New Year's Eve

Pickled beets, dilly beans and canned tomatoes, all dressed up for Christmas

How do I end up posting right before the holidays?   I guess on an academic calendar that's when we have time.

Well, as the sun sets at 4:20 pm on New Year's Eve, 2010, I'm doing my little reflecting thing.  The day has been intensely, beautifully quiet, the way only winter in New England can be, especially when you have no "outside" responsibilities: family, school, work.   We're done with all the parties, entertaining and gift-giving, lesson planning and paper writing, deadlines and test-taking.   At least for a little while.   And so I, happily, turn to food.  And not just eating it, which has started to feel like a recurring bad habit with all the holiday meals we've been served (thank you, thank you, we are grateful for the hard work and abundance that went into them - oof, my pants feel tight!  :).

No, I'm talking about the work with raw ingredients that has, over the past few years, started to feel so intensely personal, soothing and healing for me.  I spent today boiling and bottling orange-flavored homemdade vinegar, my head blissfully woozy from the scent of all that boiling vinegar.

Keeping the Harvest.....

So it's been far too long since my last blog post, but now, the day before Thanksgiving, I finally have a little time on my hands.

The garden has been put to bed, almost.   Late to mid October, me and Dawn cut down the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beans, cucumbers and broccoli.   I pulled up the last of the carrots (some of which, left to grow the proper amount of time, actually got to a decent size!) and beets (ditto), pulled off the green peppers, hoping they'd go to red in our fridge, and gathered up all the green tomatoes to bring inside.

It's comforting, after a few years, to start to have a ritual.   Now I know when the heat goes on in late October (we can never make it to November 1!), upstairs comes the little wooden, three-shelved "onion box" I got at an unfinished wood store, with little mesh grates on the doors.   It lives in our back hallway all winter, our impromptu "root cellar" where we keep onions, potatoes garlic and winter squash.

The dried garlic and onions I grew are gone - I always mean to keep them longer, but they are so good, I always say, what the hell, what if they spoil, live for today, and they go into everything I cook between August and October and then they are gone.  :(  Every year I vow to plant more.

The last of the potatoes are hanging on, and I am carefully plotting their fate, planning my last few potato dishes with them in mind.  But we are moving into a different phase of year, here in New England, something I am slowly getting used to.   When I realized that tomatoes, eggplants and peppers were only fresh here for a few months (more like six to ten weeks!), it brought me down.  How the heck are you supposed to eat the lush, sweet, local produce everyone rhapsodizes about, when October-May practically nothing grows?

Well, some people use season-extenders, which I'd like to learn more about, just like everything else I'd like to get around to (sewing buttons back on my coats, selling my stand-alone Ikea closet from two houses ago on Craigslist, writing a novel).   Apparently, with the right cold frame, you can get lettuce in January (and I might believe it - my lettuce is still going strong!) but until then I'll have to stick to a tried-and-true old farmwife tradition: food preservation.

So, a few seasons into my New England gardening education, it suddenly dawned on me: old school (ie, colonial) housewives couldn't go to the supermarket in January to get food.  They knew this in the flush seasons of July and August, and that is where our very most basic "processed foods" come from: jams, jellies, pickles, ketchup, mustard, relishes and sauerkraut, wine and beer.   Who knows if the nutritious value was preserved (was it?) but at least they had a little variety.    It also explains the difference between what we know as "Italian cuisine"  and "German cuisine."    Italy is linked with tomatoes, basil, zuccinis, and other fresh veggies of every kind.   Well, guess what?  It stays warm in Italy for a lot longer than in Germany, which is famous for bratwurst, beer, and sauerkraut.  Or worse, Russian food, where tomatoes often barely make it to ripe at all.   This is actually where my ancestors come from, and it is known for hardy root vegetables: potatoes, cabbages and beets.   Black bread.    Why?   Not because they are unhealthful and hate salads, but because this was what was available.

