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.

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. 

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.

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.

Signs of Spring

Red-winged blackbirds congregating in the branches of oak trees, our neighbors raking leaves, ducks pairing up on the lakes, and a little girl dressed up in an pastel-colored Easter dress, heavy wool sweater and bare feet - all these things tell me that it's spring.

Spring is an optimistic time of year all on its own, but this year, I feel a jolt of extra enthusiasm when I go to check out the garden. We started on the yard and garden four years ago, and had our work cut out for us, tearing out a dozen years' worth of neglect and overgrowth. Our work is ongoing - we'd like to build a set of stone steps on the far side of the house, we need to continue cutting out old stems from the  lilac hedge, and there's that pesky front garden bed next to the porch that offers no easy planting plan.

However, when I go outside these days, I'm not thinking how much work remains to be done...

I'm thinking about how well the daffodils have spread over the past few years,

how nicely these little lilac root sprouts have taken to the hillside,

how glad I am that the ground warms up faster in raised beds, 

how thankful I am that spring has come again.

Cucurbitaceae - Loofahs, Lemon Cucumbers and Super Pumpkins

The Cucurbitaceae is a family of vegetables native to tropical and subtropical climates in both the New World (North and South America) and the Old Word (Africa, Europe, Asia) - consisting of such familiar household staples as cucumbers, squash, gourds, melons, and --- wait for it --- loofahs!

Really, it should not come as a complete surprise that we might be able to grow useful household items in the garden - after all, linen is made from flax, hemp cloth is made from hippies a certain green plant, and beets can make a beautiful pink food dye. But I can honestly say I had never contemplated WHERE loofahs might originate. From the loofah gourd, of course.

A sampling of cucumbers from 2011

In my 2012 garden, I am going to pass on the loofah gourd this year, in favor of pickling cucumbers, lemon cucumbers, watermelons, sugar pie pumpkins, super pumpkins, zucchini, yellow summer squash, butternut squash, and Hubbard squash (if I can manage to fit them all in). 

I'm excited about the lemon cucumbers, which are small, mild-tasting cucumbers that will hopefully grow prolifically. In addition, this will be my first year trying to grow a big pumpkin - a.k.a. a super pumpkin! I just found out that growing enormously large pumpkins is serious business. Like racehorses, super-sized pumpkins can be tracked by lineage, with the seeds of the award-winning Biggest Pumpkins being in high demand among a certain crowd. My super pumpkin seeds come from a 1,095-lb pumpkin named Urena from 2007, whose parents were the 1,100-lb Wallace (dad) and the 1,195-lb Zunino (mom).

By the way, the reason why it's easy to track the parentage of pumpkins and other cucurbits is that they have two different types of flowers - male and female. Unlike many other garden plants that have both male and female parts in the same flower (termed "perfect" flowers), cucurbits produce two types of "imperfect" flowers, one with stamens (the male reproductive part) and one with pistils (the female reproductive part). It is a simple process to use the male flower of one variety and hand-pollinate the female flower of another variety. Here's an informative article from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana about breeding your own plants, including a step-by-step on hand-pollination pumpkins or squash.

The Family Solanaceae: Garden Plan 2012 and Dark Days Meal (#11)

I sat down one night last week and started sketching out my garden plans for the spring.

But first, I needed to sketch out what I grew in my garden last year. In order to promote fertile soil and reduce crop disease and pests, it's a good idea to rotate your garden vegetables so that you're not growing nitrogen-hungry tomatoes in the same soil each year. 

I found it helpful to draw 2011 on the left-hand page and 2012 on the right-hand page of my garden notebook. The beds are scaled in my mind, but not on the page... this is more of a schematic than a rigorous planting regimen. This is also a work in progress - note that I am using pencil, not ink here.

Click to open a larger picture in a new window.

I counted over 40 seed packets in my little storage box saved from previous seasons, and having ordered 20 new packets this year, I realized that sharing my planting plans might "get into the weeds" pretty fast. I figured it would make sense to report out on my garden planning on a botanical family basis. So, to start off, let's meet the Solanaceae family...

