A day of rest

Apr26

Sunday being a day of rest I try to avoid too much noisy, heavy labor on this end of the weekend. I don’t exactly deserve it since I did plenty of resting yesterday as well, but on this subject I will defer to the higher authority and take it easy. With daffodils beginning their season it’s hard anyway to focus on serious projects. The blooms are a great distraction on what thankfully turned out to be a warm sunny spring day.

The vegetable garden is looking good in spite of its lack of vegetable space. My favorite daffodils deserve a good spot just as much as some bean or pepper plant.

I did manage to get a few things moving in the ‘potager’. With so many flowers filling the beds, calling it “the farm” anymore seems a bit inappropriate. Maybe a flower farm, but definitely not a hotbed for fresh produce. I did find a few open spots for squeezing in a couple lettuce and broccoli transplants. That should keep the rabbits happy.

Lettuce and arugula tranplants are in and hopefully will amount to something before temperatures rise. I also planted a few of the sprouting potatoes found in the back of the storage bin. Not a picture for the serious gardener but that’s how we roll here 😉

Covering all the vegetable beds with whatever mulch I could scrounge up (mostly shredded leaves and grass clippings from the lawnmower bag) has made bed prep a snap this spring. I just stirred in whatever leaves were left of the top coating and popped transplants into the ground. My little vegetable babies from under the growlights will hopefully make me proud in no time at all.

I’ve given up on this vegetable bed, and the daffodils have completely taken over. Note the empty chair. Trust me it gets plenty of use 🙂

So I did get a little done yesterday to deserve a break. Not exactly a lot by most standards but after waiting so long I hate to see the season fly by. I want to soak up every minute and hope you can do the same as well!

I’m pretty sure there’s fiber in icecream

Sep7

Many people wax poetic on the joys of homegrown produce. The flavor, the nutrients, the connection with the earth…. all good things and all good for you (and deep down inside I agree) but on the shallow outside I’d still rather reach for a donut or chocolate bar rather than a carrot stick. Vegetables just don’t make my heart go pitter pat.

Because of that the vegetable garden always walks a fine line between productivity and extinction. I love the look of vegetables bursting from the soil, but the newly dug beds and open ground are just too tempting to keep free of flowers. At this time of year it’s more of a flower harvest.

Oddly enough a sunflower has come up in exactly the same spot as one grew last year. It’s the perfect spot actually, and I’m glad to have it!

The season starts innocently enough, and with a strong will I turn under all the persicaria and daisies and whatever else tries to sneak in. I need room for delicious lettuce seedlings and broccoli transplants and the flowers just throw off my industrially neat rows. Things go downhill from there.

Dahlias always seem to grow best in a vegetable plot and when you’ve got one or two extra roots it seems perfectly logical to sneak them in between the chard. This is dahlia “Tanjoh” which I barely noticed last year as it suffered under the shade of a wayward sunflower.

Harvest time is always a problem. If the broccoli is ready it needs to be picked, and there are only so many broccoli-cheese omelets you can reasonably fit into a weekend. Things go to seed and I’m strangely amused to see weeds such as lettuce, pumpkins, and chard popping up the next year.

When you lose control the broccoli turns into a froth of yellow blooms and green rattail seedpods. Several of these plants were self-sown seedlings which just showed up from last year’s patch.

One of the sore points this summer was how often the sweet corn needed watering in our pancake-thin topsoil. It seemed like every other day I’d look out there and see dry curled leaves begging for a little moisture. Shockingly enough even after giving up in disgust the patch managed to produce a few deliciously sweet and flavorful ears.

A space, water and fertilizer hog, freshly picked sweet corn is still worth the trouble (I guess). But it’s a tough argument when the supermarket has 6 perfect ears for $2.50 and mine probably cost me that much just for the seeds!

Another producer was a trellis of pole beans (which called it a year after being blown over in August). Beans are nice on a trellis, but the kids appreciate “love in a Puffs” much more than bean salad.

The pale green balloons of love in a puff (Cardiospermum halicacabum) with the ferny green leaves and red flowers of cypress vine (Ipomoea quamoclit). Both conveniently reseeded here at the base of the trellis from last year, something to keep in mind if you don’t like volunteer plants.