A blog which has nothing to do with gardening

So, after sitting around in a classroom discussing the future of the "publishing" industry, I listened to an awesome new-ish album (2009) and read about how one local performer is DIY-ing her way to financial solvency: Amanda Palmer.

The concept is - the old model of paying artists was to have them "signed" (or for writers, "contracted") to a major label (or publishing house) which would then front the costs of producing and distributing your media.   Now that often that we as writers can create and distribute our media ourselves....do we need that big contract, that big signing?   Well, it certainly would be nice to get an advance..... but is there another way?

I liked this short description of how Amanda Palmer made money simply by promoting herself.  Of course, its a bummer that such a cool, off-beat punk-indie-rock-cabaret (caberet??) artist would not make money off her album.   But its fantastic that she is doing her own promotion, and getting contact with her own fan base directly.   As such a quirky (and dark) non-pop artist, there's always going to be a limited audience - so how do those of us interested in quality over popularity, innovation over selling out, um, sell ourselves?
read on for one possibility....
(I of course would prefer that I didn't have to auction off my stuff, but whatevs...)

http://www.suite101.com/content/amanda-palmer-saviour-of-the-music-industry-a130519

ps: the album is great.  Paste to browser to listen to a song....

http://ilike.myspacecdn.com/play#Amanda+Palmer:Guitar+Hero:44419473:s28038082.9144795.3088909.0.2.221%2Cstd_36382125cd664a549cad6ca3fb25527d

Annie Proulx, gardening and fiction

E. Annie Proulx: (2000) "All over this scratched and worn earth regional and rural cultures, the natural world, and the diversity of life itself are eroding and crumbling under terrific outside pressures. For more than a decade, through the medium of fiction, I have been trying to catch pieces of North American rural lives and ways squeezed in the pincers of change. For me everything begins with the great landscape—not scenery but soil and water, climate and weather, indigenous plant and animal life, geography and geology. Against this background human adaptation to, and exploitation of, that landscape in a particular time orders the personalities and characaters of my stories, shapes the stories themselves which must tumble out of the place portrayed. I am concerned as well with the growing gap between rural and urban attitudes and behavior, the rural perception of the economic forces that call out the marching orders."


This summer I started two blogs: one about my garden, and one about my writing and teaching.   I haven't wanted to write too much about the teaching, namely because I tell all my students (I can't believe I have students!) to look at my blog, and then where am I? 

But it's felt like a funny stretch for me, writing about my backyard and my devotion to my tomatoes, beans and peppers, and then also trying to keep up my fiction.  I've always placed these in two separate boxes - writing is indoors, public, and professional, while gardening is outdoors, a private and amateurish pleasure.   But I've known in my heart that they were linked, a kind of ying and yang.   Writing involves sending my mind fixedly far away from the here and now.   Gardening pushes exactly the opposite buttons - it is a radical rooting in the here and now - the smell of this tomato bush, the stink of the compost, the wet or dry dirt, the hidden bean harvest, the way my fingers learn to find little weeds and pull them out.  It's an immersion in sights, sounds and smells - tiny little lacewing insects, flies, worms, birds, caterpillars, rot or growth on a plant.   The information is here and now.  And the product is for my pleasure only: no matter how hard I work to preserve the harvest, it will go.   Eventually, no matter how delicious a meal is, it will disappear into the belly of one of my friends, to be absorbed into their bodies or gone forever. 

Writing is the opposite - it is sitting alone in a little room, the quieter the better, and the only senses triggered signal distractions: a tea kettle, cold feet, the phone ringing, someone at the door.   The world here has to come entirely from our mind.   And it's not to be enjoyed now - what we make now might disappear forever.  But the final product is a kind of everlasting pie - I can (hopefully) pass it around to a world's worth of "relatives" - and unlike a pie, enjoy it or not, it will last months, maybe years. 

