Archive | April, 2010

The summer garden. Finally.

By on April 27, 2010 in Garden

Purple cabbage - so beautiful to look at that it earned its keep without ever producing even a tiny head of cabbage

Over the last couple of days, I’ve removed most of the remaining plants from last fall’s garden. The potatoes are all scrubbed and distributed in my refrigerator and those of a few neighbors. The sugar snap peas I planted in February are still in the ground with zillions of pods just starting to fatten up, and I’m waiting for two small patches of leeks to flower, so I can refresh my dried leeks and lavender arrangement. Everything else (except a short row of shallots) is gone, and the beds have been prepped for planting.

My vegetable garden, all ready for planting summer vegetables

It’s late. I normally plant my tomatoes on or near April 10, after I’m sure the soil is warm. This year it has been so cold that all I did on April 10 was email Natural Gardening and ask them to delay shipment two weeks on my tomatoes, peppers, and basil.

One and a half boxes will be devoted to six big cages of tomatoes (top right and lower left), peppers and basil will share the box at top left where the peas are growing now, the first crop of green beans will grow on my new bean fence in the box at lower left, and somewhere in the spaces left I will have pattypan squash and lemon cucumbers.

It’s cold, rainy and windy today, but the 10 day forecast shows nothing but sunshine after a few showers tomorrow morning. So now I’m just waiting for the UPS truck to deliver my plants and the rain to stop.

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Potato Surprise

By on April 23, 2010 in Garden

Sometimes it seems like gardening success happens in spite of what you do. I guess it’s only right, a little payback for all those “I don’t know what went wrong” experiences.

Last September, when I was shopping for vegetable plants for my winter garden, a nursery employee mentioned that they would be getting in gourmet seed potatoes “in a few weeks.” I’d never grown potatoes, so I set aside one of my raised beds for potatoes and went back in a few weeks. At the nursery they told me it would be a “few weeks.”

This went on, with me going to the nursery every two weeks, until late November, when they admitted they didn’t know whether the potatoes would be in before spring.

In desperation, I bought some organic Yukon Golds at Whole Foods and decided to plant them. My mom, who has lots of potato-growing experience from Montana and as a child in Wyoming, was very skeptical, but she helped me dig the right-sized and correctly spaced holes. We planted them, and I began to watch for something to start growing.

Newly planted potatoes

Nothing in November. Nothing in December. Nothing in January. Clearly they had rotted away with all the rainy weather and I’d just have to plan on planting something else in the box for an early spring crop — maybe potatoes if they ever arrived at the nursery.

Suddenly, at the beginning of February, I saw little green leaves emerging, and within a few weeks, every single potato was growing happily.

The plants looked great, and before long Mom was helping me hill them up, at least as well as I could manage in the raised bed.

Potatoes by late March

We watched for blooms, which Mom said would signal that new potatoes were being formed underground. When nothing happened I googled around and found reassuring words that potatoes didn’t always bloom, so maybe there was hope yet.

Finally, earlier this week, I just couldn’t stand not knowing another minute (a recurring problem I have with root crops). I pulled one plant and dug out about a dozen potatoes, most about the size of an egg, a few larger. They were delicious!

So this morning, I pulled another. Voila! That’s a standard-sized dinner plate. They weighed a little over 2 pounds.

Newest of the new potatoes

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My gardening rules

By on April 22, 2010 in Garden

Volunteer lamb's ears and alyssum

These are a few rules I’ve adopted after 24 years of working on the same small urban garden. None of these are rocket science, or anything new, but they are things I only really grasped after making the same mistakes time and again.

NO invasives allowed! I’ve fallen for so many over the years, only to have to fight them off for a few years once I’d decided they were trouble, trouble, trouble. I’m sure what turns out to be a pest varies depending on where you are, but a few I’ve brought home and come to hate are red valerian, Mexican evening primrose, several ornamental grasses, especially wild oats and pink ribbon grass, and worst of all, ornamental strawberries. These are all charming plants that soon became a nuisance in my garden.

Ornamental strawberry went wild in my yard! Mom and I managed to get most of it out this spring.