The kids share the love by picking the puffs and having a puff-fight but the real reason behind the name is found inside the puff on each of the vine’s black seeds.

A white heart forms on each seed, a kind of ‘belly button’ from where the seed was attached to the plant. Glad my hands were clean for this one 🙂

There is plenty of ‘real’ harvest that comes from the patch. Tomatoes never fail, even the fussier heirlooms, and here is a huge cluster of “Kellogg’s Breakfast”. In a rare second appearance in a single blog post (I hate having myself show up in any pictures), I left my hand in there to show just how big the fruits are. 2 lbs, 14 oz for the pair in case you’re interested.

Kellogg’s Breakfast tomato

When I finished planting the tomatoes I couldn’t resist adding a border of “Moldavian” marigolds (from Nan at Hayefield) and a few stray salvia and leftover zinnia seedlings. Might as well since the other side of the bed is edged in hellebore seedlings.

A vegetable garden is the perfect place for bunches of annuals that might not find a place in the rest of the garden. The brownish orange of these “Moldova” marigolds might be hard to fit in somewhere else.

And did I mention I like phlox? When you’re faced with a few new ones to plant and you’ve given absolutely no forethought to where they’ll go the vegetable garden makes everything better again.

Just coming into bloom now, phlox “Kirmeslander” seems almost too summery a color for the autumn-golds and yellows which are starting to appear.

With the season winding down one would think the vegetable patch would be safe, but fall is actually the most dangerous time of year for vegetable space. After you pull up a dead, mildewed patch of zucchini the vacant spot almost begs for a few tulips or daffodils which you can’t find a space for elsewhere. No worries though, I’m sure they’ll die down before I need the room for peppers!

Oh and I think the colchicums look nice blooming between the sweet corn stalks 🙂

Welcome to Fall

Sep29

Now that autumn is here I have officially given up on watering the garden. The cooler temperatures are not as deadly as the summertime heat, and the rain we had a week ago should be enough to keep things alive. So things are on their own for a while.

Most of the vegetable garden is done anyway. Yesterday I let the kids pick the pumpkins and decorate the porch for Halloween.

The ‘Red Wing’ onions were also harvested as well as the last of the eggplant. This pretty much finishes up the garden for the year (with the exception of a few peppers and a single brussel sprout plant). It’s a shame the dry weather sapped all my enthusiasm for a fall planting, the idea of a fresh lettuce harvest right about now sounds very nice.

Despite the end of regular watering, the dahlias continue to put out flowers and carry on. But they are beginning to look tired, and anytime the sun gets strong the leaves wilt. Just about everything looks tired. dahlias in the vegetable garden

The only dahlia that actually looks better now is this one. I need to look up the name, but the color that looked awful in July shines in autumn.

In case you haven’t already picked up on it, the vegetable garden tends to become a flower garden as the season progresses. Any gap in the plantings quickly fills with self sown verbena, Persicaria orientalis, and amaranthus ‘hot biscuits’. The amaranthus has a weedy look that not everyone appreciates, but I like it, and have been very generous with spreading the seedlings throughout the yard. At this time the seedheads seem to glow in the autumn sun. the late summer vegetable garden

The glow of autumn light is a signal to start thinking about protecting the tender plants for winter. My fig has had a troubled season. It spent the winter in the dark of the garage and began sprouting in January. The sprouts dried off by March but then a few pots of water brought some new shoots for April. By May I decided to use its pot for other, healthier looking plants, and while the fig waited for a new home (perched with rootball exposed on a spare saucer) it died again, this time I thought for good… on to the compost pile it went. But like cats, apparently figs have several lives. Around July I noticed a few sprouts coming up out of the compost and upon investigation found the fig root ball to be the source. Finally it was given a decent home, and it’s grown this year without any resentment. Now what to do this winter…..

Also needing a winter home are the tropicals on the deck. Even though I only paid three dollars for this red dipladenia, I can’t let it die! So either the dipladenia or the pansies will need to be repotted and brought in. I would have never thought of this combo, but pansy seeds do their own thing.