Review of "Radical Homemaking"

So, in the inevitable crossover of my literary and gardening pursuits, I present for you a witty and charming review of a book I fully intend to read (just as soon as those dang beans are harvested, the tomatoes safely in their winter storage box, and  my entire herb garden moved!).

http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article08311001.aspx

Enjoy.


On an update note, this blog seems to have gone as my gardening goes.....super heavy and intense at the beginning of the season, then trailing off a little as August makes everything go crazy, and down to barest maintenance as school starts up and life gets busy in September.    The basic update:  the cool weather slowed down all my fall crops, but I'm still harvesting a little lettuce, beans galore, tomatoes and peppers.  I have ripe bok choi, but can't find the time to eat it.   I've made chili, tomato sauce, steamed beans, more tomato sauce, all sorts of middle-eastern style Tagine potato, eggplant and tomato and pepper dishes, etc. etc. in various combinations.    In general, I have it down to a science at this point:   beans are cleaned, tipped and tailed, and frozen in plastic bags.   Tomatoes are sliced in half, cored and de-seeded, sprinkled with olive oil, a little salt and maybe rosemary, and roasted on parchment paper in a 200 degree oven for 1-5 hours.   (1 hour for making sauce later that evening, when, cooled, the skins slip off pretty easy, 5 hours for bagging and freezing).   cucumbers and peppers are eaten ASAP.   It's nice now, that planting is all done and harvesting, cooking, preserving and eating are the biggest chores.   Looking out now for the first frost, so we can grab all the tender plants before jack frost does!

How to actually process tomatoes!

I'm re-posting the link to my friend Janelle's blog, where she actually tells you in some detail how to do the things I airily whisked onto my blog, not giving y'all the hint that I spent hours trying to figure out how exactly to (safely) dry, roast, freeze, puree and can tomato products.   It's definitely a learned art, and Janelle gives good directions.  (also bomb-ass pictures).

http://creativehomesteading.blogspot.com/2010/08/tomatoes.html

My only note of caution about preserving is to always follow a recipe and to never, ever try to preserve something in oil.   I had one book tell me to let my dried tomatoes sit in olive oil, to make "a delightful sauce for soups and salads".   I thought, ok, added garlic and it quickly turned moldy, thank goodness, because that turns out to be a fairly perfect botulism environment.   Vinegar kills just about everything it touches, and is safe (thus we have pickles, catchup, mustard and mayonaise), but if you want to make a flavored olive oil, I'd use it within a few days and store it in the fridge.   For the dried tomatoes, they might be acidic enough to be all right, possibly add some vinegar to the mix and nothing else,  but I'm still leery.   

More on canning soon - hopefully with pictures!

Preserving and Perservering

Beans

Well, it's August, and you know what that means: full on harvest time.  Yes, there are still many chores to be done, but I feel like in August the bulk of the work shifts to inside the house - what to do with the tons of produce we get.   This year we got a CHEST FREEZER, and so instead of having to stand over a hot canning bath if I want to keep something, I can just pop a lot of stuff in the Freezer.  Like those beans.  Cool.

And, in this garden, you win some, you lose some.  I think I got 1.5 beets, after all that fussing over them.  I (fingers crossed) will have 1 really nice canteloupe.   And the squash bit it, hardcore.   In general, my plants seem to be able to fight off most bugs that attack their leaves.   But we got squash vine borers, that get the part of the plant that goes into the ground, and pretty much finishes them off.   So no squash.

But we are pulling in 5-15 tomatoes a week, including some heirlooms, 3-4 cucumbers, and maybe 20-30 new beans every time I look outside.   The onions, potatoes and garlic are in, so I can cook with those, and the eggplants are producing on schedule.   Peppers - well, lots of green, we are holding out for red.   And I'm trying to coddle some late-summer lettuce, bok-choi and peas - so, in general, I'm feeling pretty well fed.

