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 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!

Experiments in Benign Neglect

On the morning of November 3rd, I went out to my carefully covered "fall salad" garden bed and, to my horror, the sheet was stiff with frost and the arugula was positively crispy with frost. I had a sad drive into work that day, believing that the arugula would turn black and slimy from being frozen to death. Despite my conscientious efforts to cover the bed each night with an old sheet, even when it meant running outside in my pajamas at 11 o'clock because I suddenly was clutched by a feeling of dread that I had forgotten to cover the bed. The looming spectre of frost-killed salad was enough to get me out of bed every time, but my efforts had been futile! I was so downhearted that I didn't even bother to put the sheet back out on Wednesday night, or to look at the damage done on Thursday morning.

I have never thought myself to be a drama queen, that role has always been filled by another member of my family (hmm, wonder who that might be?), but I must admit that I completely over-reacted in this case. Imagine my surprise when on Thursday afternoon, I came home and the arugula looked chipper and green and completely unscathed by the frost. Arugula - 1; Jack Frost - 0.

I should say that I do not just have arugula in the fall salad garden, but it's the only thing worth looking forward to eating. (Plus, I have a love affair with arugula.) The spinach looks anemic (oh, the irony) and the scallions, carrots and lettuce haven't done much at all.

Since I discovered the resilience of fall salad plants to frost, I've been much less concerned with their overnight tuck-in. I'm trying an experiment of how long I can go before a really hard killer frost (or snow! or ice!) does these tough little plants in for good. It's wonderful because I have turned my attentions toward the hordes of green tomatoes that require substantially more attention lately ("ew, this moldy tomato just collapsed in my hand" and "how many more times do I have to make tomato sauce before this is over?")

I am going to go pay some attention to my lovely little arugula right now, because we're making quiche tonight with farm eggs, caramelized onions, ricotta and Jarlsberg. (And many many thanks to the drama queen for providing the eggs!)

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.

Summer Harvest Wrap-Up

I'm amazed at how nice our autumn has been thus far. It's rained some, helping to refresh the water table and our drinking water wells. But mostly it's been a lot of really beautiful days with pretty fall colors. At our house, we haven't yet had a frost as we're in a sheltered spot, but we did wrap the cherry tomatoes two nights ago with sheets. I almost wanted to keep them up as ghostly Halloween decorations, but that would defeat the purpose of keeping the tomato plants producing.

I've been a bit remiss in keeping my online harvest log up-to-date, but I did just catch up - so please navigate to My 2010 Harvest Log. The season isn't completely over, but it's certainly winding down. I am keeping my fingers crossed that I will still be harvesting some spinach, arugula and carrots from the garden well into November.

So - I've learned a couple things this year -
1) Squash plants grow like kudzu. Interestingly, I had great success with the winter squashes (butternut and acorn) and only a very few zucchini and summer squash. Somehow my friends and family members are much more enthused about taking home free hard squash than summer squash... so maybe this was a good thing.

2) I do not need 12 tomato plants. Without doing the math, I know that I've harvested over 40 pounds of tomatoes from my garden this year. The vines kept overwhelming their supports and threatening to topple completely, even with fairly routine sucker-removal.

3) Peppers do well with a little spa treatment. Some nice farmers who sold us pepper starts told us to sprinkle Epsom salt around the base of the plant. Apparently the magnesium is in high demand for peppers.

4) Even though I measured out my plant spacing this year, I still crowded my plants. My nasturtiums barely grew at all until I tore out the cucumber vines, and then they just flourished late summer and into the fall.

5) I also just learned a new trick - you can use sawdust as mulch. I'm really quite excited to learn this because we have a lot of sawdust from woodworking and I need to mulch a lot of garden space. We planted raspberries, grapes, strawberries and blueberries late this summer, which all need some sort of bed mulch. The key is to put down some nitrogen fertilizer (compost or other type) before the sawdust.

6) Ran into trouble with bitter lettuce and early bolting of greens during the summer. Part of this may have been attributable to the droughty conditions and my lackluster watering habits in August.