The Solanaceae is a New World family (i.e. native to the Americas, not Eurasia) of tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, deadly nightshades, belladonna, mandrake (not the shrieking variety of Harry Potter fame), petunias, groundcherries, and many other plants. (For a full listing, visit the USDA Plants database.)

I have a few types of hot and sweet-hot peppers (cayenne, cherry bell, and orange pimiento) that I'm hoping to start as seedlings next month. I have not had much success getting sweet bell peppers to fully ripen, so I think I'll stick to the farmer's market for acquiring a stockpile of those.

For tomatoes, I have ordered Cherokee Purple, a big, meaty heirloom that looks positively wild and unkempt but tastes fresh, sweet and juicy. I also have seeds from previous years of several varieties of cherry and paste tomatoes. I have found that smaller tomatoes ripen faster and more uniformly in our garden microclimate. My neighbor, who lives two houses over, grows outstanding Brandywine tomatoes, but I have the hardest time getting my full-size tomatoes to ripen.

Despite my success growing potatoes last year, I'm going to pass on growing them in 2012. They take up a lot of space, and there are excellent and inexpensive sources of potatoes at several local farms. I'm also going to skip growing eggplants - I don't love them enough to allocate them space in the garden this year, plus I can buy them for a good price at both the farm stand and farmer's market in the summer.

Leftover soup for lunch!

Speaking of getting good prices at the farm stand, when the tomatoes start coming in July and August, they don't tend to stop until the frost hits. August/September is a great time of year to ask your farmer about special bulk prices on canning tomatoes. You will thank your farmer at the time of your purchase, and then again in February when you crack open a jar of tomatoes (or pull a container out of the freezer) to make tomato soup.

For my Dark Days meal this week, I tried a new recipe for Cream of Tomato Soup. Despite its origins with a very reputable source (America's Test Kitchen), I found it to be overly complicated for a simple soup and the results were just so-so. Fortunately, there are more tomatoes in the pantry, so I will have the opportunity to try again.

Garden Planning Giveaway - D.S. Landreth Seed Catalog

Imagine America in 1784, one year after the end of the Revolutionary War.

The official treaty ending the war with England was ratified on January 14, 1784. There was no Constitution and no President. (Those didn't come about until 1787 and 1789, respectively.)

Most of New Hampshire was the very fine edge of civilization surrounded by wilderness. Our town was chartered in 1748, but not incorporated as a town until 1784 - the population at the time was just over 300 souls. (The 1783 census for New Hampshire wasn't even 65,000 people!) To give you an idea of what I mean by wilderness, the last time someone in New Hampshire was killed by a black bear was in 1784.

However, a few hundred miles south, the city of Philadelphia was the second largest city in America and much more civilized. Although the American capital was moved away from Philly in 1783 after a soldiers' revolt, Philadelphia had been the meeting place of both the First and Second Continental Congresses. In 1784, Charles Wilson Peale opened his natural history museum, the first daily newspaper in America started production, and Ben Franklin invented bifocals and wrote to his daughter that he disapproved of the eagle as an American symbol, preferring instead the noble turkey.

In this very same year, 1784, the D.S. Landreth Seed Company was founded in Philadelphia, PA. This company is still in existence today, and I feel like I'm holding a little piece of history when I look through the pages of their 2012 seed catalog. This seed company is older than the United States and introduced some iconic garden plant to our country, such as the white-fleshed potato and the tomato and the zinnia.

Summer garden dreaming on a winter's day

I read about the financial straits that this company is currently in and felt compelled to contribute in a small way to the preservation of an heirloom company. Lisa Boone with the LA Times pointed out that Landreth specializes in heirloom varieties, which helps to preserve genetic diversity of food crops and flowers. There was a big push in the fall of 2011 to buy catalogs to raise enough capital for the company to renegotiate its debt. I don't usually purchase seed catalogs, but I must say that I am not disappointed with my purchase.

The catalog includes a lot of advertising art and old articles from the seed company's past, which is quite interesting.

There is also a nice synopsis of the origins of each type of plant, and succinct but useful descriptions of the different varieties available for purchase. I am pleased with the diversity of the offerings for vegetables, herbs and flowers - and I love that there are full-color photos in the centerfold. The tomato pages simply make my mouth water.