The food goes into stir-fries, pesto, tomato sauce and salad.   I also got ambitious with the tomatoes and beans:   The umpteen beans got turned into a sort of bean-based pesto type dip, that is really delicious, and frozen for future parties.  (Babs Kingsolver calls it "frijole mole" - most people seem to think it's: strange but good)
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/Frijole-Mole.pdf

Into the freezer can now go pesto, bean dip, tomato puree, roasted tomatoes, and whole beans.   I'll get to canning and pickling in a week or two, when it's a little colder.

And with the tomatoes, I"m trying it all.   I've peeled, cored and seeded plenty of my over-healthy romas to make from-scratch sauce, run them through my roma-3000 (or whatever it's called) to freeze the puree, and even bought extras to put away. - well, I bought about $10 of almost-ripe heirlooms at the farmers market to try preserving.   As per my book (The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food, by Janet Chadwick), I sliced the tomatoes up thin and left them in Dawn's food dehydrator until they became, and I quote, "leathery" and put them on my shelf, and also roasted a bunch at 225 degrees, with olive oil, to freeze (note to self: 6 hours waaaaay too long for thin sliced tomatoes to roast - anyone want burnt-up tomato chips?).

So, to all my friends who have cooked with me, and to Dawn who has suffered the effects of my vegetable mania ("OK, so I'll cook the carrots and the beets together, the beans on their own, we'll mash the potatoes, oh yeah and the corn, and what about a salad....?"), thanks for the help.    I'm excited for the cooler weather and some canning, because who doesn't feel good with jars and jars of home-grown food on their shelf?

Sunday in the garden + potato salad recipe

I spent this Sunday afternoon  as I've done for the past couple of weeks: in the garden.   There's lots of other stuff I should be doing on Sundays - writing, grocery shopping, paying bills or getting my car fixed.  Looking for work in the fall.   But there's something truly seductive for me about the backyard on a quiet weekend afternoon.   It's at the point right now where the garden needs a few hours of work a week, and then it will be more or less happy.   But its just a wonderful thing to do, on a day to myself, to give attention back to the plants that will feed me.  Last week I fertilized the nightshades, peppers, and vines, and planted about nine more feet of carrots to come up this fall.   Even out in the hot sun, I love puttering out there: stringing up cucumbers that are trying to grow upside-down, pulling crabgrass out of the beds, checking the tomatoes to find out that we have FIVE new super-ripe Roma tomatoes.    Deciding to cook them up into sauce, and invite a friend over for potato salad.  Pulling up a few big, bulbed out onions, tiny beets, yanking out a few purple carrots that after 2 1/2 months are finally big enough to eat.   Emptying out a couple potato buckets to find out how they did, pinching suckers off the tomato vines, harvesting basil or sorrell, or transplanting teensy, tiny little lettuce plants from the shady part of the yard.   After a week full of work and driving around, errands and deadlines, it's nice to slow down for a few hours, exist in greenspace, and tend to something - All this week, I'll know that my garden will grow healthier, and more food will be ready because of the work I put into it.  

Upstairs, I cooked the onions under low heat, skinned and seeded the tomatoes, and stewed them together for a little bit of sauce, along with salt, pepper and some basil.  Ate it for lunch over raviolis - without any extra sugar, the tomato sauce was a little acidic, but full of flavor.   Potato salad tonight was a little bit more complicated, but the basic idea is fresh, boiled potatoes, oil, vinegar, a little bit of mayo, and anything fresh from your garden you want to add....

Hot Summer Harvest time

So after much too much time away, and several technical difficulties (many of these pictures were taken with the tiny camera on my Blackberry, thank you very much), I am back, and better than ever.

Last week, with temps in the 90s, rendered me completely incapable of caring about anything that wasn't air conditioned.  I guess that's why I'm a gardener and not a farmer, huh.   But a short visit with my friends at First Root Farm, for a writing-and-gardening workshop (what could be better?!) re-energized me, and I've been working my butt off in the garden, trying to catch up.  I got rid of the spring veggies - harvested the bok choi, cut down the last of the somewhat dead peas, and general clean-up.   Into every generation, they say, a Weeder is born, chosen to fight the crabgrass, the clover, and the lamb's-quarters that threaten the garden.   And right about now, I think that might be me.

