Garden thoughts

We're starting to harvest food from our garden! Most dinners consist of whatever we can pick plus the occasional supplemental protein in the form of farm eggs or local meats. Yesterday, for example, we ate:

• cucumbers, hardboiled eggs, and tomatoes in balsamic vinaigrette
• sauteed green beans (Masai haricot vert and scarlet runner beans)
• thinly sliced purple carrots and beets (braised and then sauteed for a few minutes in olive oil and sea salt)

Today we ate:

• cucumbers and tomatoes with vinaigrette
• green beans again
• brats from a local pork farmer (I've found a person in the area who raises pastured pork with no additives/hormones/antibiotics in the feed...and the prices are just as good or better than the supermarket)

I have a really big garden, and I'm still surprised at how little it yields, relatively speaking, to feed our family. We still have to buy a fair amount of other staples for lunch and breakfast...and we rarely have anything left over to can, dry, or freeze. How did people ever grow enough to last them through a whole year? It boggles my mind.

I'm also reminded of both how easy it is to eat garden food...and how much work it is at the same time. You can walk around, pick some cucumbers and tomatoes, and eat them straight off the vine. But you can also spend 10 minutes shelling peas and only come out with a small bowl. I admit that I'm still way too used to opening up a bag of frozen vegetables.

I'm going to try my best to do a second planting this month whenever I take something out. I'm thinking lots of kale, salad greens, brussels sprouts, and carrots. What else grows well as a late summer planting?

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Ivy is 2 months (and change)

Zari finished kindergarten yesterday, so we're officially on summer holidays now. I've been doing lots of gardening. So far, here's what I've done...

• moved all the asparagus plants to one location
• planted 20 white cabbages, 3 red cabbages, 3 cauliflower, 8 tomatoes, 2 raspberries, 6 romaine lettuce, 10 basil, rosemary, oregano, cilantro
• transplanted chives, lavender, fruit bushes from our other house (june berry, red currant, josta berry, honey berry), and about a zillion hostas
• dug up some areas of weedy lawn near the house, installed brick edging, and planted perennials
• planted 4 more dwarf fruit trees in our orchard, for a total of 7. I'd like to add some peaches and one more variety of apple
• built some large cages covered with chicken wire to keep the squirrels out of our strawberries (they're working!)

...and what I still need to do:

• till our main garden area (adding in compost, peat moss, and perlite to the heavy soil), which consists of eight 12x4' beds
• plant the main vegetable garden with Masai bush beans, edamame, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale, beets, watermelon, and other yummy things
• plant some grapes if they're still in the garden centers...I'd love to have a few varieties to eat
• transplant my sage & garlic (they're currently residing in one of the flower beds)
• mulch all of our vegetable and flower gardens to keep the weeds at bay 
• try to trap the squirrels and rabbits that are eating our garden

Yes, I really love working in the garden. It's mentally relaxing and provides a good workout at the same time.

Ivy is a roly-poly baby now. She's pleasantly chubby but not crazy chubby like Inga was. She smiles all the time and has settled into a fairly predictable routine of nursing, being awake, and napping in 2-hour cycles. And she lets me put her down for naps now! She goes to bed between 7-8 pm and has a nice long sleep before waking to nurse, often midnight or 1 am and sometimes as late as 3 am. Then she nurses every 2+ hours the rest of the night. This just started last week.

She loves playing Patty Cake and The Itsy Bitsy Spider and Once There Was A Snowman. She's starting "talking" to us with little gurgles and coos.

Inga is starting to be very temperamental. It's such a drastic change from her normal easygoing self. Maybe it's because she's getting 3 molars at once? Or maybe it's just that she's 2 years old and wants to assert her independence all the time. "No, my do it!" is a constant refrain. Fortunately she calms down easily if I tell her "Ask the right way, please."

