February Thaw - on applesauce and overwintering herbs

I've been applying myself particularly hard over the past year, having decided to go back to graduate school. After trying to continue to do everything plus school for a year and failing badly, I have let a lot of things fall by the wayside so that I can focus on school and work. The chickens met their end in the late summer, as their numbers had dwindled and their egg production had declined -- we were ready to close out that chapter of our lives. My garden and my canning schedule were severely scaled back. Our neighborhood farm had a bumper crop of apples this year, so I did make enough applesauce to see us through the winter and give to all my coworkers and friends for Christmas.

Side note: Applesauce may be my new favorite homemade gift -- in addition to its delicious taste and simplicity to prepare, it does not run up against any of the special diet restrictions that many people have. Applesauce is vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, no sugar added, good-for-upset-tummies.

2014 is a challenging year thus far, but I'm trying to stay optimistic. This weekend, the temperature has risen above freezing and the glacier on top of our driveway is melting away. The Lane River looks like it is ready to shed its icy covering.

You can see the freeze-thaw circles in the ice.

On the garden front, the scale-back continues - no maple sugaring this year and no starting seeds indoors. While I feel a little sad that we won't be hosting a maple sugaring party this year, I feel a huge sense of relief to not be rushed and overwhelmed trying to keep a maple sugaring fire going all day long or to make sure that the house stays warm enough for the baby plants to germinate and grow.

Too bad Smell-o--vision never took off. This rosemary smells as vibrant as it looks.

While most of my free time these days is spent on the computer or reading books about fundraising or organizational behavior, there are some bits of green remaining in my life. Back in October, I brought my rosemary, stevia and celery plants indoors and they have remained alive and growing in the kitchen. The rosemary is particularly happy because it can handle low humidity well, although one of the two plants is thriving more than the other.

The stevia demands more water and is much more finicky - if you are growing stevia, keep it in a sunny spot where you will see it everyday and will notice when the leaves start to get wilty - keep it watered well! Stevia is a low-calorie sweetener (you can learn more about it here) and I like to use the dried leaves to add a little sweetness to iced tea.

Time and the Garden

I love watching plants grow - every morning, I walk out and something has changed every time - the tomato plants have grown new suckers, the eggplants have formed their flower stalks and the peas, in this banner year for peas, have produced a new crop of peas - even though I picked them yesterday.

On a human scale, one day is not that much time -- but in the garden, one day can bring a pint of strawberries and the next day only three (or if you've been enjoying this rainy, rainy June like we had, a pile of moldy red goo.) And the day after that, the kale is ready to be picked again. Every day is different and every day is significant.

Having written this, I realize that my farmer friends may laugh at this, because there are certainly days where you're planting onions or picking radishes all day long for several days straight. The work may be the same (weeding, pruning, watering, weeding, picking, addressing pest problems, more weeding), but the plant life is constantly changing.

So far, I am having fewer pest problems this year than last - knock on wood - but there is something eating my dill. These guys are serious eating machines!

These beauties will turn into yellow swallowtail butterflies! Normally, I'm pretty harsh on caterpillars eating my plants, but I have a self-seeded dill forest and I'm happy to share it with the swallowtails.

A Bouquet of Lilac Flowers

My heart has a special corner in it for Cornus florida, the flowering dogwood. When I was a little girl, we had a flowering dogwood in the front yard and its exuberant white flowers charmed me each spring.

In high school, I learned that dogwoods are one of the few opposite-branching trees and shrubs (part of the MAD CAP HORSE* crowd.)

During undergrad, I learned and then taught that the dogwood's white flowers are not petals at all, but modified leaves called bracts. The actual flowers are the tiny structures in the center of the bracts. Also, the wood was used for golf clubs - back when golf clubs were made of real wood. (Watch the YouTube video of Dr. Leopold** teaching Cornus florida - "Many regard it as the most beautiful of all our native trees.")