A note on the farm - it's two friends of mine who founded an acre farm and CSA on a national historic park in Concord, MA - really inspiring and lovely - they welcome community helpers, and sell some kick-ass organic eggs, so check them out if you are into local farms.  http://firstrootfarm.wordpress.com/.




Other tasks: stringing up the tomatoes and cucumbers, more weeding, transplanting some underperforming cukes, and some squash that really randomly got into my columnar apple trees, more weeding, and HARVESTING!  The garden is just big and fertile right now, and a lot of herbs have gone to seed (note the gigantic dill), and they are all buzzing with parasitic wasps and flies, and other beneficial insects that help protect the cucumbers and beans.  The bean teepee has just started, and I'm pulling up a few (purple!) carrots, teensy beets, the garlic, an eggplant, a first zucchini, and the first round of potatoes!

I'm "curing" the onions in the basement, which basically means I set them on some old upturned pots and let a fan blow on them for a few weeks.  After that, they should be ready to store for as long as it takes us to eat them.   They say to harvest garlic when 1/3 to 40% of the leaves have turned brown.  Then wait for a dry day and gently dig them up with a shovel...or wait until they look entirely dead, like I did, and pull them up by their roots, which I also did.

Garlic!

For the potatoes, it's always a bit of an oddessy - most of mine are ready after 60-80 days, but I plant them so early, and then it takes weeks for them to sprout, so I never know when to start counting. Once they flower, you should be able to harvest baby potatoes after about two weeks.   My roommate, from Northern Maine potato country, said to start harvesting them when the stalks start looking a little dead and flopping over, and mine were starting to do that, so I dug them up.

In the beginning, potatoes in pots.   Then, two months later, the pots got filled with dirt, the vines grew, flowered, and pretty much died.   But never fear, it's time for harvest!           

I love the way red potatoes look in the dirt.  It's like finding Easter eggs when you start to dig.  I stuck a shovel into the dirt under the plants, then started using a digging fork. I dug them up very carefully, but still speared a few with my fork - ate those last night!    The rest can get stored in my dark-but-air-circulating onion cabinet in the basement all summer and into the winter..if they make it that long.   We plan to eat these right quick.   These are a  "red thumb" variety of fingerling potato - they are not just red outside, but threaded with pink color inside - really beautiful and delicious.  These are the soft and creamy potatoes I was talking about.   The whiskey barrel did better than any other kind of growing - I was just rooting around the bottom for about fifteen minutes, pulling up more and more potatoes.   Good to know for next year. 

More pictures soon, but I'll leave you with one of my least favorite garden pests....they haven't been too bad this year, but in a rainy year they can get out of control - until I pour Sluggo on them (it's organic, don't worry) and then they just go away, poof!   Maybe some day I will have ducks to eat them in a very circle-of-life like manner, but for now, I loves me some Sluggo.

This sucker is seriously three inches long.

Escape!   Escape!  

(he didn't, don't worry)

(splat, bye bye sluggie!)

Strawberries, Late June Thai-style stir fry and one tough flower garden

It's been ten days since my last post, and there are plenty of updates.

1) Strawberry season has flown by - Dawn and I went strawberry picking at Land Sakes farm in Weston to get a couple of quarts of the extra-sweet June-bearing strawberries for jam. We pretty much ate all of our fruit as soon as it came in, and so we bought a few quarts at the you-pick-it operation. Land Sakes isn't certified organic, but it used to be, and they say they haven't changed their practices since they stopped getting certified. I wanted to find somewhere organic because strawberries are supposed to soak up chemicals like a sponge - and we were not disappointed. The strawberries were at an orgasmic peak of ripeness. More pictures posted when we actually get our jam on.

