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.

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.

Dark Days 8: Spinach Goat Cheese Flatbread and a Giveaway!

Now that the snow has finally arrived, I am in no rush to get back into the garden. Before it snowed, I felt like I should be doing some sort of yardwork, even though the ground has been frozen solid for weeks. Now, I am blissfully relieved of my obligations to do yardwork or compost-turning until spring comes.

Instead, I have turned my gardening attentions indoors - I am forcing some paperwhites and a red amaryllis to bloom indoors, and I'm trying to nurture the houseplants with a little more care than usual. Also, I've been doing my garden planning for the spring (click here to enter a giveaway for a seed catalog).

In the meantime, I can't live on the beauty of flowers and houseplants alone, so I spent a good amount of the weekend cooking. I am really fortunate to have Spring Ledge Farm's greenhouses so close to my house. They are open Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings through the winter, and their spinach is fresh, crisp and oh-so-very-green. For dinner last night, I made two small flatbread pizzas with garlic-infused olive oil as the base, and spinach, red onion and goat cheese on the top. That's a bit of grated Parmesan that you see in the photo - I'm trying to use up a last little bit of this cheese that has been "aging" in the fridge for months.

That's some creamy chevre.

Garlic-infused olive oil sounds really fancy, right? It's not hard at all and takes about 1 minute to assemble. 

Garlic-Infused Olive Oil -

Take a clove of garlic, smash it flat with the flat side of a knife, chop it finely and put it in a small cup or dish with some olive oil. When you're ready to assemble the pizza five minutes later, dump the olive oil with garlic chunks onto the dough and spread it around the whole pizza all the way to the edge. Also great with crusty bread or breadsticks.

Sources cited:

Pizza dough - Bread flour from Champlain Organics, honey from Cutting Farm, sugar, olive oil, salt, yeast from the grocery store

Red onion - Kearsarge Gore Farm

Goat Cheese - Vermont Cheese Company

Spinach - Spring Ledge Farm

Garlic - from Vanessa's garden

Parmesan cheese - originally from Wisconsin, it's been in the fridge so long, it might now be considered a local product.

Olive oil - Italy (definitely not local... but oh so tasty)

Still.... Seeking Spring... Desperately

Guess what April showers have brought this year?
April SNOW!!

It has been spitting snow off and on, and everyone seems to be getting really tired of it. I was just at a meeting with a colleague who had dressed in well-coordinated, pretty pastels and then had to dig out her winter jacket. Fortunately, not all spring colors have to be covered over. The crocuses don't seem to mind the weather at all.

I snapped this shot of the crocuses near my office, not in my own garden. But I have spotted a few signs of spring from my garden, which I'd like to share with you:

Chives - These start growing immediately after the snowpack melts off, and cold weather doesn't bother this herb at all.

Daylilies - Even though they won't bloom until the summer, their green leaves pop up almost as fast as the chives.

Blueberries, lilacs, and crabapple - The buds are starting to show a little bit of green. And there was a small flock of juncos frolicking in the lilac hedge this morning.


I'll leave you with a recipe for a refreshing beverage that will get you excited about spring. Even if the weather seems more like winter.

Lemonade with Maple Syrup

1) Dig through your produce drawer and pull the lemons from underneath the parsnips, onions and other root vegetables. They are under there somewhere... I promise.

2) Juice the lemons into a pitcher and try to get as much pulp out into the pitcher. If there is not too much pith, you can peel the lemon and throw the pulp into the food processor.

3) Pour in maple syrup and stir up it well. Add water and ice cubes. Take a few taster sips to adjust the sweetness and intensity to your liking.

Sunlight and Maple Syrup

Yep, I was wrong. In my last post, I downplayed the effect that Daylight Savings Time would have on me, because I work late and it's usually getting dark by the time I drive home. Except that it is downright invigorating not to walk out to the parking lot and drive home in the pitch dark, and sometimes I even get home with enough time for a walk before night falls. It's really fantastic.

I was also wrong to think that spring would come in a pleasant stepwise fashion. I've lived in New England and the Northeast long enough to know that spring is an ephemeral season, ever changing and predictable only in its unpredictability. We can generally depend on the ski areas staying open into the middle of April and the ground to be warm enough for planting tomatoes on Memorial Day, but anything can and typically does happen between March 20th and June 21st - wintry mix, floods, ice storms, 70-degree weather, weeks of continuous rain (or so it seems), mud season, black flies and maple syrup. Case in point - it was so warm that I didn't wear socks this past Friday, and yesterday it snowed five inches.