Finally, during a two-month stint at Overlook Farm, we sang the song "Wagon Wheel" at least once a day. On breaks from farm chores, I'd wander the forests and town streets looking for "a bouquet of dogwood flowers" but to no avail.

Sadly, flowering dogwoods are not so common in New England as in the mid-Atlantic and do not bloom in our yard this time of year, so I must substitute for another charming spring-flowering tree: the common lilac (Syringa vulgaris).

There are many reasons to recommend the lilac as my new favorite spring flower: It's the New Hampshire state flower and typically blooms here just in time for Mother's Day. The wood is streaked with purple. Our lilac hedge may be almost 100 years old and a pair of birds nest in it each spring. Mountains of pale purple, fragrant flowers are just now starting to open their petals. While I don't know of any song about picking a bouquet of lilac flowers, I'm hopeful that someone will write that song one day.

Really, could anything be more lovely?
I hope this brightens your day. Happy Mothers' Day!

Click to enlarge - you'll be glad you did.

*MAD CAP HORSE refers to Maple, Ash, Dogwood, Caprifoliaceae and Horse Chestnut - this is a helpful mnemonic to remember the small number of trees and shrubs that have opposite branching. Caprifoliaceae is a family of shrubs and small trees, including viburnums, elderberry and honeysuckle among others.

** Dr. Don Leopold's teaching and mentoring was hugely influential in my college education, teaching approach and ever-deepening appreciation for trees. You can learn the key defining characteristics of 100+ North American tree species by watching the SUNY-ESF YouTube Channel. If you are interested in native plants not just trees, I recommend his book Native Plants of the Northeast.

April Flowers

I've been gawking at several florist/flower farm blogs lately, completely blown away by the gorgeous arrangements showcasing old timey flowers and subtle color palettes. I think that I've been anxious to see spring flowers, as northern New England is still shaking off the end of winter. The grass is greening up, but the gardens are still looking pretty bare. 

It took a little bit of doing, but I was able to pull together a small early spring bouquet by traipsing around the yard. My April bouquet is composed of jonquils, daffodils, lilac, white pine, crabapple, myrtle and a red-twigged shrub that has sent suckers from my neighbor's yard onto our side lawn.

The garden in April

Can't stop the daffodils

Hello, springtime!

Well, it may be more accurate to say "Hello, mud season."

Maple sugaring season is done, and we've had some blue sky days, but it's still too wet to step foot into the garden to rake out the autumn leaves and winter sand from the plow trucks.

Thus, my gardening duties have been fairly light so far. It's still too wet to step foot into the garden to rake out the autumn leaves and winter sand from the plow trucks.

Here's an April garden report:

• I do have seedlings started in the "attic" above the woodstove. 
• Most of the tomatoes have been repotted into larger pots.
• I planted one raised bed on Saturday with peas, beets, radishes, kale, chard, spinach and scallions.
• The chickens got to kick around in the back yard over the weekend.
• The daffodils have pushed up through a layer of leaves and are showing off their flower buds.

I've been trolling the Internet for some gardening and garden trellis ideas - Homegrown.org and Pinterest have been particularly helpful. I really want to do more with flowers and groundcovers this year and Pinterest is great for alluring garden landscapes. I've got a Pinterest board called Garden Inspiration, if you're interested to have a look. 

Seeds and Citrus

I put in my Fedco seed order last week. It feels nice to cross something off the list.

In case you might wonder how I pick out which seeds I will purchase this year out of the thousands of varieties that Fedco offers, this is my process:
1) Leaf through the Fedco catalog while watching television and circle or star anything that looks interesting - this is the longest part because I like to read ALL the descriptions, even of plants I know I will never grow in my garden.
2) Look through my box of seed packets from past years, and identify which seeds of staple plants I still have and jot down which I need to order.
3) Go back through the Fedco catalog and put together a list of the varieties of staple plants as well as a short list of new plants I'd like to try.
4) Cull my list by half.
5) Cull my list again until it's down to one column on the Fedco order sheet.