(Dawn is very excited about the strawberries!)

2) We went to the Cape last weekend, and over the summer solstice, apparently summer happened. We came back to a million snap peas, big tufts of lettuce, some carrots, big radishes, etc.  Now the work of the garden is mulching, weeding, harvesting and cooking - the trick now is to actually use the stuff I grew while its in season.    Tonight I got to make my first all-garden dinner.
I wanted to make a stir-fry from this magical period when my ichiban eggplants overlap with the peas, bok choi, and garlic scapes. Recipe below.

 Stir-fry satisfaction.   Squishy eggplants with crunchy peas and delicious, fried garlic scapes - Seriously delicious. 

3) Last, I put in a sweet perennial garden at a rental house on Cape Cod. Since no one will take care of these plants all summer, I wanted to make sure they were hardy. I split up my wild yarrow, moonshine coreopsis and some unkillable groundcover, transplanted some lillies and some yellow coreopsis that were growing nearby, and put in an echinacia I bought. Here's a picture of it at the beginning of the summer - we'll see how it looks by the end, after the deer have had plenty of time to feast.

Late-June Thai-style stir-fry w/brown rice and fried tofu.

Ingredients:
One package firm tofu

potato flowers and, garden stir fry and birthday apple Trees!

So - garden updates:

1) one, it's been wicked cold and rainy in the past couple of weeks, so pretty much nothing has grown - or shrunk, so I guess it's even steven.

2) two, we have some food in the works - little tiny eggplants, raspberries and some bok choi.





 3) three, we're making another garden dinner tonight - with a little help from Boston Organics.   Homegrown green onions and bok choi in the stir fry, along with onions, garlic, broccoli and squash and various Asian condiments.   This time of year we just have a few garden items ready: radishes, lettuce, Asian Greens, green onions, peas and herbs, so I try to find ways to work them into dinner when I can - I find they add a lot of flavor.

4) Plus, we have some new, odd, exotic flowers....

Potato flowers!   Who knew that such ugly plants could grow such nice flowers.....some folks say you can harvest right after they flower, but I'm still waiting a bit.



Last, best birthday present ever:  Columnar Apple Trees....

Now I will possibly have apple trees growing in my backyard - of my rental apartment.   Apparently they will grow right off the tree.   More updates as they grow.

Permaculture and the backyard garden

Permaculture stands for "permanent agriculture."   To learn more about permaculture, check out my last post.   I had a love-hate relationship with it, but there were some Permaculture slogans that, after three or four years of planning my own garden, (and much to my chagrin) have become part of my own basic philosophies in gardening. Enjoy.

1) Plant in “zones”

In permaculture, a "zone map" becomes an intricate diagram of an entire farm: zones zero through five indicate a range of planting activities, from an herb garden all the way out to a semi-forested orchard-and-grazing area, for all those sheep I will never have. But the concept is practical:

How I learned how to learn about gardening

In college, I took a course in Permaculture, or permanent agriculture, from a pair of dreadlocked hippies journeying through Southern California. They ran their own bio-diesel-powered sustainability bus tours, teaching like-minded folks across the Southwest how to dig up their lawns and make gasoline from fast-food fry oil. They got a gig teaching this Permaculture class to me and about eight other food-growing hippie wannabes, and proceeded to try to download a lifetime's worth of engineering and gardening knowledge in one college semester. They seemed to have as many slogans as Mao's little red book, with themes like, "protracted observation, not protracted labor!" and "yields are potentially infinite!" They were zealots, that's for sure, out to to save us from future starvation with smart design. Nothing was to have just one use: beans fertilized the soil, chickens not only laid eggs but could be placed in a "chicken-tractor" for soil prep, grape vines provided fruit and summer shade, and our shower water could be filtered through a system of ponds (filled with edible fish, of course) to irrigate our fruit trees.