I don’t even want to think about the rest of the non-hardy deck plants. They’re growing and blooming and doing well in general even though I never got around to any of the summertime repotting or transplanting I had planned. blooming succulents on deck

The geranium should hang on in the dark of the garage, maybe the rosemary, but I’ll need someplace warmer for the coleus.

Fortunately the tropical garden survives the winter by seed or stored tuber. No windowsills needed for this end of the garden.

…and I’m finally getting some work done instead of just sipping drinks in the shade. The compost pile was turned and a bonanza of “god enough” compost was found underneath. It’s as dry as a bone in the pile, so I’m surprised there was any decay going on at all, but the plants will love it and I’m grateful for any scraps I find. the question will be “who gets it?”

Actually there’s no question, my favorite new bulbs always get the scarce compost. Here’s the newest bed in the back of the meadow. A privet hedge (luckily privet isn’t invasive here) is planned for along the fence, and a snowdrop (galanthus) bed will get its start here. I’ll bore you with the varieties next spring but for now here’s a picture of my usual low work (ie lazy) bed preparations.A couple inches of topsoil from elsewhere in the garden is spread out, bulbs are pressed down into the raked surface, a few inches of compost is used to top off and cover. The compost I used has a good amount of soil mixed in, but if it was more organic I’d cover the bulbs with a layer of garden soil too. They should be just fine here, and I’ll give them a good mulch of chopped autumn leaves once they come down.

I celebrate fall with bulb planting, I love getting the bulbs nestled down into the earth for next spring, I just wish the soil wasn’t so unfriendly and dry.

Pur Pur Purple

Aug28

Something weird must have been going on last winter while I was picking out the veggie seeds for this summer… or maybe there’s something weird in the water…. in any case there’s a definite purple tinge to the vegetable garden this year. I knew that these heirloom ‘Trionfo Violetto’ pole beans would be purple, but I chose them for the meaty, nutty flavored, stringless beans they produce. They turned out great, but whether it was temperature or bird attacks, it took them a while before the blooms started setting little beans.I rip out bucketfulls of the volunteer verbena bonariensis every year, but even after the carnage stops there are still plenty of their airy purple flowers throughout the garden. They go good with the beans, but also match the ‘Ruby Perfection’ red cabbage on the other side of the path. I never realized how purple red cabbage is until this year.

The verbena also picks up the black-purple of the ‘black egg’ eggplant. Although the cold spring made for a slow start to the eggplant season, they’ve hit their stride now and are putting on decent sized fruit. The ‘Black Egg’ is turning out to be productive and tasty even though I’d rather the fruits were a tad bigger.

The ‘Red Wing’ onions are also doing great. They’ve sized up more since I took this picture and the purple flush of the bulbs matches up nicely with the purple phlox.

There are regular green beans and yellow onions, but for some reason they haven’t done nearly as well as the purple versions. Go figure. It makes me wonder if I could ever get organized and disciplined enough to have color coordinated vegetable garden. In my case I doubt it, but it reminds me that vegetable gardens can look good too and if you ever want to give it a serious go check out some of the books by Rosalind Creasy. She wrote the book on edible landscaping (plus a few others!) and her gardens really are amazing.

Vegetable update

Jun26

I have a few hours this morning and rather than get some real work done I wanted to give a quick vegetable garden update. We’ve been picking lettuce from the deck planters and now also out of the fenced garden area. This “Matina Sweet” butterhead is tasty and if you look closer to the fence you’ll see the first two “Packman” broccoli are ready…. even though I’m not exactly sure how to tell when broccoli is fit for harvesting.

Last year’s broccoli went towards raising a healthy, vitamin rich, wild bunny population, this year the fence has really made a difference. Too bad it doesn’t keep out my newest pest- slugs.

Here’s a slug chewed kohlrabi. I hate peeling anything off these super fresh home grown veggies, but this one will need it.

The “Bright Lights” swiss chard looks good enough to eat. I cheated and prestarted in pots, that way when planting out the colors could be arranged 🙂

I just like the looks of red cabbage. Better soil would have done this plant good but it’s not bad considering the only fertilizer for this bed was the bag of chopped maple leaves dug in during spring planting. I did break down yesterday and gave everything a dose of miracle grow, we’ll see what that does.

