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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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Foolish optimism – the winter vegetable garden

By on October 5, 2009 in Garden

peas1

I’ve tried with limited success to grown a good winter garden before.

Theoretically, I know it’s possible, but the timing is tricky. It has to be planted late enough to keep from frying all those cold-loving plants in 100-degree weather, and early enough so they get some growth in before the dark and cold of December and January shuts everything down. Even if there’s nothing to harvest before December, if the plants have a good start, they’ll just wait the cold out and then burst into action in February.

I started at the first of September, filling one of the raised beds with sugar snap peas, carrots and rat-tail radishes. Since then I’ve been fighting off the snails (they LOVE tender little carrot seedlings) and the little green caterpillars “planted” by those pretty white butterflies. Who knew that caterpillars would like sugar snap peas? Dusting with BT is helping. And did I mention the last heat wave of the season last week?

Still, some of the peas are halfway up the fence, and the radishes look great, although they’ve yet to produce any flowers or pods.

Since the first of September, I’ve been adding more plantings as space is freed in the beds and the veggie plants become available at the nursery. Now I have gorgeous cauliflower plants, lush Italian parsley and newly planted celery, red cabbage and broccoli plants. Oh, shallots and onion sets too.

A few days ago I planted four of my small boxes with spinach and lettuces. These boxes are ringed with copper tape and filled with fresh potting soil every year to defeat the snails. It worked last year–I hope the snails haven’t spent the summer working out a plan to outsmart me.

I routinely cover all my raised beds with a wire mesh (about 2 x 4 in) when they’re empty or newly planted so the soil isn’t mostly covered with plants. This keeps my cats from doing their business among my veggies, but it isn’t enough to keep the squirrels from their fall food-burying frenzy. I saw at least a dozen fresh holes in and around my newly planted areas this morning. The photo below, a few years old, is of my sweet Carlos lounging on top of the wire, suspended two or three inches above the dirt. Anything for a sunbeam!

carlos_suspended

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La fin des haricots*

By on August 30, 2009 in Garden

Mom helping tear out the beans

They were wonderful while they lasted, delicious and amazingly productive, but when I took my eyes off the beans for a few days (road trip to Oregon), the aphids moved in and took over. Earlier in the season, I would have put up a fight, but I was beginning to get tired of beans anyway so I decided they might as well go.

Mom helped me tear them out and free up this year’s new fence for climbers. The fence worked so well and is so sturdy that I’m done forever with teetery bamboo pole tepees. All it took was three cheap poles and two fence panels from Home Depot.

Naturally, the minute I had empty garden space, I got itchy to start my fall garden, so last week I planted sugar snap peas the full length of the fence. Now I’m checking several times a day to see if the seeds have emerged yet. This morning I planted carrots and rat-tail radishes in the rest of the box (plus some other radish varieties and arugula in a couple of earth boxes that looked lonely and empty).

It’s hard to say whether my timing is right for starting the fall garden. Most years I’ve been too late, but this year I may be too early. Time will tell!

* French idiom meaning “the end of the beans, ” described in Clotilde’s Chocolate and Zucchini blog. Here, obviously, I mean it very literally.

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August garden blahs

By on August 12, 2009 in Garden

august

August is the least inspiring garden month, at least for me in Sacramento.

Everything looks a little tired and dusty since it hasn’t rained in months. The daddy long leg spider webs and dropping blossoms from my huge crepe myrtle tree are working together to make everything messier, and I can’t justify wasting water to blow them away since they’ll only be back in a day or two.

The vegetables have been blasted with several 100+ degree days, and show the effects. I’m even beginning to have blasphemous thoughts about being tired of tomatoes and green beans, something that seemed impossible only a few weeks ago.

One end of the green bean wall was savaged by aphids while we were away for a week, and the catsitter apparently isn’t that wild about beans, because I came home to lots and lots of tough stringy beans that stayed on the vine too long. I almost filled a five-gallon bucket with the tough ones, but now the vines are producing nice tender beans again. I wonder if they would have been good as shelled beans if I had left them to ripen all the way.

It’s hard to believe, but the tomato hornworm I pictured in my last post seems to have been my ONLY one this year! Usually I find at least a dozen. The tomatoes quit setting during the hot spells, but they will probably revive and start producing lots of fruit next month, just when I’m beginning to think about pulling them up and planting cabbages or something. My huge orange strawberry tomato has redeemed itself. Later, more fully ripe fruits turned out to have lots more flavor. One of them is enough for pasta for the two of us.

I’ve already ordered a big batch of seeds for lettuces, peas and radishes for fall planting, including rat-tailed radishes. I’d never heard of them until we were served them as an amuse bouche along with fava beans at an Oregon restaurant.

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Garden characters

By on July 24, 2009 in Garden

worm

This eating machine is the first tomato hornworm I’ve spotted this year on my tomato plants. Left alone, these worms can virtually strip a tomato plant in a few days. This little guy was about the size of my middle finger before he was relocated to the garbage can!

trio

Tomatoes come in all sizes. A new variety I planted this year, the “orange strawberry,” has turned out to be a giant. It’s a pleasantly mild (not terribly exciting), very meaty tomato weighing more than a pound. It’s shown here with a sungold cherry tomato and a mid-sized Carmello. I don’t think I’ll bother to grow this one again, given my limited garden space.

Finally, sometimes tomatoes are a little weird. I think this one has sleep apnea.

snoringTomato

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Yesterday’s harvest

By on July 6, 2009 in Garden

july5harvest

From left to right, bush beans (the little haricots verts),  sungolds, a small carmello, a midsize big beef, two lemon cucumbers, and a mess ‘o’ beans.   Also my handy-dandy tongs.

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July garden

By on July 5, 2009 in Garden

garden2
At this point the vegetable beds look pretty much the same as earlier posts except a little taller, so this photo is of the big border at the back of my yard that used to be shaded by the pine tree and now soaks up the sun.

Note to self: Next year, don’t plant so damned many beans! I love green beans, but I’m beginning to lose my enthusiasm for them. We’ve had them at least once a day for a few weeks now, I have about a dozen packages in the freezer, and I know there’s another big batch out there waiting for me to pick this morning.

I’ve discovered that my long-handled OXO Good Grips tongs, my favorite kitchen tool, are also best for picking beans I can’t reach otherwise.

We’re eating lots of sungold cherry tomatoes now, and the lovely mid-size carmellos. I’ve picked one Big Beef, but none of the “orange strawberry” variety are ripening yet. I’m intrigued by them, because they’re huge, strawberry-shaped, and the catalog described them as orange with red shoulders when they’re ripe.

We’ve got all the lemon cukes we can use, and plenty of baby leeks. I’m waiting for the bell peppers to ripen, since I don’t like them green.

The weather has helped make this a really successful year. We’ve only had a couple of really hot days, with most of our days in the low to mid 80s. I’m already starting to think about what I’ll plant for a fall/winter garden. Sugar snap and snow peas on that bean fence for sure!

paving
A detail of the paving shown in the photo at the top.

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