I remember baking out on a California hill, trying to handle my pencil, my notebook, and an A-frame level, trying to map out elevation for a potential terraced orchard, thinking, I will never get this down.

Grown in the Dirt - food from the backyard

In the last few weeks, I’ve feasted on our first strawberries of the season, out of our backyard patch. Our backyard strawberries are sweet, but they are not just sweet. With cool nights and days during their growing period this year, they are not the syrupy, sickly sweet of June, store-bought strawberries. They are a little tart, like blackberries. In my experience, store-bought strawberries are either a little sweet, or else they are limp, white and flavorless. But in our backyard strawberries, lack of sweetness does not mean lack of flavor. Our strawberries sucker-punch you: sweet, tart, and then a burst of sizzling, tingling tastes and sensations on your tongue. Eat one of these, and your tongue comes alive.

I had no idea food could be like this. I figured broccoli tasted like broccoli, cucumbers tasted like cucumbers, and fruit, living in New England, mostly didn’t taste that good. I always hated oranges, which were always tart and stringy, and peaches were always rock-hard and bitter. Apples were the only thing that had a season, and I figured that apples tasted pretty much the same anyway – some tart and juicy, others mushy and flavorless. I do have a memory of biting into a summer plum so juicy and delicious that I licked my fingers afterward – but no one connected the dots for me between “summer” and “yum.” As a kid growing up I dutifully ate my veggies, biting off the tops of broccoli crowns and shoveling peas onto my fork so I could get dessert. As a grown-up I continued to do the same, especially after it was pounded into my head that veggies were good for our health: cram as much flavorless lettuce into your salad as possible, for fiber, or gnaw on a tough carrot for a snack. Vegetables became like vitamins or medicine: hold your nose, shove it in your mouth, get it down your gullet – never mind the taste.

New section on Gardening Website + tomatoes!

This is my front walkway - my own little perennial border.

Two new little news tidbits -

one, I just added a new section on my website, the Boston Backyard Gardener, about flowers, bugs and beneficial insects. Check it out.

Boston Backyard Gardener




Also, just found a few little green tomatoes on my store-bought Roma tomato plant....I can taste the sauce already. Go, Roma, Go!

My Birthday, 2010

Today is my twenty-ninth birthday. Whew. Just saying it out loud kinda hurts a little. I always thought I was going to be at some magical, different place when I was almost-thirty - like....have some job with an important-sounding title, be dashing about solving the world's problems - I don't know, be in *charge* of something.

But as it is, I'm in charge of this little corner of the world. I'm in charge of my stories, of maintaining my friends and my relationships. I'm in charge of keeping my house going, and of maintaining a good, healthy relationship with the families I babysit for, toddlers included (especially toddlers - I find having a good relationship with them to be a lot like any other one: try to honor both your needs and wishes, have fun, and maintain good boundaries). I''m in charge of my writing, and the little community I'm growing of other writers around me. And I'm in charge of manifesting all this food in my garden, and a little corner of really pretty stuff all around my house.

I guess it feels very private, instead of some big, public life (filled with public accolades, etc.) that I'd been imagining, but it also feels very real. I think everyone fights very hard for the little pieces of peace of mind we achieve - the good times with friends, a decent job, a little corner of quiet tucked into a busy life. I appreciate what I've got.

So, as I look forward to a summer filled with work and writing and friends, I feel really grateful. As I look out into my garden, it's only June 6th and the garlic scapes are already curling twice around, there are little flowers waving above my potatoes, the lettuce is ready to harvest and there is already a tiny little eggplant forming on my deep purple ichiban. It's enough to make you grateful for another day like this one. Two years ago my Dad took me to a nursery on my birthday, handed me a hundred dollar bill, and said - "go wild." It was one of the best presents I've ever gotten - the beginning of my perennial flower garden, that comes up bigger and brighter every year. I also used his gift to buy myself my first rose bush - the flowers are pretty small, but they smell divine. They are blooming right now, and as I walk through my garden everything smells sweet and flowery....like I said, it feels like a good day to be alive.