This weekend, the extra daylight was much appreciated as we hosted our second annual maple sugaring party. This party is actually just a ruse to coerce our friends and family into hanging out with us as we stand around all day waiting for maple sap to boil down into maple syrup. And it does take ALL DAY to boil down maple syrup - we figure it takes about 12 hours for us to boil down 20 gallons of sap into a half gallon of syrup. (For you math fiends out there, the ratio is 40 gallons of sap yielding 1 gallon of syrup - or 39 gallons of water that need to be turned into steam.) Commercial maple producers and serious hobbyists have specialized equipment to move the process along faster and are substantially more efficient. We have an abundance of scrap wood and free time, so we boil in a big pot over an open fire.

We got a late start this year on the boiling, so even though we stayed out until the sun went down (and much later into the full moon night), we ended up finishing the syrup the next day. It was a beautiful thing - sweet-smelling, amber-hued maple syrup on a Sunday morning. We're storing the jars of syrup in the fridge until we can distribute it to our partygoers.

The sweetest part of springtime - maple syrup

The non-linear tendency of a New England spring may be morally trying and spiritually disheartening, but it's great for maple syrup producers. Maple sap runs and is extracted by maple syrup producers when temperatures get below freezing at night and about 40 degrees during the day and before the trees bud out - not exactly the balmy springtime weather we might wish for. However, if we had ever-improving weather during springtime, the trees would bud out quickly and the maple syrup season would be short indeed. But with the on-again, off-again nature of the weather, there's usually around 6 weeks of maple sugaring season starting sometime in late February and ending sometime in late March or early April.

Stay tuned for the results of this upcoming weekend's maple sugar boil... we're hoping to have another 20 gallons to boil down.

Winter Sunshine

The weather forecast had predicted snow for this weekend, but it turned out to be largely a beautiful sunny weekend. Cold - it was 56 in the kitchen at noon today and stayed below freezing outside all weekend - but still partly to mostly sunny! Wonderful!

While New Hampshire is a far sunnier location in winter than other places I have lived (Ohio, Syracuse, Oregon, the Czech Republic), it can sort of drag you down when it gets dark out at 4:30 in the afternoon. It becomes extremely enticing to go to bed early and cocoon yourself with blankets on the couch.

It's this time of year when I become immensely grateful for summer. Grateful for summer in December - huh? Because of the vegetable garden, I can conjure up the colors and tastes of summer even when it's cold and dark outside. As I have written before, it was a prolific year for squash, and I can take a walk to the pantry in the garage, pull out a butternut squash from the squash basket, roast it in the oven, scoop out of the inside and puree it - and voila, instant winter sunshine!

Besides its lovely cheery color, butternut squash is high in vitamins A and C, potassium and fiber. This squash was exceptional - so sweet and creamy - that Adam didn't even have to add maple syrup or butter, our standard squash flavorings. (Also good are sage, browned butter, blue cheese, or brown sugar.) I took some more puree for lunch and then need to turn the rest into creamy butternut squash soup.

Oh, to live in Zone 7!

We are travelling for an extended Thanksgiving holiday by visiting friends and family in the Mid-Atlantic. Late November is a wonderful time to wander down to this area from New Hampshire, because it's like travelling back in time - suddenly it feels like October again. True, the days are shorter and the foliage is past peak, but it's staying well above freezing at night and on sunny days, which we've enjoyed so far, it's getting into the 60's.

On Sunday, we went to the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, which is a large marshland complex on the Chesapeake Bay on the eastern shore of Maryland. Large may not be the proper word to describe this marsh - it's truly impressive, this refuge covers 27,000 acres, much of it marsh.


View Larger Map

We saw bald eagles, Canada geese, snow geese and ducks and also encountered the infamous marsh denizen, the mosquito. It was really interesting to see where the geese go after their V's fly southward from New Hampshire in October - the DelMarVa peninsula (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) is a main wintering grounds for the Atlantic population of Canada geese.

We saw the most vibrant and luscious rows of kale and cabbage in someone's yard on Sunday driving back from the refuge. And I realized how much more hospitable southern climes are to growing vegetables. Instead of this mad rush to try to get plants in the ground in the spring so that they have a chance of maturing before the frost comes, you might take a more leisurely pace here. Or... you might work just as hard in the garden but for longer. As it is, in New Hampshire, I'm actively gardening from March (sowing seeds indoors) through November (with arugula) even though the frost-free "growing" season is only 121 days, according to Old Yankee Magazine. It's sort of nice to have a few months off to pursue other endeavors. But how tempting to have a growing season with 200 frost-free days!!

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!)

The Lazy Days of September

It's mid-September now, which is a really lovely time for gardeners who don't want to work too much. It's not too hot, not frosty at night, and we're getting intermittent rain, which keeps weed growth down, gives the fall-planted greens a chance to thrive, and reduces the need for watering. This change in the weather allows the gradual ripening of summer season vegetables, which means I can actually keep on top of eating the tomatoes coming out of the garden before they start to get over-ripe. And the fall vegetables have wonderfully long shelf lives - I don't have to worry about cooking down my sweet little pie pumpkin from Musterfield Farm because it's not going to get moldy in a few days.