Also - my favorite part - there are pages devoted to a children's garden, a patio garden and crops important to African-American history and culture.

The photos bring summer to your living room.

I purchased two copies of the seed catalog, one for me and one for you! I am very pleased to be offering my first blog giveaway. I will mail this catalog anywhere in the US or Canada, if you are the lucky winner.

To enter, leave a comment and tell me what your ancestors were up to in 1784 or a little something about your favorite vegetable. The giveaway will be open until January 31st, 2012.

Disclaimer - I did not receive any compensation for writing this review or holding this giveaway. I purchased two copies of the Landreth seed catalog because I wanted to help give this historic company a chance to reinvigorate itself in the 21st century.

Seeds have been sown, chickies have grown...

I spent a lot of time this past week getting my gardens and my neighbor's garden prepped and planted for the summer. We are headed out on vacation on Wednesday, so I was definitely feeling a bit of pressure to wrap up the spring planting. No thanks to the mosquitoes and black flies, I managed to hack away at my neighbor's garden in 1/2-hour chunks before running inside to avoid the flying hordes.

I may not look smart, but I can surely get those skeeters.

In a fleeting attempt to control the mosquito population, we've been putting the chickens out in the yard while we are at home. They do go crazy for mosquitoes and any other flying insect, but I don't really believe that six little chickies are going to make much of an impact. The pen is just two pieces of wire panel that we got as a side gift from Freecycle (Adam went to pick up metal roofing and the landowner asked Adam if he wanted any wire panels in addition -- yes, please!). The wire panels lean against each other forming a circle and I placed a window screen on top to keep Yellow from escaping the pen.

Free-standing open air chicken pen - not predator-proof

They love it, and I'm half-tempted to build them a little chicken tractor so they can stay outside all summer. The latest issue of Mother Earth News says I can make one for $200 bucks, but I'll just need to learn how to weld first! (Sorry, I don't think I'll be welding any time soon - gardening is enough of a hobby to keep me occupied for years.)

Fresh from the garden this week:
Salad greens!! including Swiss chard, spinach, arugula, mesclun and a few types of lettuce.
Mint - I made some awesome refrigerator tea with fuzzy mint, chocolate mint and black tea.
Chives and scallions

A Perennial Surprise

We were away for the Memorial Day weekend and had a chance to gawk at the rich farmland along Lake Ontario and the beautiful mountain farms and homesteads of the Green Mountains. We found no shortage of daydreams during the many hours in the car each day. (Ahh, wouldn't 10 acres of field on the Lincoln Gap Road and a sailboat on Lake Champlain be lovely?)

The heat switched on over the weekend and has stayed on, and we returned to the tail-end of the lilacs, the urgent need for thinning salad greens, and a few surprises in the form of blooming perennial shrubs.

I had purchased three or four small perennial shrubs on sale two autumns ago and planted on the base of the wooded slope in the side yard. One shrub was eliminated through the indiscriminate dumping of excavation debris - to be fair, the pepperbush was not exactly thriving or much larger than any of the other vegetation. I vaguely recalled having bought more than one azalea, but I could not find it this spring and figured it had also succumbed to death by clean fill.

Pink azalea flowers look like a bit like hibiscus.

Well - the darn thing did survive! I walked up the side steps and saw a ball of pale pink tropical-looking flowers lying on the forest floor. The azalea had taken a beating, and the flower stalk had been knocked or perhaps trampled to the ground.

Oh so pretty... I love the radial symmetry.

The other wonder of the side yard this week is the rhododendron. Our first spring here (3 years ago), I found a scraggly, half-dead rhody planted in the center of the patio behind the studio and relocated it to the very edge of the side yard. The scrawny plant took a while to establish and never flowered until this weekend. The photo doesn't do it justice, but it is a beautiful bright red color and attracts bees like crazy!

A Break from the Rain

Today was the first day in over a week where it didn't rain, alleluia. The plants did not mind too much, as the extra moisture and cool temperatures allowed them to establish their roots and acclimate to the garden. I did mind the rain, as I did not acclimate very well and had to wear shoes and sweaters.