Oh, and some good news: we have an accepted offer on our old brick house, the one where Dio and Inga were born. We'll be closing in a few weeks! I'm glad to get rid of one of our properties, although I will miss the master bathroom that we remodeled when I was 7 months pregnant with Inga...

The kids horsing around in the bath. Zari said she was a zombie.

And finally, a typical morning. Kids are tumbling around showing me their "tricks," Ivy is hanging out on the bed kicking her legs while I'm getting ready.

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My garden

Two years ago, the back of our yard was a gravel parking area. It was the best place for a garden--full sun, no trees nearby to shade it--but the gravel meant I had to build up with raised beds, rather than dig down into the soil. I got a huge pile of free wood chips from a tree removal company, so those are spread as mulch between the raised beds. Here's what my garden looks like today:

Top beds: 1) beets and some mystery squash/melons, 2) herbs
Middle beds: 1) carrots, 2) tomatoes (mostly Cherokee Purple), shallots, garlic
Bottom bed in the retaining wall: raspberries & strawberries

Top beds (notice the last few fence panels that need to go up): 1) strawberries 2) compost pile/brown matter/compost tumbler
Middle beds: 1) Masai variety bush beans 2) edamame & more bush beans
Bed alongside the garage: blackberries, asparagus, and (harvested) onion patch

Fruit bed that wraps around the swingset: 2 honeyberries, 3 red currants, 3 gooseberries, 3 juneberries.
You can see my shadow--I'm standing on the top of the play house to take the picture.
We also have a 4x10 bed right outside our kitchen door, with tomatoes, potatoes, & herbs.
And lots of mystery melons and squashes in our compost pile & in the jungle behind our garage. I spotted an acorn squash plant but the rest I don't recognize.

Things have been growing vigorously this season, but it seems I've harvested surprisingly little. Other gardener friends of my have made the same remark. My onions & beets were disappointingly small. My carrots, on the other hand, are long and straight and lovely. The beans & herbs have done well, while tomatoes and potatoes got the blight again. I saved most of the tomato plants with a copper spray, but the potatoes finally gave up the ghost. I need to harvest several of the beds and plant beets, kale, salad greens, spinach, and whatever else will grow quickly enough for a fall harvest.

This last picture is a homage to Craiglist--$150 for the whole swingset, including delivery! There's an I-beam for a tire swing on the other side of the playhouse.

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Survival Seeds from Hometown Seeds

Many of you were right--it was seeds! Laura gets a gold star for guessing "survival seeds." Hometown Seeds sent me their Survival Seeds, a collection of 16 non-hybrid vegetable seeds that can plant up to 3/4 of an acre.

Survival Food Storage

This Mylar-sealed package will keep up to 10 years if frozen and unopened. Or, if you want to plant them right away, you can save seeds from your plants, all of which are open-pollinated varieties.

I really like this ready-made garden collection, because I suffer from a kind of overload when I'm browsing through seed catalogs. I thought I had it bad when I was just receiving the big-name nursery catalogs that do mostly hybrids. Then I fell into the world of heirlooms and seed savers coops....and my gardeners' paralysis got a million times worse! I mean, how do you choose between 267 varieties of tomatoes, each with a tantalizing list of virtues and qualities? Should I plant Winterbor or Nero di Toscana kale? Ice-bred or Sylvetta arugula? (I definitely prefer the ruffly Winterbor over the flat Nero di Toscana; I planted both last year in a fit of indecision.)