Okay, so maybe my kitchen table is covered with squash and pears and the windowsill is lined with ripening tomatoes and drying hot peppers and the cute little pumpkin (I don't have a camera until Tuesday, but let me assure you that it is indeed covered with said produce), but I've got a good amount of time before I have to get on with canning the pears and figuring out what to do with the tomatoes. It is SO nice to have a breather from constant harvesting and preserving.

Mid-September is also an ideal time for taking a bit of a respite from gardening and the food processing that comes with gardening. The weather is great for many outdoor pursuits and I've recently managed to go for walks around the lake, bike riding, hiking, looking at the early fall colors, and enjoyed a cup of hot chocolate while sitting outdoors at a picnic table with only a fleece jacket. The outdoor hot chocolate part is a truly special event that can only be enjoyed on certain crisp fall days and then those really sunny ski days in late winter.

Of course, there are fall garden chores that I should be doing, you know, weeding out the grass that has become seriously established around the daisies, turning the compost, mulching the perennial beds, cutting back flower stalks... but really none of that demands my immediate attention. A lot has been written about the lazy days of summer but maybe we should start promoting the lazy days of September. This should certainly include the promotion of outdoor hot chocolate consumption. Sure, there's wood to split and stack, pears and apples to preserve, grass to cut, trees to prune... but most of those things can be put off until October... or November... or even next spring?

In Praise of Long Summers

In my mind, I think of September as autumn - back to school traffic, waking up before the sun is fully up, rapid sunsets transitioning to cool nights, pumpkins sitting on the stone wall at the local farm, the first of the fall apples and the end of the peaches.

But September is really a summer month - just as June is really a spring month. We've got another 3 weeks of summer after August passes us by, which is really a pleasant prospect. First, it means that I can still wear sandals even though it's now after Labor Day because it's STILL SUMMER!! I have an unwritten but oft-spoken rule that sandal season is from Memorial Day through Labor Day, but I think I'd like to amend the time period to Memorial Day to the Autumnal Equinox on a trial basis.



Secondly, more summertime means more vegetable-growing weather, more baskets full of basil, and more time for my tomatoes to ripen and red bell peppers to turn red. In New Hampshire, sweet red peppers are difficult to come by; the past few years, I've picked them as green peppers. This year it's been nice and warm and I'm hoping that the green will start turning to red this week.

I've been pulling a few pounds of tomatoes from the vine every other day for the past 2-3 weeks, but the number of green tomatoes still overshadow the red ones picked so far. Green tomato chow-chow is all piquant and thrifty and good, but it's just not as good as the fresh-picked tomatoes that exude redness or any of the many products that can be created from red tomatoes.

I remember 2 years ago, the first year I had a garden at our house, the red tomato harvest was decent, however, I had dozens of green tomatoes that I picked before the first frost and gamely packed them in paper to wait for them to ripen... let's just say that indoor ripening didn't really work out. The majority of those tomatoes went into the compost pile as soggy greenish-yellowish half-rotten orbs. Then, last year, the late blight hit our region and I lost all my tomatoes in mid-August; I think I harvested 3 tomatoes. It was a sad time for home gardeners and a really tough year for market gardeners and farmers.

However, optimism is a requisite trait for a gardener - hope must spring eternal, as a pessimistic gardener is likely to throw in the trowel and take up a more predictable hobby, like cross-stitch or sky-diving. At least for the tomatoes, my optimism had paid off - I'm happy to report that this year's tomato harvest has been great and there's still a rather long time before the end of summer and autumn's killing frosts. Here's a photo of Friday's harvest; the basil basket is also from Friday. Happy summer!

Chlorophyll - definitely not bore-ophyll

Adam Sandler may be a funny guy from the great state of New Hampshire - but I must say that he got it totally wrong in the high school biology class scene in the movie Billy Madison.

Chlorophyll is cool!

I have been neglecting photo-posting lately, an error that I will begin to fix today. Looking through photos taken on July 31, I came to the above realization - call it an "epiphany of botanical revelation."



It's simply amazing. Go away for two weeks in the summer and, provided that your garden doesn't suffer a searing drought, brush fire, plague of locusts or golfball-sized hail, you will return to find a jungle. A lush, green profusion of plant life and all because of a funky little molecule called chlorophyll.