The perennials have really greened up. The peas and spinach have been slowly growing, and the onions seem to appreciate the moisture. The lilacs have had electric purple buds for a week, but now have gone whole-hog into unfurling their petals. The scent is just wonderful!

Today was also the first day for harvesting in quite some time - I cut a mini-bouquet of lilacs, cleared out the over-wintered spinach, cut back the arugula, thinned the over-wintered scallions, and grabbed a few stalks of chives. Adam also picked a colander full of chocolate mint. We had our friends/neighbors over for spinach-arugula-chive-scallion quesadillas and mojitos - it was great!

Flowers and spring greens make me happy.

We just moved the little chickies (two-week-old Red Stars) into the coop with the big chickies (one-month-old New Hampshire Reds) and they seem really happy. The coop is nothing fancy just a plywood box with a lamp, but it is a step up from a plastic bin. They are also very happy to eat any little flying insects that may enter their domain - they are extremely coordinated when it comes to mosquito control!

Here's a photo of Yellow - she's got big wingfeathers now but her head still looks goofy.

Yellow might be my new best friend.

The 2011 Gardening Season Opener

It's been very busy in the garden the past few weekends. The long-anticipated "is winter really gone?" season is now over, and gardening is into full-swing. There always seems to be twice the amount of work than expected and half the amount of time necessary to complete it. Fortunately, the sun doesn't go down until after 8:00 pm now, so I can sometimes fit in a little bit of gardening after work (on those days when I don't have a night meeting).

In between the raindrops, I've planted out all my cold-hardy seedlings (cabbage and onion families), watched my peas sprout, and planted strawberries and a cherry tree. I've also done a lot of "re-organization" that has entailed digging up almost all of the shrubs I've planted in the past 3 years and moving them to a new location. I'm hoping that I will stop "re-organizing" soon, because it's not good for the shrubs to be moved so much, and it's not a very fun task! Speaking of not-fun tasks, Adam and I have both done some work on weeding - somehow the grass loves to grow in the garden but not in the lawn.

A few insights from May-time gardening:

1. I was reminded why sandals and shoveling don't mix. It's impossible to keep your feet clean and it's just uncomfortable to feel grit between Chaco straps and bare skin. Not to mention that I had to get out an old toothbrush to make my sandals look presentable before going out last night.
2. My mom is SO great! Not only does she come to my house to visit on the day before Mother's Day and comes bearing olive oil and balsamic vinegar, BUT she also volunteers to help clear leaves and put a variety of plants in the ground. All while wearing a crisp white Oxford shirt. Thanks, Mom! Love you.
3. Having raised beds really makes prepping beds and planting seeds or seedlings easy. It is certainly an investment of time and materials in the first year, but the second year, I'm just amazed at how quickly I can get seeds into the ground.
4. I now know what niche I can fill if I ever want to write a book on gardening. It would be called "Front-Yard Pocket Gardening." I had bought 25 strawberry plants and wanted to figure out how to use them as edging, or ideally as groundcover around my cherry tree sapling. And then I wanted to know if I could get away with interplanting low-bush and highbush blueberry in a mini-hedgerow. The Cooperative Extension has great fact sheets on gardening, but they are geared substantially toward the 20X40 row garden in someone's flat backyard. And finding advice about care for fruit trees, grape vines and small fruit is prolific for a production operation or a large yard, but quite scarce for "I have 8 feet between the house and the driveway, and the powerline is 12 feet away."
5. For all the effort so far, the garden still doesn't look that great. It's really really exciting to see seeds sprouting and leaves unfurling, but it's not beautiful quite yet. See photo below - not what I would call "garden artistry."

Garlic, peas, spinach, scallions and the onion family

Up next - tomorrow, we will welcome 3 new Red Star chicks and move our 2-week-old New Hampshire Red chicks out to their new coop in the shed!

Are We Really Saving Daylight?

This morning, I woke up late. The sky was overcast and the cat was not as insistent as usual about getting me out of bed, so I stayed in bed a lot longer than I might have. Plus, the clocks jumped ahead at 2 am, placing us squarely back into the time warp of Daylight Savings Time.