Stay tuned for my big dreams for next year's garden and to see how the late harvests turn out!

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!

"Pickles are more nutritious than fresh cucumbers" - really?

The Internet is full of astounding information, some of which is true, some completely unfactual, and some that seems just a little odd.

Take NC State University's cucumber profile, for example. As quoted in the title of this post, this article includes a statement that pickles have more nutritional value than fresh cucumbers. Really?? Doesn't this fly in the face of raw foods being more healthful than processed ones?? This certainly deserves further examination.

I've always thought of pickles as a sort of junk food condiment - like ketchup, it's made from vegetables, but it isn't actually "good for you." I delved into some literature and online databases to find out more; perhaps my assumptions about fresh produce would be turned on its head.

The USDA has a very cool searchable online nutritional value database. I used this to compare the nutritional content of cucumbers to pickles, as well as the cucumber profile from NC State.

Since I'm not a nutritionist, I can't really interpret precisely how much better or worse pickles are than fresh cucumbers. I'd love to know if the brine makes pickle nutrients more readily absorbed into the bloodstream. But anyway, what I've found from my quick research project is that cucumbers are 95% water and have very few calories, and that pickles are 94% water, have very few calories and a lot of salt. There are some differences in the amounts of vitamins and minerals, but neither have high concentrations (except with sodium in the pickles.) Therefore, as a non-expert, I would conclude that they are about the same nutritionally speaking, except for the salt.

The American Heart Association recommends that we consume less than 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day. According to the USDA database, one 4-oz dill pickle contains over 1,100 milligrams of sodium. That's almost your whole daily allotment - wow!

Why is salt bad?? - Excess sodium intake is linked to high blood pressure and increased risk for heart disease and stroke, two of the top three leading causes of death in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

The bottom line: I intend to eat fresh cucumbers and also make pickles. The salt content of pickles will keep them as a tasty condiment to be enjoyed in small quantities, and the watery crunch of fresh cucumbers makes them perfect for main dishes and salads.


This really started off as a post about making pickles, but somehow I found myself in the middle of a huge digression.

Anyway, I made four different kinds of pickles on Sunday night, using up about 10 pounds of cucumbers. Half were from my garden and half from Musterfield Farm (we rode our bikes to the farmstand.) I'll let you know what I think of the results of this recipes as soon as I try them...

Here are the recipes:
Audrey's Refrigerator Pickles
Refrigerator Dill Pickles
Marisa's Garlic Dill Pickles - this is a truly great blog on canning!!

Bread and Butter Pickles (adapted from the Ball Blue Book)
-makes 4 quarts-
4 lbs cucumbers, run through the food processor into 1/8-in slices
2 lbs onions, run through the food processor into 1/8-in slices
1/3 cup salt (non-iodized)
-- Combine cucumber and onion slices in a large kettle, layering with the salt. Cover the top with ice and let stand 1.5 hrs. Drain, rinse, drain again.

2 cups sugar
2 Tbsp mustard seed
2 tsp turmeric
2 tsp celery seed
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp peppercorns
1 tsp allspice berries (at Adam's request - may add an interesting flavor, we'll see)
3 cups vinegar (I used white vinegar this time, but would normally use apple cider vinegar.)
-- Combine ingredients in a medium saucepan to make the brine, bring to a boil.
-- Pour brine on top of cucumbers and onions in the kettle. Bring to a boil.

Boiling water in a canning kettle
Sterilized quart jars with lids and rings
Chopstick, spatula or other wooden or plastic stick
-- Pack hot pickles and liquid into hot jars, leaving 1/4-inch headspace.
-- Run a chopstick around the outside of the jar, removing any bubbles.
-- Put on lids and screw on rings.
-- Process quarts in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.
-- After the jars have sealed and cooled, put them in a storage area and wait 4-6 weeks for the flavor to develop.

