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.

Dark Days #5: Hard Cider

Oh, what a difference a year makes!

This time last year, you would have found me perusing my Fedco seed catalog with a big mug of tea, as shown below.

Ahh, the zen of garden planning.

2012 has brought some changes - this is my seed-purchase planning spread this year.

No zen this year, more like ordered chaos.

You may notice that my collection of garden books and catalogs has rapidly expanded. And I've swapped the tea for hard cider.

No, garden planning is not so stressful that I'm driven to drink! Today is Thursday and that means it's Growler Day at Farnum Hill Ciders in Lebanon, where locals can stock up on the offerings of the day at a discount.

While hard cider was the original American adult beverage of choice, it is not well-known today. What I've been enjoying this winter's evening is nothing like Woodchuck or Hornsby's; Farnum Hill tastes much more like a dry white wine. I'll let owner Steve Wood tell you about it himself - here's a clip from the PBS production "The Botany of Desire" where Steve was interviewed. (The feature-length documentary is based on Michael Pollan's book of the same name, written before he started on his lengthy, multi-book quest to find the answer to life's most persistent question, "What's for dinner?")

Garden planning brings out the eternal optimist in all of us, but each year, the motivation changes a little. Discovery of new or different varieties, hard lessons learned from the year prior, and surprising successes all play a role in the general feeling of "anything is possible" for the upcoming year's garden.

For 2012, I've got three primary motivators for my garden planning:

1) I'm feeling ambitious to really work on season-extension this year, so I can be working in the garden from March through December. 2012 will be the year of the cold frame.

2) Julie introduced me to some new tasty vegetables that she grew in her education garden at the Sylvia Center at Katchkie Farm in 2011, and that I really want to grow this year. Julie's enthusiasm for growing and eating vegetables is positively contagious. Specifically, I want to try out salad turnips and braising greens (choy, mustard greens, broccoli raab, etc.) and garnish kale.

3) My aunt and mother-in-law gave me gifts of garden books for my birthday, full of tips, recommendations and layouts. I've relied on the good words of Mel Bartholomew and Eliot Coleman for garden planning help in the past, but I'm really enjoying The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch and The Kitchen Gardeners' Handbook by Jennifer Bartley this year. I will review these books in more detail this winter.

I'll also share my planting list and seed order with you all shortly. Readers, are there any new varieties you're planning to try out this year?

***
As this is a Dark Days challenge post, I should mention that I did eat more for dinner than just hard cider. The hard cider is an excellent local beverage pairing with my meal this week, but unfortunately, I fell a little short on the local choices for the food part of the meal.

Adam cooked black duck and Canada goose breasts with shallot and sweet cherry, and I prepared a side of homemade pasta, rosemary-infused olive oil and Parmesan cheese. The duck and goose were local (well, they are migratory, but were shot flying over Great Bay in New Hampshire), and the pasta and rosemary-infused olive oil were homemade, but the shallots, cherries and cheese were all from far away lands. Not a great week for Dark Days eating... but a very good week for Dark Days drinking.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Gardening Season Begins?

Gardening season does not have a start date. If you are a gardener, whether you live in the tropics or the Arctic, you garden all year long. Gardening season is a state of mind, not two days X'ed out on the kitchen calendar.

True, there may be that first day when you can see the chives poking out of the residual snow and ice, and immediately you crouch down and brushing away the ice and dead leaves. The green spikes and their sharp oniony tang is a wake-up call to that part of you that went dormant during the winter.

But that day is in sometime in the beginning of April - I can't remember exactly - because New Hampshire is still in the throes of mud season. This "fifth" season is aptly named because it is essentially a 6-week-long mud wrestling match between winter and spring. Not pretty to behold, potentially damaging, and really, what's the use of it? The only benefit I can see that mud season provides is that the weather is so inhospitable that it offers plenty of time for a gardener to start seeds and, more importantly, start dreaming in full, bright Technicolor about what the garden will look like in a few months.

Gardening journals tell you to wait to play in your garden until the ground is dry enough to work... to me, that shows the true impatience of gardeners in spring. We just can't wait to put all of our new garden ideas into the ground and see what sprouts. This urge is especially irresistible when the daytime high gets above 50 degrees and there's a beautiful yellow sun in a clear blue sky. The first week that the local garden and farm stand opened, I was there to buy pansies. So what if the temperature was supposed to be below 20 degrees every night for the next week? (Not that the pansy plants would die, but the blooming flowers wouldn't survive heavy frosts.)

I did hold off on planting those pansies for another two weeks, partly because I was so overwhelmed with the urge to buy and plant flowers that I hadn't even decided where I would put these eight tiny specimens of "Sorbet Mix" pansies. The other part was that last fall, I decided that raking up leaves was not worth the effort; this spring, I decided that was a bad decision. For the first 2 weeks in April, I raked leaves. Instead of planting peas and pansies, I raked the front lawn. Instead of digging new vegetable beds, I raked the leaves from the granite steps leading toward the planned vegetable bed site. Never again will I put off all the raking until the spring, because it might be summer by the time I get done with the raking this year.

This past weekend, I did manage to pull myself away from the rake and actually do some planting and digging. I've got big plans for this year, the second summer in our first home. We were fortunate enough to move into a wonderful bungalow with a completely neglected yard - not exactly a tabula rasa, but there's something so satisfying about tearing out the sparse lawn, culling the overgrown daylily population, and harshly pruning trees and shrubs.

Here's a brief summary of how the gardens look in my mind. In front of the house, there are peas growing up strings in between the foundation plantings (little Spiraea and Potentilla shrubs that we planted last spring). Between the house and the driveway, where Adam dug up the lawn for a vegetable garden last year, we'll have a annual/perennial flower garden with some salad greens thrown in there. New vegetable gardens are in the process of being dug up the hill next to the garage; the hillside leading up there will be part rock garden, part herb garden, part "anything-to-stabilize-this-slope." The shade garden on the other side of the house will get some plants other than comfrey and myrtle, and the lilac hedge will be thoroughly groomed. And I'll put in an asparagus bed... and I'll clear out all the wild blackberry canes... and I won't spend all of the free time in the garden. (Did I mention that I'm an optimist when it comes to gardening?)

This vision is the culmination of many months of planning, research, and daydreaming, and this process is at least as important if not more important that the actual planting. The year-round gardening that I do in my mind is not as strenuous as the digging, weeding, and planting I do from April through September, but it's a critical part of the gardening season.

(Sorry! I ran out of daylight before I could take any photos - check back soon for garden photos.)