To me, Daylight Savings Time means a shift in "the day" (as in the workday) to start a little darker and end a little lighter. In my case, it's going to be just getting light outside when I get up for work and just getting dark when I leave work... until the days get longer, I'm still going to be spending the daylight hours indoors. So, there's really no "saving" of the daylight right now; the days are still too short for that.


I'll be more thankful for Daylight Savings Time once summer comes and the sun stays out long enough to enjoy an evening meal without electric lights. For the time being, I will settle for the cheery fluorescent glow from the lights over my seed-starting trays. These lights run about 14 hours a day (thank goodness that fluorescent bulbs are energy-efficient) to trick the baby plants into thinking that they are in a greenhouse and not an unfinished attic loft space.

I tried a new seed-starting medium this year, which I do not like very much, and so I will recommend using Pro-Mix, which I wish I had used instead. I have sets of black plastic 4-packs reused from last year, sitting in black plastic trays - I prefer the 4-packs to the 6-packs so that there is more space for roots to grow. Because this is the second year I'm using these trays, I washed and sanitized them to protect against any plant diseases - thanks to Minnesota Cooperative Extension for that advice. Later this spring, when the plants in the first four trays are big enough, they will go on the front porch, and I will plant more seedlings, trying out this trick to make seed-starting pots from newspaper.

Germination has been a little slow so far, because our house temperature is a little cold, but I'm not in a terrible rush. Even with a week of rainy, warm weather, we still have 2 feet of snow on the ground.

This is what 3-day old broccoli seedlings look like. It's really interesting that my mustard family plants all germinated first - Brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower are very cold-hardy, even in seed form apparently. These will be some of the first plants to go in the ground this spring.

Now is the Time for Great Faith...

Adam has been asking me for the past few weeks WHEN am I going to start the peppers? Last year, on Memorial Day weekend, we purchased three pepper plants at the Burlington Vermont Farmers Market. The farmers told us that they started their peppers in early February! Talk about planning ahead - we were in northern Vermont last weekend and it's the most-wintry-feeling place I've been in years.

These pepper plants were outstanding - they were head-and-shoulders above all other pepper starts when we purchased them and took extremely well to transplanting. They produced an incredible number of peppers, starting in late June and continuing through first frost!

I ordered new plant seeds from Fedco, but they will not arrive until March. So I broke down and went to buy more seeds. Fortunately, most seeds store well for a couple years, but if you are interested in sharing seeds, do let me know.

Seeds are amazing - just look at these tiny parsley seeds superimposed on an illustration of what they will grow up to be. (You may want to click on the image below to see a larger version of the photo.)

Seeds consist of three components, each with a different purpose. The embryo is the plant-to-be, the endosperm is the food for the infant plant, and the seed coat is the packaging. Each is amazing in its own right:

• The embryo will sit happily in a state of suspended animation for up to several years, only sparking back to life when conditions are right.
• The endosperm, which makes up the bulk of the seed, has got just the right mix of food for the developing embryo to get it germinated and grown enough to start taking in its own nutrients from the soil.
• The seed coat protects the embryo and endosperm through hot and cold, wet and dry, and in some species, will experience unscathed an exotic vacation through a bird or mammal's digestive system.

The size and variation of seeds among plant species is simply outstanding. In one seed tray, I planted seeds ranging in size from half an inch long (marigold seeds) to so tiny I couldn't separate them individually even with my fingernails (German chamomile). I keep thinking one day I will have to plant an avocado seed, just to see what an avocado tree looks like.

Similarly, the variation of germination requirements for garden plants can be quite fascinating. Columbine seeds like it cold before being planted (the technical term is cold-stratification), lettuce seeds require light to germinate and parsley seeds require a 24-hr soak prior to planting.

Now the seeds are sitting silently in their trays in the dark; since I did not plant lettuce, my seeds should not need light to germinate, just water and warm temperatures. Now is the time for patience.... and for faith in the miracle of seeds.

Hearth and Home (and Garden) - Part One

My boss recently described me as "quite the homemaker." Aw shucks. I don't really consider myself a homemaker, since I do work a full-time professional job.

But then I got to thinking about it, when I was home washing a week's worth of pots and pans. I do make things at home to make our house and lifestyle more homey, so yeah, I guess that I am a homemaker.