Peas, Please

It's the height of pea season in New Hampshire, which is a very good time. I have been enjoying my own snow peas as well as Vanessa's sugar snap peas this past week. You can plant peas in late April or early May here. The seed guides indicate "as soon as the ground can be worked" but I tend to plant whenever the spirit moves me; this year I planted mid-May. For having gone to science "do things by the book" school for four years, my gardening ethic is rather lackadaisical.



Peas are fantastically tasty, raw or cooked. I especially like sugar snap peas straight from the vine, as they've got a great crunch raw. Adam is not a fan of raw peas, so I put snow peas in with some potstickers for a picnic dinner. I also tried doing a quick 90-second steam in the microwave and then rinsing the snow peas in cold water before chopping them for a green salad. I was surprised at the difference in flavor with that short amount of cooking - it definitely mellows out the flavor.

I have experimented with several types of pea fences, although I did not follow the scientific method. (That would be a great science fair project - which pea fence provides best support?) Peas naturally vine and trellis themselves, wrapping thin yet strong tendrils around anything they come in contact with. (Botany Quiz - What's the name for this differential growth habit stimulated by plants "feeling" a surface? - the answer is at the bottom of this post. Bonus points if you can remember which plant hormones are responsible for this!!)

I've tried two different trellis systems this year. One is a line of vertical tree saplings with twine running between the saplings. The other is a wattle made out of crisscrossed branches. There are pros and cons to both, but both are now too short! I've had to re-purpose part of my pole bean trellis for the pea plants. The peas are rapidly maturing, and I'll probably pull them out this weekend - peas do not take well to 90-degree heat. For the second planting this fall and the years to come, I may need to follow my some "by-the-book" advice and set up a regularly-spaced wide mesh netting for the peas that's at least 4 ft tall.



Quiz answers: this growth habit is called thigmotropism - and the hormones responsible are our dear old friends, the auxins.

First, select a sunny spot...

I'm pretty sure that I've checked out every book on gardening from the Lebanon library (except the ones from the 1970s with the garish photos on the cover because I never want a garden that looks like a psychedelic tropical jungle hemmed in by brick work.) You think I would have taken the authors' cumulative advice to heart on how to establish a garden, but I managed to ignore all of it and to pick the worst sites for vegetables last year. Too dark, terrible soil, and I reaped a very poor harvest accordingly. Very sad but of course COMPLETELY AVOIDABLE!

Had I heeded the advice of Chapter One of every gardening book, I would have picked the sunniest spot for my garden, but the only sunny spot is in the front yard and on top of our septic leach field. Roadblock #1. But this spring we had a big frankenpine taken down and amazingly, our yard near the driveway now gets sunlight - yay! Roadblock circumvented.

Adam built several raised garden beds out of Douglas fir planks and these cool metal corner brackets, which he filled with a mixture of aged manure and loam. I'm using a modified version of Mel Bartholomew's square-foot gardening method, what I like to call the "yeah, that's probably about a foot" gardening method. I don't own a 12-inch ruler and didn't want to get dirt in the tape measure, so I just eyeballed it. Which is why some of the tomatoes are a little more tightly bunched at one end of the bed.



So now I've got my vegetables in the right spot so let's see how this season goes! The weather has been surprisingly warm and the plants are loving it.

I love August

This is a Bulgarian carrot chili pepper -
hopefully it will turn orange!
I can tell it's spicy because no insects have tried to eat it.

I may actually have to water my garden this week... there are thunderstorms predicted but it really hasn't rained for a full week! And it's nice outside during the day and cools off at night - it's just so great.

A quick list about this August -
1. realized it's really shady in both new vegetable gardens... whoops... no wonder my tomato plants are stunted.
2. peppers grow really well in pots. so do tomatoes - 3 have been transplanted to pots on the front steps and are no longer languishing in the shade.
3. green bean vines can grow inches in a single sunny warm day!
4. all cilantro eventually bolts... even the long-lasting varieties.
5. next Sunday marks 8 weeks until the average first frost in this region - talk about a short summer.

I'm going to try to direct-sow some greens this week for fall harvest... it would be nice to have some arugula again.