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. 

Desperately Seeking Spring

The front yard on Friday - you can start to see lawn!

We wrapped up maple sugaring two weekends ago, not because the season had ended but rather that we had exhausted our initial enthusiasm and wanted to go visit friends. So that's what we did - left our semi-snowy home on Friday and took a little trip to the Hudson River valley.

People hiking the Appalachian Trail northbound are often said to be "chasing spring" as they trek northward from Georgia to South Carolina to North Carolina until summer takes the East Coast by storm. For us, this trip was more like "desperately seeking spring."

It was a great trip full of springtime pleasures - we went bike riding, listened to peepers, went for a hike on a trail with no snow and no mud, and watched painted turtles sunning themselves while we sunned ourselves on our friends' dock. And when we got home, it had warmed up and the snow had melted significantly! And on Monday, it was 70 degrees in the afternoon! I did yard work until it got dark, and it felt absolutely wonderful.

The front yard on Monday - much less snow, still no green.

Better than Christmas - 2011 Fedco Seed Catalog

I picked up my Christmas turkey at the Lebanon Food Co-op on Wednesday. I must say that I felt a little smug about planning ahead and pre-ordering my turkey, as the woman next to me at the meat counter asked "Do you have any turkeys left?" and was told no. Then, I realized that she was just being opportunistic - as in, "oh, maybe I'll pick up a turkey just for fun..." That sort of took the wind out of my smug sails... but I was secretly glad that I wouldn't have to hustle my turkey out of the store with a wild woman chasing me down in the parking lot. I realize that this story doesn't have anything to do with gardening, but thought a little holiday anecdote would be apropos.

More exciting than the turkey - which is pretty exciting because we honey-brined and smoked it - is the 2011 Fedco seed catalog that I picked up at the Co-op!! The Co-op does a bulk order for its members, and this year, the deadline is January 16th, up a few weeks from last year. So, I need to get planning for next year's garden now.


The Fedco catalog is great because they have an enormous variety of vegetables and flower seeds (including plants used for dyeing like indigo - how cool is that?!) This is not a pretty color pictures catalog - it's black and white on newsprint - but the descriptions are just awesome. The layout is a throwback to the old Sears and Roebuck catalog, where you try to fit as many goods on the page as possible. How many catalogs come in a size 8 font size with line drawing illustrations any more?

I'm not completely consumed by perusing seed catalogs in winter. I just do the Fedco catalog because I have a tiny garden and Co-op members get a discount. But I do have hours of entertainment reading through the Fedco catalog, and circling everything that strikes my fancy. Then I cull that list harshly to what is actually practical to grow in my garden. I will probably not be growing any indigo this year... and probably only one variety of sunflower, not five. I can already see myself opening the paper seed packets and starting them next to the chimney on the second floor in March...

I have been really pleased with the Fedco seeds I bought last year and I'm looking to expand some of the species that I'm growing this year. They are continuously expanding their selection of organic seeds, which is a plus. Fedco is based in Waterville, Maine, so I like to think that plants that do well in Maine should also do well in New Hampshire. I haven't tested this hypothesis rigorously, but it does follow common sense. Fedco is online - so if you don't happen to have your own copy sitting on your coffee table, you can see what I'm talking about.

I'll post again soon with my picks for the 2011 garden! Merry Christmas!

You say tomato, I say enough already

If I were a model of the "conscientious gardener" I would be able to look back at my minutely detailed, comprehensive garden journal entries and tell you exactly when our first killing frost hit. Garden records are incredibly interesting and also provide a good source of information on interannual climate variation. I think that records of this type have been used to document certain aspects of climate change, such as changes in first and last frost dates. However, science will not gain much from my garden journal as consistency in my records is sorely lacking... sorry to let you down, Michael Mann.

So I can't really say when our first killing frost hit. Sometime after Columbus Day because I remember wrapping the tomatoes in white sheets and thinking that I wish it were closer to Halloween, so that we could have garden ghosties! At any rate, it's been almost a month since the tomatoes and other hot-weather-loving plants retired for the season.