Note that 4 and 5 are repetitions of each other - with a small garden, it takes time to whittle down the list to something that is manageable. If you are buying a whole set of new seeds or have a larger garden, your order may likely be larger. Having a small and diverse garden means that I only plant a small number of seeds out of most packets each year - so a packet of tomato seeds lasts me several years. Two notable exceptions to this rule are lettuce and cucumbers - we plant lettuce rather densely and in multiple successions, and it seems that we have to re-plant our cucumbers a few times each year due to bad weather or pests.

***
January's Can It Up Challenge was to make something featuring citrus as the star ingredient. I figured this would be a good time to try something new - and then I thought about it for a while -- I've really never canned anything featuring citrus as the star ingredient. Just think, I've been canning for most of my life, and haven't done a marmalade, a citrus jelly or a citrus curd. Oh, how limited I have been.

So, I tried out a Meyer lemon curd - it was excellent with one exception. Quick to prepare, quick to cook, tastes fantastic, but somewhat long to clean up. You have to strain the curd through a fine mesh sieve to take out the lemon zest and any cooked egg - the recipe doesn't tell you that the lemon zest then gets severely stuck to the fine mesh. In case you are interested, the recipe is over at Food In Jars.

Freezer Space

It was an especially busy summer in 2012, which meant that I didn't have as much free time to spend in the garden or in the kitchen as I would have expected. My canning larder is still somewhat stocked, but instead of canning quarts and quarts of peaches, I put a lot in the freezer. They fit nicely into gallon-sized bags and I created quite a stack in our small chest freezer.

Fast-forward a few months and we have also frozen blueberries, wild mushrooms, duck breasts and ready-to-eat foods like meatballs and crab cakes. the freezer is packed to the gills. it is a good thing, but the point of freezing food is to save it for eating, not for indefinite storage.

So for this month's Can It Up challenge, I looked to those peaches from New Hampshire in the freezer to make some peach compote flavored with maple syrup from Vermont and maple whiskey from Canada.

I let a gallon bag of peaches defrost in a saucepan. As they defrost, they release a lot of liquid, which means that I didn't need to add any water. I ended up with 7 cups of peaches and then added a half-cup of maple syrup. I brought the whole concoction to a low boil and then watched until the smallest peaches started to break apart but the larger pieces were still intact. Then I took it off the heat and added about a quarter of a cup of the maple whiskey. I used the Sortilege brand of maple whiskey because our friends who live in Quebec had gifted us a bottle, but Cabin Fever is a similar product that is sold in the US.

Poured into pint jars, I processed three jars for 25 minutes, plus had a scant cup leftover for tasting. This is when I realized I should have doubled the alcohol, as the fruit really soaked up the whiskey flavor. I think a half cup or even slightly more would have been a better proportion. I was happy with the half-cup of maple syrup as it wasn't overly sweet.

Another fun, easy canning project - perfect for the holiday season.
Happy New Year 2013!
Here's to enjoying the food in our freezers and pantries with people we love.

Chicken Litter and Cranberries

I just heard Susy Morris of the blog Chiot's Run reflect on her constant striving to do things efficiently - Chiot's Run has started a podcast series, which is interesting and thought-provoking. In particular, she described how she has gotten good at working efficiently in the garden, so that it doesn't take up all of her time.

It is great advice to work smarter, not harder. But sometimes it takes the experience of working harder first to make you ponder, "Shouldn't there be an easier way?"

Case in point - cleaning out the chicken coop.

Here's some background - We use the deep litter method with our chickens, which is an unoffensive way to describe the rather unglamorous piling-up of chicken poo and pine shavings. Instead of cleaning the chicken coop like a cat litter box (i.e. always in cleaning mode), you cover the animal waste periodically with a new layer of pine shavings and allow a deep layer to accumulate over time. This is a low-maintenance way to keep chickens, but eventually you will need to actually clean out the coop.