Even if you're not planning on putting in a big garden this year, you might want to have a collection of seeds in your long-term food storage. Survival Seeds are made just for this purpose. They come in a resealable Mylar pouch. Each seed type comes in a plastic, rather than paper, packet. Included in the packet are:

• Lincoln Peas: 5 oz.
• Detroit Dark Red Beets: 10 grams
• Kentucky Wonder Brown Pole Bean: 5 oz.
• Yolo Wonder Pepper: 5 grams
• Champion Radish: 10 grams
• Lucullus Swiss Chard: 10 grams
• Black Beauty: 10 grams
• Waltham Butternut Winter Squash: 10 grams
• Bloomsdale Longstanding Spinach: 10 grams
• Scarlet Nantes Carrots: 10 grams
• Long Green Improved Cucumber: 10 grams
• Rutgers Tomato: 5 grams
• Golden Acre Cabbage: 10 grams
• Romaine Paris Island Cos Lettuce: 5 grams
• Golden Bantem Sweet Corn: 5 oz.
• Yellow Sweet Spanish Onion: 10 grams

Survival Seeds also come with detailed planting, harvesting, and seed-saving instructions for each variety, arranged by hardiness group. I like that all of the information is in one stapled handout--no sifting through opened seed packets to find when to plant your peas or your beets. I especially appreciated the seed collection instructions. I had no idea, for example, that carrots and beets were biennials.

My own garden is off to a good start. This spring I've already planted peas, carrots, mache, mesclun, spinach, shallots, leeks, garlic, and onions. I started two large flats of seeds this week, from Cherokee Purple tomatoes to 95-day artichokes to mystery melons that we liked from the farmer's market. Last years' raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, asparagus, rhubarb, overwintered kale, chives, sage, and parsley are thriving. I'm also putting in a collection of fruit plants: Juneberries, honeyberries, currants, gooseberries, and jostaberries, plus more raspberries and strawberries. I wanted to put in a dwarf fruit tree orchard, but I think I'll have to delay that until next growing season.

I'd love to hear about your garden plans/dreams/ideas for this year!

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Brown matter

No, this post is not about poop.

It's about creating a brown matter reservoir for composting. I just started composting last year, even though I've been married for 11+ years and we have owned houses for the past 9 years. It just seemed too scary and overwhelming, with all the talk about the proper balance of brown and green matter and turning and aerating and sifting...so I just didn't do it. And then I decided that my lack of familiarity with composting was a pretty lame excuse and it was just time to start.

I'm a pretty laid-back composter. I simply toss any appropriate kitchen or yard waste into a pile, throw on the occasional shovel of dirt if I'm digging something up, and let it sit until it turns into compost. I don't worry about all of the fancy technical stuff. My method is often called cold composting. If you're more into composting, you can do hot composting, worm composting, and probably a lot of other kids that I don't even know about yet.

Our next-door neighbors gave us a tumbling composter last year, and that's been wonderful to have. It speeds up the process immensely, especially if you have the proper ratio of brown to green matter. 

So back to brown matter: it's nice to have a mixture of green matter (kitchen scraps, green lawn cuttings, etc) and brown matter (fall leaves, paper, etc) on your compost heap. But we've always had trouble finding enough brown matter except for the fall months when leaves were falling. So this year, we took apart an old chain-link fence that we're getting rid of and made part of it into a huge leaf/compost pile.

Eric cut the four posts out of the top rail (we have a metal cutting chop saw, so it's quick and easy to cut anything metal) and pounded them into the ground with a fence pounder (which we bought years ago for installing metal fence posts). That way they're pretty solid, but not cemented in. Which is nice because I don't want to have to dig them out if we want to move the pile! He made the enclosure about 10'x5'. He cannibalized other parts from the old fence to make an enclosure with a makeshift gate. Not fancy or pretty, but definitely functional. The leaves in our back yard went into the leaf container. The front yard leaves went into the street for leaf collection; we had plenty just from the back yard anyway. The leaf container is even fuller. After I took this photo, I did another round of raking.

And from a slightly different angle, here are our raised beds, which are on a sunny, graveled area in the back of our yard.

After my first year of vegetable gardening (we've always worked in France during the summers until this year), I have a better feel for how much of each vegetable to plant. Mostly I want more of just about everything. More beets, more kale, more peas, more carrots, more onions. more green beans, more tomatoes, more melons, more squash... One of the few things I might not grow next year is broccoli. Now I adore broccoli and I can't eat enough of it. But it takes up a lot of space and has a very small yield for all of the time and work involved. Anyway, I hope to double my garden space next year by adding a few more raised beds, tilling up some of the back yard that doesn't have gravel on it, and planting raspberries along the back (south) side of our garage. I also want to add fruit trees and fruit bushes next year: apple, pear, cherry, gooseberry, & red currant at a bare minimum.