The week's worth of pots and pans shows that I am not a great housekeeper, but I do try to make our house a home. I can take very very little credit for the interior decoration of the house, but I can take credit for much of the exterior of the house.

My main focus in cultivating a sense of "home" is through cultivating the garden. One of my favorite homey things is fresh-cut flowers and thriving houseplants. This past year, I did grow enough flowers, particularly black-eyed Susans, to have several weeks of bouquets. I'm hoping that in a few years, I will have a well-established cutting garden so that I can actually utilize all the vases I've accumulated under the sink. This year, I have ordered Flashback calendula and Selma Suns sunflowers to expand my floral choices.

The other favorite homey thing (this time of year) is my pantry. It has onions from Musterfield, potatoes from Spring Ledge, butternut and acorn squash from our garden, a sad handful of tiny shallots, and all my canned goods. It is immensely gratifying to "go shopping" in the garage for dinner. We have been eating canned peaches and pears lately, and they are just wonderful. I can't say that I grew most of the contents of the Mason jars on the shelves, but I was able to preserve foods made from the cucumbers, peppers, basil and tomatoes that we grew in our yard.

Garden Resolutions for 2011

I started planning for the 2011 vegetable gardening season by looking back at 2010. This practice is entirely akin to New Year's Resolutions, although I am very hopeful that I will be more successful with keeping this plans than with any New Year's resolution.

The first step is to contemplate last year's garden - and what I'd do differently...
1) Plant fewer tomatoes
2) Give up on zucchini and summer squash and buy it at the local farm
3) Succession-plant lettuce from spring through fall and pay close attention to its growth (don't let it fry in the July sun alone!)
4) Figure out a way to get pole beans to grow; plant a few bush beans just in case I'm not successful again
5) Plant all squash on the leachfield side of the garden, so that the runners can grow on top of the leach field.
6) Work on growing cilantro better; succession-plant like crazy
7) Lighten the soil for carrots, so that they are not all 1-inch long!
8) Build sufficient trellises for vining crops

The second step is to think about what new things I'd like to try this year...
1) Try new types of cold-hardy greens- beet greens, mache, sylvetta arugula
2) Try growing vegetables that I really like that are hard to find at local farms - celery, cauliflower, parsnips, brussels sprouts
3) Try to start herbs from seed - rosemary and basil (I've planted basil seeds before and they have had spotty success)
4) Get Adam to build the cold frame for one of the garden beds
5) Plant more flowers so that the garden is beautiful, productive and attractive to pollinators

The third step is to draw out how I can accommodate the ideas generated from steps one and two. I haven't quite made it to step three yet - it's going to take some work to figure out how many seedlings I need to plant and where they are can fit in my four vegetable garden beds. I estimate that right now, I've got just over 100 square feet of open garden bed to work with. Even in that small space, the possibilities are nearly endless.

2011 Plans for the Porch Garden

I dropped off my seed order at the Lebanon Coop on Thursday, all in a rush to get to a meeting. I ended up being 20 minutes late to the meeting, so I suppose that there was really no point in rushing. So, I didn't really think too much about my seed order at that time or since then.

But then we had friends up this weekend and started talking about food and gardening and turning the houses we've bought into our homes... and I started thinking about the new crops and flowers that I am going to plant in a few short weeks or months.

I'd like to share some of my ideas and enthusiasm for the upcoming growing season now, because I have the time and the two feet of snow we received this week has made my garden seem like a blank slate. Really, the possibilities are endless, and I'm newly inspired from reading Frances Mayes' memoir "Under the Tuscan Sun" and her experiences cultivating their farm and shopping at the markets in the town. (A side note - the book is nothing like the movie of the same name, although both are worth experiencing.) Wow, what could be better than having an ancient farm with olives, grapes, fruit trees, herbs and a patio with an amazing view to the valleys below?!