Now, jump to a sunny day two weeks ago - I decide that I REALLY need to clean the chicken coop before winter, and that today is THE day. I open the chicken coop, and immediately notice the big pile of chicken litter directly underneath the chickens' roosts and on the edge of one of the nest boxes. It is enormous compared to the layers of chicken litter over by the food and water dishes.

Hmmm... I wonder if I can reduce the number of times that I need to clean out the whole chicken coop, if I start doing routine maintenance work in the chicken roost area, where 90% of the feces are headed. Wouldn't that be easier?

Yes. (Duh.)

Turns out that it's much easier to do some "kitty litter box" maintenance in the areas where chicken poo accumulates rapidly, and continue with the deep litter method in the rest of the coop. It's sort of a shame that this revelation has taken a year and a half to arrive, but I can already tell a difference.

***

Cranberries for syrup, apples for sauce.

In other news, this month's Can It Up challenge was for cranberries. I'm trying a new recipe each month in super small batches, so I can experiment a little without investing a lot in ingredients or time.

I'm a huge fan of pickled cranberries from Marisa at Food in Jars, but I had another recipe from Marisa's cookbook that I wanted to try - CRANBERRY SYRUP!

I love the simplicity of this recipe -
1) Put cranberries in pot, add water, boil until cranberries pop.
2) Strain juice from cranberry pulp.
3) Add sugar to juice, boil until mixture is syrupy.
4) Ladle into jars and preserve in a boiling water bath.

The verdict - I think I may have cooked the cranberry syrup too much, as the syrup has a soft set, almost like a runny jelly. It tastes fine, but doesn't dissolve well in sparkling water to make a cranberry spritzer.

I need to figure out some other ways to use my cranberry syrup/jelly - any ideas?

Deep red juice drips from boiled cranberries.

Garden to Bed, Back in the Kitchen

I have to admit that I breathed a sigh of relief when we finally had a killing frost this year. I was ready to tear out the tomatoes and cucumbers and green beans. Most summertime plants are looking pretty sad by the time fall rolls around - powdery mildew on the cucumbers, the pumpkin vines have died back, and even the sunflowers start looking weather-beaten.

Note to self: tomatoes don't ripen well here after Labor Day - must tear out tomato vines sooner. That's another crucial point I'm just starting to realize - certain plants have their peak and then start on a slow decline. The flavor and texture of late-ripening tomatoes is profoundly inferior to those ripening in the heat of summer.

The garden is not completely barren yet - I still have two plantings of huge Swiss chard and a planting of parsley so large that it resembles a shrubbery (a nice one, not too expensive). Both are very tasty, but somewhat overwhelming. I extend my gratitude to friends and family who have been pruning back the chard forest!

Apple cider boiled down into syrup

Because the gardening season is cycling into hibernation mode, I'm moving my efforts indoors into the kitchen. I've got a new venture for this transition into winter - I'm trying out a food preserving challenge called Can It Up!

Each month, our lovely host Hima at All Four Burners blog will post one ingredient which we should make into some sort of food that can be put in a canning jar and boiled in a pot of water.

For October, the ingredient was APPLES, so I made boiled cider, which is exactly what it's named. You press fresh cider at your parents' house with your sister's apple press, have your dad drive the cider to your house (because you forgot to take it home with you), and then you put the cider in a pot and boil it until it becomes thick and syrupy.

I did put these jars into a water bath for canning (boiled 10 minutes for quarter-pints - as estimated from somewhat similar jelly recipes), but most recipes I found for boiled cider recommended just storing it in the fridge for a few months.

A Quiet Spell in the Garden

Other than the routine maintenance and periodic harvesting, it's a surprisingly slow period in the garden the past two weeks. It's an in-between time where I seem to have conquered some of the pest insect populations for the time being, and I'm waiting for more than one tomato to ripen at a time.