However, I took care to pick all the green tomatoes before the first hard frost, and then I also gleaned green tomatoes from our friends' garden. I pulled enough green tomatoes to make 6 pints of green tomato relish (somewhat like pickle relish that you put on burgers.) That still left me with scads of green tomatoes, which are slowly slowly turning red. I've been foisting them off on my neighbor every week, and making small batches of tomato puree every week or so. I'm really impressed because I've never had good luck ripening tomatoes indoors before - some tomatoes get moldy or develop scary rotten spots, but overall, the tomatoes are ripening quite nicely.

I feel that this is a success story and it's all thanks to our good friend, ethylene! Ethylene is a very fascinating plant hormone - unlike other hormones, it is gaseous and is released from ripening fruits to accelerate the ripening process.

But I must say that these tomatoes do not taste summer-fresh, they taste like grocery-store tomatoes. I would not recommend the large tomatoes for eating fresh, but they cook down really nicely. The cherry tomatoes are still tasty enough to eat fresh on salads, and also make a lovely flavorful sauce.

As successful as this year's indoor tomato ripening may be, I'm sort of looking forward to a time when I won't have trays of tomatoes covering numerous horizontal spaces (I've already been kicked out of the kitchen, except for one small tray). I anticipate that the tomatoes will be completely ripened by the end of November, and then it's just a short while until it's time to place my order for next year's seeds.

August - the noble month

In the New England garden, August reigns supreme. Like its Roman emperor namesake, the eighth month of the year bestows upon its lowly subjects a great but infrequent largesse. This August, the largesse is in butternut squash and cucumbers. The squash are far from their harvest date, but the vines are spreading like kudzu over the woodpiles, driveway and stepping area in front of the garden beds.

August is sort of the botanical version of Tax Day, where you find out how much you will receive for your tax return, except that you are paid in zucchini and cucumbers instead of greenbacks. Filing tax returns always involves some.suspense and anticipation, as you never really know what the final balance will be. Similarly, August will produce a bumper crop of green beans one year and volleyball-sized melons the next. There's often no prediicting which plants will produce like crazy and which will shrivel up and die or limp along barely surviving the Japanese beetles. Before we left for vacation in the second half ofJuly, the squash was underperforming,but what a change when we returned two weeks later!

I'll post photos soon -you won't believe it!

If vegetables were race horses...

We have been watching Planet Earth again (I love David Attenborough) and I'm always so amazed by the time-lapse footage of plants and fungi and corals growing. If I were a nature videographer, I might skip the mountain of cockroach-infested bat guano in Indonesia and instead set my sights on more mundane subjects, like my garden plants. I would love to see the ever-so-slight circular movement of plants as they angle for the best light and the speedy coiling of pea and cucumber tendrils.

I go and look at my garden every day, partly because I am trying to stay ahead of the weeds and partly because the garden is on either side of the driveway where I park my car. So, I see that my peppers are getting longer, the tomatoes keep putting out new suckers, and all of a sudden, the eggplants are twice the size they were the day before. Or at least, they seem twice as big. It would be SO cool to actually track and document the daily progress of my garden plants and correlate growth rates with weather, microsite conditions, and other factors (heirloom vs. hybrid.)

Then I would know who to put my money on... in the great Belmont Stakes of mid-summer garden growth. Is it the snow peas who keep outgrowing their fence? Is it the arugula that sprouted in a day and a half? Is it the Sweet 100 tomatoes from my mom that put out new flower stalks on an almost daily basis? This is a very happenin' time in the garden, with the front-runners showing a lot of potential and the stragglers (like the tomatoes in the non-raised bed with regular soil) are falling way behind.

So, who would you bet on? It's still early for most vegetables - I'm harvesting lettuce, arugula and snowpeas this week, but haven't even seen a baby green tomato yet. What plants will make it through to the harvest, retaining their penchant for productivity?

Cast your vote by leaving a comment below.