While not so spectacular as having fresh figs from your own tree, I'm really excited about trellising vines on the front of the house. now named the Porch Garden. When we were looking to buy our house, the 4-season porch on the front of the house was completely obscured by awful, overgrown arbor vitae. Fortunately, those trees had to be torn out before we moved in, as the septic system needed to be replaced and the arbor vitae roots were in the way of the new leach field. Since then, we have tried something new every year for the front of the house - we planted spiraea and potentilla/cinquefoil, then peas and alpine strawberries between the shrubs, then moved the shrubs and planted tomatoes, asparagus and basil. I still haven't got it quite right... but this is what I'd like to try this year -



Kentucky Wonder pole beans (white flowers), scarlet runner beans (red flowers) and canary creeper (yellow flowers) growing their way up trellises attached to the front of the house. The scarlet flowers of the runner beans are supposed to attract hummingbirds, which would be great... and the vines should help to absorb some of the heat load that overwhelms our front porch. Last fall, we planted two grape vines on either side of the porch steps on the side of the house, for the same solar-heat-gain-reducing purpose. The grape vines will get their own free-standing trellis and will hopefully shade our house and give us some tasty Concord grapes in a few years.

I cannot confess to having come up with this idea all by myself - the grape vine trick we learned from our neighbors Iain and Christine across the park who wanted the grapevines to give them a little privacy from the street. I'm very encouraged by the vigor of their grape vines, which grow profusely each summer. The privacy screening does work quite well, but their beautiful gardens do make me peer more often into their yard. The scarlet runner beans and canary creeper suggestion comes straight from the Fedco magazine. While vibrant green leaves are beautiful, it would be nice to have some primary-color contrast (and more hummingbirds!)

Stay tuned for more plans for the 2011 garden...

Clark's Memorial Salad

Wintertime is a bit slow for gardening, a bit short on daylight and a bit long on cold windy nights that are uninspiring for evening walks. But inspiration never rests! In the winter, I find that inspiration follows us indoors, particularly into our kitchen, transforming our everyday meals into something a little special and our special occasion meals into an adventure.

And by adventure, I do mean the kind of meal where you try something you've really never ever tried before that has the potential to cause bodily harm. Like smoking sweet potato/white potato mash in an applesauce (chinois) sieve and a canning kettle. Unfortunately, I do not have photos from this because I was too busy trying to escape the smoke that completely filled the kitchen. The smoke eventually emptied the room after opening all windows and the exterior door, but it remained infused into the root vegetables and tasted amazing! I must thank Kelley Flynn, chef at the Palette restaurant, for explaining how one might go about infusing smoke into a vegetable. He prepares an delectable smoked parsnip and potato mash at his restaurant. I wish we had learned that trick last year, when we were inundated with root vegetables from our winter CSA.

It is important to recall the dark days of winter and any inspirational recipes when planning for next year's garden. We were fortunate to have sweet potatoes and white potatoes available from local farms, but parsnips are significantly more difficult to find. Thus, parsnips are on my list of things to grow next year! I've been re-reading Eliot Coleman's book "Four-Season Harvest" and I'm newly inspired to try cold-hardy greens and to have Adam build me some cold frames. We love salads year-round and it would be a real treat to pick our own salad greens this time of year. Other gardening inspiration comes from having to buy shallots in the grocery store because my shallots didn't produce much at all this year - and oh! the grocery store shallots are enormous!

Tonight's inspiration came in the form of pickled eggs, much more mundane but still a little adventurous. I use a recipe adapted from the University of Georgia's National Center for Home Food Preservation - try the Dilled Eggs recipe.

I first became acquainted with the pickled egg at Clark's Ale House in Syracuse, New York. There was an excellent selection of beers but only two items on the menu at Clark's - pickled eggs and roast beef sandwiches with horseradish. I say "was" because Clark's Ale House closed its doors on September 25th, 2010 - we were very sad to hear of its closing.

So, in memory of our favorite drinking establishment in Adam's hometown, we put together the following recipe, the Clark's Ale House Memorial Salad:

Mixed salad greens, with sliced pickled eggs, grated horseradish cheddar cheese, shredded roast beef, finely sliced red onion and croutons tossed with a honey mustard dressing.

To make the honey mustard dressing -

3 parts Honeycup honey mustard dressing to 1 part olive oil to 1 part balsamic vinegar to 1 part water - blend together and toss with the salad.

If you can get it, enjoy your salad with any Middle Ages Brewing Company beer, which was always on tap at Clark's and brewed just on the far side of downtown Syracuse.