There are numerous factors that have contributed to this phenomenon:

• The plants I chose to grow this year - for example, I grew cabbage (harvested a few weeks ago), broccoli (which produces small amounts of broccoli over the course of a few weeks) and Brussels sprouts (to be harvested in late fall). This breaks up the labor of harvesting over a long period of time.
• The timing of planting - I planted pole beans, cucumbers and eggplants late, so they are not producing yet.
• Seed packet mislabeling - I planted "carrot" seeds, but dill came up instead.
• The quirky nature of plant growth, likely influenced by weather and nutrient availability - the okra loves the heat but not cool weather, lettuce hates hot weather, and I think several of my pepper plants have too much nitrogen to bother with producing flowers. My onions are not doing well, but I'm not sure why that might be.
• Massive weeding operations two weeks ago. I had fallen behind with weeding and enlisted my husband's help to catch back up. For now, it's easier and less time-consuming to keep up on weeding.

So, what to do when you feel like you can take a break from the garden?

• Go to the farmstand and purchase produce you don't grow in your own yard. Eat peaches, corn and blueberries while they are in season. Or put these splendid fruits and vegetables into your freezer or pantry. I am trying reusable Tattler lids this year for canning, and I am really pleased with how well they seal.
• Figure out how to use up the fruits of your labor. I find it difficult to both garden and cook in the summer. So, a break from the garden should allow me to seek out new ways to eat my home-grown fruits, vegetables and herbs, like this tomato fennel pasta sauce.
• Take time to enjoy the summer! There are other ways to get exercise than pulling weeds in the garden. I spent the weekend with my parents and sister, watching the Olympics and enjoying some down-time.

Fall Planting Already?

We saw our first red leaves on the maple last week.

Incredible - it seems like a trick, but it's not.

This got me to thinking that tomorrow is the first day of August, and it's a short few weeks until fall rolls around.

This means that it's prep time - preparation for the fall garden. I'll likely plant carrots, beets, radishes and greens - spinach, lettuce, arugula, and I'll try out planting mache this year as well.

The First Tomato

I've been watching one particular tomato intently for the last week. It's been slowly turning green to pink to orange-ish and then finally to red and to deep red.

It is a hybrid tomato that spent its first months in a greenhouse at a local farm, until I went on a farm tour and received a free plant to take home.

I do not have a photo, but let me assure you - this is a run-of-the-mill hybrid tomato that looks like something you could buy at the grocery store. It's not exciting on its own merits of taste and aesthetic appeal, but has earned its very own blog post by virtue of getting a headstart by early propagation. The first harvest of any produce is exciting, as it portends future bounty.

So, how will I eat this first tomato? I don't know yet. I feel like the first tomato of the year should get special treatment, but I can't seem to decide how it might be prepared. Usually, the first tomato of the year is a cherry tomato, and that's easy to figure out how to eat - straight from the vine.

Tomato with goat cheese?
Chopped tomato in scrambled eggs?
A composed salad with tomato wedges arranged around the edge of the plate?

What would you do with your first tomato?

Knee High by the Fourth of July

Did you know that you can keep track of the summer's passing by watching patches and fields of corn stretched along state highways and back roads? In the Northeast, we say "knee high by the Fourth of July."

This week, as I've been staking up many of my garden plants, I've noticed that there are several other vegetable plants (besides corn) that grow to be knee-high or even waist-high by Independence Day:

• Tomatoes
• Zucchini
• Pie pumpkins, if you are trellising vertically
• Sunflowers 
• Brussels sprouts

Some of my Brussels sprouts and sunflowers were eaten back by a roving deer, who has been clipping the neighbors' pea plants. I am trying out a product called Liquid Fence to discourage him or her from a return visit. Liquid Fence is made principally with rotten eggs and garlic, which I should hope would be  a sufficient deterrent.

You know what else is great about July? You start harvesting baskets of produce, instead of handfuls. Yay for summer.

The scissors are in there for scale, not for eating.

A Bumper Crop of Snow Peas

Every winter, during garden planning, I ask my husband what we should grow next year.

To which I get the same few answers: cucumbers, lettuce, cilantro and snow peas.

I think it's good to have a husband who knows what he wants; or at the very least, it's good to have a husband who knows what he wants in the garden. Garden planning gets a little easier when you have some standard vegetables that you know you will grow year after year.