On the other hand, I love other plants that could be called invasive: tiny blue forget-me-nots, alyssum, lamb’s ears, and Mexican feather grass, which has has such fashion sense, knowing just where to sprout to do its feathery accent thing.

Don’t buy plants on a whim without knowing where they’ll fit. I try to follow this one, I really do, but sometimes I just can’t resist bringing something beautiful home and then searching for a place to put it.

Don’t scrimp. Bargain plants are rarely bargains. I buy healthy plants at nurseries where I know they are properly cared for. This is a rule that I never break anymore.

Experiment, but don’t hesitate to change course when it isn’t working. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve tried things that turned out to be really bad ideas. The best (worst) example is the flagstone paving I had installed with big gaps to grow lots of pretty groundcovers. Even with weedcloth under it all, the gaps were soon full of weeds. My followup experiment for this one is working better. Now those gaps are filled with a mosaic of pebbles and colorful tiles.

Pebble mosaic

It took a long time to fill all the gaps between flagstones, but it was worth it!

Yes to mulch, no to chemicals.

Compost, but don’t compost weeds. Beware of buying compost that might contain weed seeds. I’m still paying the price for that load of composted rabbit poop I bought 12 years ago.

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My back yard

By on April 21, 2010 in Garden

When I was in my 20s, my boyfriend and I moved from one house to another at least once a year. There was always a reason — a job change, our rental being sold, or we’d spotted something we liked better. The decision to move usually seemed to be made right after I’d just planted a bunch of daffodil bulbs, bareroot rosebushes, a vegetable garden or something else that wouldn’t pay off until we were gone.

I remember always thinking that one thing I wanted out of life was to have 10 years in the same garden, so I would have time to make it perfect and see the results of my efforts.

Hah! I’ve lived in this house for 24 years, and one thing I understand now that I didn’t then is that a garden is NEVER finished, never perfect. I felt like it was almost complete in 2003, when the photo at the top was taken. I’d quit working full time the previous year and worked obsessively for a full year to make it ready to be included in a local garden tour.

[nggallery id=5]Click a photo to start the slide show of garden photos from 2003

 

After the tour, I was completely burned out and did practically nothing to maintain or improve it for at least a year.

What a mess! But that year of doing nothing and watching the results probably taught me more about gardening than anything I’ve ever done. I saw what thrived (weeds, weeds, weeds) and what didn’t do well without a lot of fussing. Those gaps in the flagstones turned out to be the perfect environment for weeds, and an invitation to spend my summers on my knees on the rocks (weeding, weeding, weeding). The cottage garden in the front of the house with all the disease-prone roses and (spreading) grasses looked like crap without daily grooming, weeding and deadheading.

Much has changed in my garden since then, although much remains the same. I’ve established a few rules for myself, although I’m often not very good at obeying my own rules.

Tomorrow, “My Gardening Rules…”

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Grounded, IMBY or something else?

By on April 9, 2010 in Uncategorized

I haven’t really posted since before our Blue Ridge Parkway trip last fall, which I can confidently report was our “best (and only) trip ever” on the Blue Ridge Parkway. (Actually, it was lovely, but the second 100 miles looks very much like the first 100. The third 100 miles is indistinguishable from the second. The 4th 100 miles is the best, but by then you’re on day 4 and busy visualizing a day OUT of the car.)

It was also our last long trip ever, at least anything involving a long flight, because of my husband’s lung disease. Even with his portable oxygen concentrator set at its highest setting, he doesn’t get enough oxygen at flying altitude to be safe if he should have to get up and move around, go to the bathroom for instance.

This is a long explanation for why I’ve spent six months not blogging and trying to think of a new blog title, since I think I’ve already blogged about our Best Trip Ever (a tie between Paris 2008 and Loire/Dordogne/Provence 2007). I kind of like “Grounded,” since it refers both to no more flying and to gardening. I’ve also been thinking of IMBY (In my back yard), since that’s where I’m spending a lot of time. I’m not satisfied with either, but I was never all that thrilled with Best Trip Ever either.

Any suggestions?

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