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My garden

We're starting to harvest the fruits (well, vegetables) of our labors. We have a lovely sunny patch of yard--the only good place to have a vegetable garden--that one of the previous owners graveled over for a parking area. So this spring we built six 4x4 foot raised bed gardens out of 2x12 lumber. We dug up soil at our friend's property, hauled it to the raised beds, then amended it with peat moss, vermiculite, perlite, and composted manure. This turned the heavy, clay soil into light, fluffy dirt. It's amazing to work with. There are three other garden beds along the kitchen and garage. They are approximately 20x3' (morning sun), 8x4' (full sun), and 15x4' (afternoon sun).

In these 9 beds total I planted:

• 11 tomato plants (mixture of heirlooms, one cherry tomato, and lots of mystery tomatoes). 8 of my tomato plants look like they have some sort of blight: the leaves are getting black spots and then dying off. Fortunately the tomatoes are still ripening.
• 17 peppers (bell, Thai chili, jalapeno, and many more varieties)
• 4 tomatillos
• 4 eggplants (I've only seen 2 eggplant fruits total from the 4 plants, not sure what happened)
• beets, lots and lots and lots
• carrots: rainbow mix and Danvers variety
• shallots
• leeks (not sure if they made it)
• parsnips
• watermelon
• muskmelon
• cantaloupe
• 10 asparagus
• 5 blackberries
• 3 raspberries
• potatoes (from mushy sprouted ones I found in my pantry this spring)
• red, white, and yellow onions (from sets)
• spinach
• mesclun mix (mixture of lettuces and mustard greens)
• mache (I eat this every day when I am in France...mmmmmm...)
• kale: lots and lots of Winterbor (ruffly leaves) and Nero di Toscana (flat leaves), definitely like the ruffly one better.
• strawberries
• bush beans
• zucchini (didn't make it)
• summer squash (just starting to see the first ones coming on)
• 3 broccoli
• 4 cabbage
• 1 rhubarb
• acorn squash (didn't make it)
• cucumbers (off to a slow start...not sure if we'll get anything)
• butternut squash (didn't make it)
• 8 basil plants (1 lemon, 1 lime, the rest sweet basil)
• chocolate mint (in a pot so it doesn't take over everything)
• 1 each of: oregano, thyme, sage, chives, sweet marjoram, flat-leaf parsley, dill (didn't make it), rosemary

We left town for 6 weeks and, amazingly, almost everything had survived when we came back! I attribute that in large part to using square foot gardening. The plants grow so close together that there isn't much room for weeds.

I am amazed at the variety of plants I was able to fit into a relatively small footprint. Next year I want to add a few more raised beds. I like the aesthetics of the square 4x4' beds, but I'm going to put in rectangular beds, still 4' deep but longer to use up more of the available ground. I also want to add fruit trees (apple, pear, peach, cherry) and bushes (red currant, chokecherry, blueberry, elderberry) and lots more raspberries.

Now the challenge this year is to not let anything go to waste!

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Obama Organic Victory Garden

Can the Obamas get any cooler? I just learned that they're planting an organic vegetable garden on the White House grounds. Michelle Obama told Oprah's O Magazine:

We want to use it as a point of education, to talk about health and how delicious it is to eat fresh food, and how you can take that food and make it part of a healthy diet. You know, the tomato that’s from your garden tastes very different from one that isn’t. And peas - what is it like to eat peas in season? So we want the White House to be a place of education and awareness. And hopefully kids will be interested because there are kids living here.

To read more about their garden plans, visit Crunchy Domestic Goddess' post.

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