I've had troubles in the past growing lettuce and cilantro, and this year, I've replanted my cucumbers three times. But so far, I've had really good luck growing snow peas.

And this year, we are getting a bumper crop of snow peas. Yahoo!

What do you do when snow peas start to cover your countertop? Eat them, and keep eating them because the pea plants are still flowering and producing new pods.

Get ready to eat them everyday, get yourself some friends who like snow peas, or get crackin' on filling up your freezer with 2012-grown veggies.

My favorite is to eat them fresh - even Briar the dog likes raw snow peas. But they also go great in stirfries with tofu and peppers, or you can make a cold snow-pea salad with peanut sauce.

Snow Pea Salad with Peanut Sauce

Wash and trim a large pile of snow peas.
Saute garlic, green onion and ginger in a small amount of oil in a large wok or skillet.
Add snow peas and saute for two minutes only - just to cook the snow peas a little bit to keep some of their crunch. (You could also add finely shredded carrot, peppers, cabbage, or other veggies at this time.)
Remove the wok or skillet from the heat, and stir in peanut sauce.
Transfer to a serving dish and put in the fridge to chill.

To make your own Peanut Sauce:

Put the following ingredients into a bowl, stir them together, and adjust quantities until you get something good.

Peanut butter - a few spoonfuls
Soy sauce - a small puddle
Very hot water - a small puddle (more if needed to thin to the desired consistency)
Rice wine vinegar - a few splashes
Simple syrup - a drizzle or two
Chili garlic sauce - somewhere between a pinch and a teaspoon (depending on how hot you like it)
Fish sauce - a splash

Taking a break in early June

We went away this past weekend to visit the great state of New York. It was a wonderful time visiting Adam's parents and family friends, and we got to see some of the recent signs of revitalization in Syracuse, including the Onondaga Creekwalk.

Out for a creekwalk with Briar

Leaving the garden behind for a few days allowed me to take a mental and physical breather. In our climate, early June is a somewhat tense and impatient period. You've done all this work in March, April and May preparing the beds, planting seeds, transplanting seedlings, worrying about the last late frost, fretting over early heat waves... and then June hits - and you just have to wait. The plants have a lot of growing to do; even the early-planted kale and rapini (broccoli raab) isn't quite ready for harvest.

In early June, the weather can start to get really nice and sometimes it even feels like it's high summer. But to the plants, it's still late spring. Which means that it's going to be a while until I start harvesting baskets of produce from the garden. (Right now, I'm harvesting handfuls - check out my 2012 Harvest page to see what's coming out of the garden each week.)

Patience is something that gardeners must cultivate, but when it's is in short supply, I recommend getting away for a while. The garden will keep growing without me, and I can always tackle the weeds next week.

The Ever-Expanding Garden

Watching plants grow is a life-affirming practice, and you long to have more.
I can now see how gardening can begin to take over your life.

We built two raised beds three years ago on the far side of the driveway.

We started with two.

The pink stuff is creeping thyme in flower - the bees love it.

A day later, we realized we could build a bed on the near side of the driveway.

And so, we had three.

Peas, chard and turnip greens

Last year, our neighbor asked us if I'd like to grow vegetables in his garden.

And so, we had four.

Garden four is larger than the other beds put together.

This year, we discussed at great length, "Why not put raised beds in front of the house?"

And so, we have five.

Look now while there are no weeds.

Actually, we had been growing fruits and vegetables in front of the house for a few years, but the soil was poor and the drainage off the roof directly onto the garden plants wasn't great either. To fix these problems, we built raised beds, set them farther out than the drip edge of the roof, and filled the beds with well-aged composted manure from a local hobby farmer. I have a lot of hope for these new beds.

How to Ignore Your Garden

A friend gave me a copy of Martha Stewart Living to peruse over the weekend, and I found out that the magazine includes a feature at the beginning of the magazine called "Martha's Month."