Our raised beds are on either side of the driveway and receive an abundance of sunlight. Our green plants utilize the chlorophyll in their leaves to capture the sun's energy and convert it into sugars to make more plant matter. For several weeks in mid-summer, it's a positive feedback loop - make bigger leaves to catch more sunlight to make bigger leaves. (Note the size of the butternut squash leaves!) However, some of the energy ends up elsewhere, directed to flowering and setting fruit, which makes the wonderful vegetables that make gardening so rewarding. And it's all thanks to chlorophyll.



The butternut squash completely overwhelmed the upper raised bed on the far side of the driveway (in the first photo), but the acorn squash vines were more orderly and stretched out in lovely straight lines across the grass (in the back of the second photo.) The garden looks remarkably different today, but the photos from August will have to wait until another day...

Bonus quiz for the General Botany club - if I had planted corn in my garden, would it photosynthesize more efficiently, less efficiently, or with the same efficiency as the other plants shown in the photos? Leave your answer below.

My Antidote to 90-Degree Days

It's been hot here... I know that rural northern New England has it easy compared to urbanites in NYC, Philadelphia and DC. But still it's darn hot out.

It's been great for the weeds, most of the garden plants, but definitely hard on the peas. I've been working hard at doing very little, especially when it comes to moving around outside. But I've had to do a little bit of gardening...

Just to keep up with the cucumbers. In the first 9 days of July, I've picked over 2 pounds of cucumbers. It's even been too hot to do any pickling (and we didn't have any dill), so I took a cue from my childhood and made cucumber salad, very similar to how my mom makes it. This is a nice simple way to prepare cucumbers without needing to make a trip to the store. At some point, I'll have to try pureeing cukes up into a cold soup, but our blender has been dedicated to smoothie production.



The Cucumber Salad I grew up eating:
Cucumbers (1 lb makes enough for 3-4 servings)
Miracle Whip (for true childhood authenticity)
Milk

My version (for adults - kids may prefer the less tangy version.)
Substitute olive oil mayonnaise for Miracle Whip. (could also use yogurt)
Splash of white wine vinegar (I couldn't find the sherry vinegar)
Dried dill weed (use liberally)
Black pepper
(Salt, if you think you need it - taste it plain first)

Peel and thinly slice the cucumbers. In a bowl, scoop and plop two large forkfuls of mayo and pour in a small amount of milk and vinegar (1 Tbsp or so of eaach.) With the fork, mix together until smooth. Shake in 1-2 Tbsp dill and 1/2 tsp pepper, adjusting to taste - I prefer a lot of dill. Make sure the dressing tastes good now, as it's easy to distribute the flavors before putting in the cucumbers. Add the sliced cukes and stir together. I usually have to pull apart the cucumber slices by hand as they tend to stick together.

If you haven't already eaten the whole thing immediately, store this covered in the fridge for a day or two. It doesn't last terribly long as the cucumber will get soggy.

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.

The Dark Days of Rain

I was so excited in April and May - weeks of gorgeous sunny days, even getting up into the 80's a couple of days. We moved our bedroom downstairs to the sleeping porch two months ago, and it was so lovely to sleep with the windows open. My gardens were thriving; even the hydrangea that I left in a garbage bag for 5 days before transplanting managed to put out some flower buds (whoops - not a recommended practice.) And the rhododendron that I thought might curl up and die actually put out new leaves. And the little squeaky cockeyed optimist in my head chirped, "This summer will surely be a warm, sunny, summery season"...

And all that hope and good will and early planting for nothing - June is rainy and cold... it's been raining every day for a solid week!

The pea plants love the cool, wet weather, although I'd really like to see them start flowering. The pole bean seeds soaked up enough water to sprout vigorously, and the snapdragons and dianthus don't care what the weather does - they just keep blooming. (Mental note to buy more snapdragons next year!)

But the daisies have been beaten down, the lettuce is covered with dirt, and my cucumber seeds show no signs of sprouting. The marigolds look sad and sluggy, the squash is turning yellow (the leaves, not the fruit), and the rest of the garden looks lethargic at best. This is a demoralizing time. This is a time when I wonder how the local farmstand can possibly be starting to harvest their greenhouse tomatoes, and why I bother to grow in marginal soil with marginal sunlight when I can just go to the farmers' market... and plenty of other depressing thoughts that make me want to throw in the spade and spend my time in some more rewarding endeavor (model rockets? writing the great American novel?).

This past week is a test of my little internal optimist's patience because most plants don't grow quickly in cool weather. The daytime high's have been in the upper 50's or low 60's - I've worn sweaters every day this week. How can I expect my hot-weather tomatoes and peppers to do anything, if I'm shivering without a jacket? If I can just hold out long enough until the skies clear... then I'll have a moment of sheer bliss before I go out into the garden and find something else to complain about!

I don't think the daisies will ever stand straight again, but this is what they looked like before the rains came!