Onions look good, I just hope they make it in spite of my late planting. They still have a way to go….. if worst comes to worst I guess we can try passing them off as tiny gourmet pearl onions or something.

“Lancelot” leek. We’ll see if anyone eats these, they’re new this year, but at least they have all year to get to a good size…. unlike the bulbing onions which will die back and bulb up once the days get short enough.

The zucchini seeds are up and growing fast now that summer temperatures are here. If I had more room it wouldn’t be a bad idea to put in a couple new seeds for a late summer crop…. just in case the vine borers kill off this batch.

Pole beans, bush beans, corn, peppers…. all are starting to come along but for some reason the eggplants are a bit sluggish this year. Just a few inches tall and they’ve got to deal with flea beetles and the little holes they make, plus some random bug (unfriendly I’m sure) leaving a batch of orange eggs….. possibly potato beetles….

Enough vegetables, it’s about time some flowers got in here and there are plenty coming along for July. Next post should have a couple blooms, until then all I have are tomato flowers. Not the most impressive but they make for promising green tomatoes.

Early June in the vegetable garden

Jun11

Things don’t look too bad out there. I was late in getting everything planted (of course) but the cooler weather and the last couple days of rain have helped the spring crops come along. This butterhead lettuce (I forget the variety) is starting to look real yummy.

There’s also some romaine coming along. These are all in the ‘safe zone’ behind the chicken wire, but even outside the fence its been a relatively damage-free spring as far as the rabbits go. Slugs have been more of a problem.

Brocoli is making progress too. It’s finally taking off and spreading its roots after a too long delay in the six packs (these I bought prestarted).These tomatoes have been in for a week or two as well as the onion transplants. This will be the year of the onion since I started way too many seedlings and then couldn’t bare to toss them into the compost. They’re small for the time of year but I hope I get something by the time the harvest rolls around….. otherwise I guess we’ll have hundreds of scallions to deal with!The tomatoes are dealing with what might possibly be the worst soil prep in gardening history. A month ago this bed was lawn. I turned under the grass and added a little compost for the onions, but all the tomatoes got was a layer of leaves and grass clippings to kill the turf and then holes dug directly into the lawn. Maybe I gave them a little compost on top.
Actually the sister bed across the path which I planted on Saturday was even worse.

You can still see the lawn peeking out from behind the tomatoes and along the bed edging. The plants went straight into holes dug into the lawn and then the grass and weeds were covered with a mulch of chopped leaves and twigs and whatever else the mower picked up during spring bed cleanup/winter debris removal…. I didn’t even have any nutrient filled tender grass clippings to put down! Once I can dig out some more compost I might put a bit around the tomatoes, but until that happens they’re on their own. At least I planted them deep, covering all the stem up to the top clump of leaves. this should let them sprout more roots into the mulch and should help with the lack of soil prep.

Hopefully if I keep it watered the earthworms will find the mulch and rototill the soil with their tunnels. Grass clippings will surely bring them in, in fact last Friday prior to the rain, I fertilized the front lawn. I’m hoping it will produce a nice bumper crop of clippings before summer drought dries it up.

The garden isn’t all healthy vegetables, it’s also juicy sweet strawberries. Even with the late freeze there are a couple coming along.

There’s also the promise of a few blueberries this summer. Most likely the birds will beat us to them, but this bunch might be worth covering up and saving for ourselves.

Of course I’m only showing the good and new. Peppers and eggplants still have to go in as well as pole beans. I’m far from having everything planted and growing. Right now the process of digging up the tulip beds is going on and it’s into these beds that the last of the transplants will go. Someday I hope to have beds where I want them and supports ready to go but obviously it’s not going to be this year!

Please tell me I’m not the only one falling behind:)

Spring vegetables

May21

I finally got the early vegetable plantings in, each evening last week I prepped another patch of soil, and by Sunday afternoon was able to plant and fence. My buddy approves, but I suspect she’d rather the fence wasn’t there between her and the lettuce.

I’m guessing it’s a she (I really have no idea) and I’ll go out on a limb and guess there’s a nest of baby bunnies nearby. She’s never mentioned where during our talks, but she’s around the yard all day so I’m sure it’s not too far.

