Timing is right for cukes, melons

The three-day weekend provided much needed garden time, black flies be damned. We finally sowed seeds of tomato, sweet peppers, and melons – seeds that should have been sown two weeks earlier, placing the cell packs on a heating mat in Amy Cat’s room. As soon as they germinate, we will place the seedlings under fluorescent lights for two weeks, followed by a week of hardening on the porch before finally planting them in garden beds. Amy Cat is complaining about the intrusion with middle-of-the-night howls that belie her condition, 18 years old and little more than a furry sack of bones.

Perhaps late for the tomatoes and peppers, the timing is just right for melons and cukes. Members of the cucumber family need warm soil for best growth and should not be planted in the garden until the soil temperature reaches 70 degrees F. This means waiting until June to transplant seedlings.

I sowed seeds of my favorite annual vine, hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus, previously Dolichos lablab). I once used this vigorous climber to disguise the city’s “No Parking” sign on the street-side edge of my Orono garden. By mid-July, the sign’s post was wrapped in dark green, purple-veined leaves and large clusters of deep violet and white pea-like flowers. The blossoms were soon followed by ruby-purple seedpods. People driving by the garden would park on the street in front of the vine to admire it. This year I will transplant the hyacinth bean seedlings to a pot, place it where the flowers will cover a porch post in Marjorie’s garden.

Another annual vine, black-eyed Susan (Thunbergia alata), went into a pot on the porch rail to both grow up the corner post and trail down toward the ground. I first grew it many years ago in South Carolina where the long hot summers allowed it to reach its full tropical potential, slender stems, 6 feet in length, twining over each other and the trellis. It bloomed all summer, long-stalked tubular flowers with deep orange petals and purple-black throats. Perhaps less exuberant in Maine’s cooler and shorter summers, it is still worthy of a sunny space in Marjorie’s garden.

In a pot at the foot of the porch steps I planted five small seedlings of flowering tobacco (Nicotiana sylvestris). By July the plants will be 5 feet tall with sticky, hairy, foot-long leaves and terminal clusters of pure white, trumpet-shaped flowers. We will sit on the steps, the air filled with the sweetness of these flowers, watching sphinx moths hovering over the blossoms as they sip the nectar with their long tongues.

Marjorie potted up pansies for a sunny corner of the porch while I potted something new, a purple passion vine (Gynura), combining it in a large pot with the bright yellow foliage of pineapple sage. I placed the pot in the middle of a sunny perennial bed. It was an impulsive act – I am fascinated by the velvety, purple, hairy stems and leaves of the Gynura, the way the intensity of purple in the leaf varies with the light. I may come to regret the act, having since learned that Gynura can get rather large and that its flower stinks. I plan to clip them off before they open. Maybe I can keep cutting back the Gynura, root the cuttings and give them to unsuspecting friends.

Send queries to Gardening Questions, P.O. Box 418, Ellsworth 04605, or to reesermanley@ptc-me.net. Include name, address and telephone number.