs, cats, traps, artillary, and chickenwire enclosures.

Rats, according to recent news reports, were keeping tourists from exploring the historic sewers of Vienna until someone came up with the idea of having bagpipe players accompany tour groups. The bagpipes, the sound of which keeps away the rats, might do the same for our “tree rats.” I am no fan of bagpipes but, as I said, I’m desperate.

My daughter Genevieve does not like to garden but does like good-tasting vegetables, especially tomatoes. So when she recently moved to the third floor of a rented house with access to some backyard space, I, of course, offered her some special tomato plants and help in planting them. No, this wasn’t necessarily going to be a garden, but 9 tomato plants bearing fruits of minimal labor.

The plants — the varieties Anna Russian, Amish Paste, Sungold, Carmello, and Valencia — went into the ground at the end of May. I brought along, besides the 9 plants, some building paper (“rosin paper”), bamboo stakes, a small sledge hammer, compost, and soybean meal (for nitrogen fertilizer).

To plant, we first knocked down some of the existing weeds sprouting along the south border of the narrow, thankfully sunny, city yard. A sprinkling of soybean meal at each planting site was topped with an 18 inch by 18 inch square of the paper slit to its center, into which we cut a planting hole just big enough to accommodate a plant’s root ball. Each plant went into a root-ball-sized hole poked into the ground beneath the opening in the paper. We covered each paper square with an inch or so of compost, hammered a bamboo stake into the ground next to each plant, and the tomato planting was complete.

Genevieve’s job was to water the plants for a few days to get them established, to keep the plants to a single stem by pruning off suckers, and to tie the plants to the stakes, as needed.

I’ve started whole gardens with a more refined version of this paper/compost method, so this week’s visit to the “garden,” possibly Philadelphia’s most low-maintenance “garden,” brought no surprises. The plants were growing and tomatoes were on their way. I couldn’t restrain myself from whacking back weeds that had grown up beyond the paper barriers to shade some of the plants. I stopped my whacking every few minutes to move the end of a hose from one plant to the next to thoroughly soak the ground beneath each plant.

Great-tasting tomatoes are scheduled to begin about the third week in July.

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Tomato plants in my own garden also require little care from me now, basically nothing more than periodic tying to their stakes and occasional weeding.

In contrast to last year’s summer of late blight, plants this year look lusty and fruitful. Late blight has already been reported this year in isolated pockets in in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and on Long Island. My plant’s healthy look comes from a thorough cleanup and composting of diseased residues last year, moving this year’s tomatoes to a new location in the garden, and starting my own planting from seed. All these measures also go a long way to thwarting the other leaf spot diseases (septoria leaf spot and early blight) that more commonly attack tomatoes around here.

The hot, sunny weather also helps a lot, ultraviolet rays and heat stopping late blight dead in its tracks.

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Back in March I wrote of my pea problems. In brief, every year for the past few years, my peas have begun bearing pods and then too soon afterwards have begun to yellow and die. I thought I narrowed down the cause to one or two root diseases of peas, fusarium and aphanomyces, both of which live for a long, long time in the soil, making crop rotation of limited utility in their control.

To keep these diseases in check, I planted the fusarium resistant variety Little Marvel and, because aphanomyces likes wet soil, kept the pea beds on the dry side. I also made one planting in an area that’s never been home to peas.

The only peas still thriving are the ones planted in a previously pea-less home. Pulling up yellowing vines from the other beds did not, unfortunately, yield tell tale symptoms of few branch roots (aphanomyces) or reddish roots (fusarium), so I’m still in a quandary.

This year’s berry season officially began, on May 22^nd, with the first harvest of strawberries. As with everything else in this year’s garden, the strawberries are early. Looking over my records, I see that in years past, I had to wait until early or even the middle of June to pluck the first glistening, red orbs of the season.

Those first berries are particularly welcome. First of all, they are the first fresh fruit from the garden. (Not that I haven’t been eating berries: We still have plenty of blueberries, still frozen and, when thawed, still delectable, from last summer.)

The first strawberries of the season also are particularly welcome because they are always the biggest. Every strawberry stem ends in a single flower, which is the first one to open. About thirty days after opening, if all goes well, that flower has been transformed into a ripe strawberry.

Every strawberry stem also has two branches and each of these also terminates in a flower. Secondary flowers open after the first flower. Those secondary stems likewise each has two branches terminating by a flower, opening even later. There might even be a fourth set of branches, with flowers, on these last stems.

If you were to dissect strawberry flowers under a microscope, you’d find that that there are most female flower parts, which are what swell to comprise each juicy berry, in that first flower, fewer in the two secondary flowers, and so forth, so the berries generally get smaller as the season progresses.

Opening first, the biggest flower is also most susceptible to late frost injury. Fortunately, I remembered to throw a blanket over the strawberry bed to protect the flowers during the two frosty nights earlier in May.

Now it’s time to throw a net over the bed to fend off birds. Those metal hoops that covered some vegetable beds to support clear plastic for cold protection also work well as supports for netting. That first harvest of the 22^nd was only two strawberries. Just a few days later, we were, and are, picking bowlfuls of berries, which the birds won’t want to share.

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I’ve previously praised backyard chickens for their eggs, for their patrolling of the grounds to keep insect pests in check, and for their decorative effect on the landscape. Benefits aside, I do spend some effort corralling them into or keeping them out of parts of the yard.

Chickens scratch for food, in so doing generally messing up planted ground, even damaging some plants as they keep scratching soil away from their bases. Hence, chickens are never allowed in my vegetable gardens, something they seem to appreciate even though they could easily fly over the 3-foot-high fence around one of the gardens. The chicken’s scratchings are also limited by their being “bantam chickens,” never taller than a foot or so and thus limited in their scratchabilities.

All unfenced ground beyond the vegetable gardens – it’s chicken’s delight. Flower beds, berry beds, mixed beds with herbs, berries, and flowers. The chickens enjoy scratching around in the loose soil and mulch of those beds. In their scratching, they even toss some of the soil and mulch outside beds, so I have to every once in a while rake soil and mulch back into the beds. “Ah, fresh, loose soil and mulch,” no doubt think the chickens, who go back right into the beds to scratch around again, and again toss out some soil and mulch.

Just a little fencing dissuades chickens – my chickens, at least – from entering an area. Bamboo stakes (another use for my bamboo) three inches apart and sticking a foot-and-a-half out of the ground decoratively and effectively have kept the birds out of one portion of the garden for years. This fencing only lasts a couple of years and becomes tedious to replace over a large area, though.

I’ve upgrading chicken fencing now to “welded wire” fencing with 2 by 4 inch openings. I cut a 36 inch wide roll in half for 18 inch high fencing, which I support with a bamboo stake every few feet. So far, after a few weeks, the chickens have only gazed longingly within but never hopped over it. Over the past couple of weeks, 7 baby chicks have hatched. The chicks have no trouble strolling right through the openings of this new fencing. Their scratchings are inconsequential.