Soil prep in my case was digging under all the weeds, stray tulips, and whatever leftover dead stuff was lying around from last year. Once dug over, compost would have been nice, but since I have none I raked/hoed in some chopped leaves from last fall and followed it with a good watering down.

Once I get some grass clippings I’ll give it a thin mulch to keep down the weed seedlings. I’m glad I finally got the stuff in, it’s already late for cabbages and onions, and a better person would have done all this prep in the fall. If you look around the edge of the fence you’ll see twigs laying on top of the unfenced plantings. This seems to be enough to discourage Mrs. Bunny from pushing through and nibbling the new transplants underneath.

So now I hope things have enough time to mature before summer really kicks in….. and if they don’t, at least it looks better than the unkempt weed patch it was last weekend.

Mental note for next year is *prep the bed in the fall for spring plantings*. It sounds easy but it’s advice directed more towards the better people who follow suggestions and learn from mistakes. I’m not sure if I can include myself in that group. A better person would not have planted a peony in the middle of the bed, a better person would not have first let last year’s turnips go to seed (just to see what they looked like), and a better person would not have left the daffodils in the middle of the lettuce.

Just another day at the salt mines

May14

I can sorta relate to the people looking for low maintenance plants and landscaping. I for one love being outside, watching things grow, tending plants, dividing, staking, deadheading…. even weeding. About the only thing I really don’t care for is watering, so when it’s spring and I have a list of projects to work on and halfway through start to think it’s more trouble than it’s worth….. well it might be time to hit the lawnchair with a drink. In a sick way I sometimes look around at my fellow suburbanites and think their yards look just as good as mine, but then I remember it’s unlikely they have a couple dozen different iris coming along into bloom, and they probably don’t even have any more than one or two snowdrops. That helps my mood and I go through and finish the day with a smug grin, quite pleased with myself all over again.

The late tulips are still holding out, these (probably “Dordogne”) mixed in with all the others keep the patch colorful even after the rest are over. Unless Sunday’s high winds beat them silly, they should last another week.

I think what beats me down is the lawn maintenance. If you want to talk high maintenance a lawn is right there on top. Part of that is my fault, I’m stubborn and insist on using a corded electric mower instead of something bigger, stronger, and faster. It’s not the most manly mower, but from someone who’s always wandering the yard looking at his flowers….. well, the mower doesn’t help.

Something that’s mostly no-maintenance is fothergilla. It doesn’t need pruning, blooms with these nice white bottlebrush flowers, is presentable all summer, and come fall puts on a nice show of glowing reds, yellows and oranges. The blooms don’t last long for me, somewhere around two weeks, but that’s plenty. You miss it when it’s gone, which in my opinion is better than a plant that wears out its welcome.

Round around July the lawn starts wearing out its welcome. Mowing in the heat stinks and I look forward to the summer sun and drought sucking the green out of its blades. As long as I mow on the long side it just goes dormant, and the summer vacation from mowing is much welcomed, since mowing clearly cuts into pool time. But right now I need the flush of green clippings since they’re my number one mulch for the vegetable garden. I use them and some leftover chopped maple leaves to smother the grass and weeds that are buried in this new bed.Most of the weeds and grass will die, and hopefully by the time tomato planting weather rolls around (2 more weeks?) I can carefully dig down to soil level, plant the seedlings, top the bed with new clippings, and admire my avoidance of actually digging up this patch of hardpacked gravely “soil”.

Since I don’t have enough better things to do I actually transplanted some of the grass from the new bed into the former bed-turned-new-pathway (lower right of the picture). I’m a big sod mover. I hate waiting for grass seed to sprout. People will disagree, but I like grass paths through the garden. If you noticed, mine are edged with fancy pink marble sections. Some people have compared the look to “deep south cemetery”, but it’s the best use I could think of for the stone we pulled off the house front. Maybe it’s the second best…. we also have a pink marble compost bin.

In the orchard our new “Freedom” apple has even put out a few blossom clusters. I should of course nip them off so the tree has more energy to establish, but I don’t care. For all I know the tree could die tomorrow, so I’ll enjoy the blooms today.