You might be interested to know, for example, that Martha's to-do list for today included yoga as well as inspecting the garden edging & paving and repairing broken or missing sections. She's also headed off to Morocco next week to give a speech at the Business of Luxury conference. Sounds pleasant, no?

My to-do list includes nothing so wholesome, attentive-to-detail, or glamourous. And it hasn't included much of gardening lately either. I've been pushing off a lot of tasks that I would normally like to tackle during the month of May.

If you want a really good excuse to ignore your gardening duties, I suggest you bring a new member of the family home who needs a lot of attention and love.

Our new furbaby - Briar

Having a new puppy is wonderful, but it sure is time-consuming. 

All hope is not lost for a good garden season this year. Having a short growing season, such as we have in New England, means that there's still plenty of time to locate a source of aged manure and get the plants into the ground.

Thinning out the seedlings

Exciting things are happening outside in the garden - it's true, although I have no photos to share today. Working late and having rainy days does not lend itself to taking well-lit garden photos, even though I'm pretty excited about how pretty the gardens are becoming.

Indoors, the seedlings are coming along okay. The broccoli and marigolds are looking great and the watermelons are starting to form their first set of true leaves. I thinned the basil seedlings and used them as micro-greens in a salad - yum! (Broccoli micro-greens are also quite tasty.)

Miniature basil is cute but full of bite and flavor.

Turns out that warm-climate plant seedlings grow better in warm and well-lit environments. I visited my friends on Sunday and viewed their seed-starting table complete with heat mat and fluorescent lights, and noticed a huge difference between my tomato and pepper seedlings and theirs. I think that I need to have two different set-ups for seedlings next year - one for my heat-loving plants and one for cold-climate plants that don't need the extra coddling.

May Showers

May Day 2012 was a wet one - 0.79 inches reported in Concord, NH. This follows a dry April with less than 3 inches of rain and no snow. If you're interested in weather trends, the National Weather Service does monthly summaries and other reports - this link is for summaries from the regional office in Gray, Maine. If you don't live near me, check here for your regional forecast office.

It's hard to celebrate the beauty and sunshine of May on a dark, wet and chilly day... but the geese and their five goslings didn't seem to mind.

The fuzzy things in between the geese are the baby goslings.

The garden didn't mind either - it's been rather dry here, so the soaking rain really gave a good watering. The indoor seedlings were a little more sluggish - cool temps and cloudy days slow their growth. You can see that the marigolds have their first set of true leaves starting, but the watermelons are still just showing their cotyledons, or seed leaves.

Seedlings reaching toward the sun

The weekend forecast is looking good, and I'm planning to turn over my neighbor's garden and plant as much as I can. The springtime showers do lead to flowers, but May also brings black flies - the more that I can do before black fly season, the better.

The Inattentive Gardener Experiment

I'm trying a new experiment this year - what I'm calling the no records, no special attention version of seed starting.

At first, this was unintentional. I planted tomato and pepper seeds in reused flats, but I didn't have my stash of reused plant markers on hand to write the types of seeds planted in each row. Then I went away of vacation for a week and then tried to catch up on all the work I'd missed for another week - the seed tray was still on the kitchen table, unlabeled and unwatered. To my surprise, after three weeks of utter neglect, the tomatoes had sprouted!

Taking this as a good sign, I then planted another tray of seeds, also that I didn't bother to label. But this time, I moved the trays to the sunny but unheated front porch. I know that gardening books say to use supplemental lighting and keep the temperature reasonably warm (or quite warm if you want your pepper seeds to germinate) - but I thought I'd like to find out if seedlings can handle the microclimate and sunlight levels on the porch, without needing extra energy.

Little bits of green

I'm hoping that with a few years of experience gardening under my belt, I'll be able to identify the seedlings when they are ready to plant outside; last year, I confused some cucumbers seedlings for squash and ended up with a funny-looking squash patch.

If my inattentive seed-starting experiment works, it's a frugal success story. It it doesn't and I end up with spindly, leggy seedlings, then I'll know better for next time.