Speaking of dying tomorrow, we have a frost predicted for tonight. I brought in a few succulents and four or five early summer plant purchases. The rest of the stuff is on its own. Planning for low maintenance gardening means not sweating the small stuff like late frosts. The cold weather veggie seedlings will tough it out (strong sun would damage them more than cool weather).

So we will see where the weather takes us. I figure if the tulips and iris don’t mind this afternoon’s snow, they shouldn’t mind a slight frost.

Feelin’ Rich

Apr8

I’ve been on a buying spree lately. After months of doubtful back and forth it looks like my job will be around for another year, so I’ve finally cracked open the wallet to treat myself to a few extras on my wish list. The first was last weeks’ $100 trip to Lowes. A new 4 light T8 shop light with timer, light bulbs, and a bag of potting soil all got a spot in the cart. I eyed the seed potatoes for a while (they had a nice selection, reasonably priced) but didn’t bite. After years of sitting on my wallet it’s hard to go all out.

I’ve got the lights set up in a corner of the basement close to the furnace, so I’m hoping this will be a good spot for the warm growers like tomatoes and peppers. Of course space under the new the light is already filled up with nonsense like coleus cuttings and geraniums, but I did fit a bunch of new seedling pots in. Hopefully by the time I need more space a few of the cool weather things can already go outside.

It’s a crappy picture but it shows about all you want to see of the spindly coleus cuttings that have spent all winter on the windowsill. I should have potted them up earlier but….. you know…. hopefully they will grow fast enough to give me a few additional cuttings as I pinch them back.

Nothing fancy about the light set up. It’s a basic T8 shop light with generic 5000K “sunlight” light bulbs rated for laundry rooms and closets. I may be feeling rich but I’m not going crazy with special (aka expensive) growlights, and based on the success of the first light setup this one should be fine.

My credit card got a little more excersise over the next couple days. Not much, but I’ll wait a few days before fessing up to my other purchases.

Seeds and seedlings

Mar13

Our usual last frost is somewhere in the area of May 15th but I’ve never seen it happen that late. Usually the first week of May has been ok. Still I go off the 15th anyway and as a result I always feel behind. I did start the onions and leeks about two weeks ago (I think that’s about nine weeks early?) and the little sprouts have been coming up on the fringes of the shop light, but as they start grow it’s time for the change-over.

The cyclamen and snowdrops are kicked out from under the light, and the new seedlings take over. They’ll be fine on the cold windowsills now that its warmed up a bit and the onions and leeks should be happy with the prime lighting locations. You’re looking at lancelot leek and copra, red wings, and ailsa craig onions.

In another two or so weeks I’ll start the main crops of warm weather transplants such as tomatoes, eggplants and peppers. Also I’ll get some lettuce and cabbage started for early transplanting. A cold frame would really come in handy about now but I never did more than just collect the windows.

I did start some other stuff (hardy perennials and bulb seeds) when I started the onions, these are all chilling outside. The finer stuff sits under a plastic tote, the larger seeds get topped off with chicken grit for protection and sit out in the open. When things warm up outside to their liking hopefully I’ll get some sprouts.

They should have been planted about a month earlier to get a real taste of winter, but I didn’t get the seeds until the end of February, so they get what the get.

I also tried something new this year. For seeds that need a cold spell, I tried the Deno method. It’s named after Dr Norman Deno and is a method he used to test germination on thousands of seed types. Basically you take moist paper towels, spread the seeds out on them and then fold them up. This goes in a baggie with info on the outside and either gets room temperature treatment (warm) or refrigerator treatment (cold).

They need a little more attention (you need to check on them periodically for germination), and they need immediate planting in soil when they do show signs of sprouting, but they take up so much less room! The other big plus is you know where your seeds are and you can easily see if they’re dead and rotted. No more staring at an empty pot waiting.

Here I have a dozen or so started seeds sitting in the fridge, nice and neat and out of the way, and so much more acceptable than pots full of dirt next to the yogurt.

If you’re into seed starting, check out “the science of seed germination” at Hayefield blog. It’s a great intro to the science behind seeds and it offers a couple great links, I’d try and put the link right here for you but haven’t mastered that bit yet 😉

Good luck on your seeds!

sorta like suburbia

more than you ever wanted to know about my garden

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