To another great year,

Abby

First "backyard" ingredient salad of the summer

Today I ate one of the first "backyard" meals of the summer: tuna pasta salad, made with backyard radishes, cucumbers, onions, celery, lemon, mayo, salt, pepper, backyard dill, and the "blushing Italian" herbal vinegar I made last year with garlic, oregano, rosemary,basil and aging red wine. It was DELICIOUS. Basically, since we're so early in the season, I'm just finding excuses to gussy up meals with backyard ingredients - but it really does make a difference. As we get closer and closer to summer, I'm getting fed-up with bland vegetables - I'm so excited to eat dishes where the veggies bring their own flavor. Me and Dawn have also been more-or-less on a tomato strike all winter. Locavores we are not, not by a long stretch, but after ice-cream sundae-level delicious tomatoes last summer, we just couldn't get excited about watery, bland winter tomatoes. We made do with lettuce, cucumber and crouton salads, which felt about right for the winter. Now that the season is starting, I'm so excited to eat food from the backyard - herbs included. We are more or less in the "salad season" - the stir-fry vegetables are still really too small to eat, so we get lettuce, radishes and early-season carrots (which I opted not to plant this year!) - plus herbs. This time of year I love coming up with a recipe just so I can chop up sage, oregano, parsley and dill and sprinkle them all on top. Roast Chicken, anyone?


Also, with all the warm weather we've been having, the garden is more or less ahead of last year - my garlics already have little scapes on them! For those not in the know, garlic "scapes" are the little seedheads of the garlic plant. The garlic is ready for harvest when the neck of the plant curls around twice, and the scape on the end grows. Last year, the garlic didn't even grow scapes until mid-June, so I'm psyched for some early garlic. Also, you can eat the scapes - I've heard they are delicious pickled, but I could never save enough to pickle - I always chop them up and throw them in the stir-fry - they have an awesome, delicate garlic flavor!

Memorial Day - the plants are all in

I'm going to try to hold back on minute-by-minute updates on the gardening front, but, having no kids, I feel like a new parent - I want to document every first shoot, bud, weed and caterpillar that I find in the garden. But this big news this weekend is that everything is in the ground! Hooray! The first year we planted, I think we put the tomatoes in in April - and they did fine. But with frost warnings this year well into May, we held off on the tenderest stuff: our eggplant, cantaloupe, tomatoes and peppers. I want those plants to produce stuff all summer long, so I'm willing to wait an extra week if it means they'll be healthier in the long run. Plus, I've noticed that even if you plant most things early, they'll stay pretty sluggish until they get the weather they want - then they take off like a rocket!

So here's the update: The earliest stuff is doing pretty good - peas are about a foot and a half off the ground, the potatoes are going gangbusters and popping out the tops of all the buckets, the carrots have their first true leaves (after almost a month of trying to water them every day, the little divas!), the Romaine lettuce is at edible size, and I just harvested and ate our first radish. Year 2 of our strawberry patch is amazing - we've harvested about 50 huge, juicy strawberries - Dawn says we owe it all to the inches and inches of compost we've dumped on top. The garlic and onions are up, and the broccoli and "pak choi" look perky and growing. The eggplant already has a bloom on it!



Our raised bed out front is now fully planted, and so far the peas that we put out front, on the south side of our house, are now fully twice as tall as the ones in the cooler, shadier back yard. Nothing really beats full sun, I guess. But I've been trying to work with our microclimate: the sun-loving squashes, tomatoes and peppers are in the sun-baked raised bed out front. The shade-tolerant lettuce and cucumbers are in the partially-shaded areas of the back, and the cool-loving broccoli an pak choi are in an area that receives a little bit of shade. After three years, I now know when to give up - the back corners of our garden, where I have tried to plant beans, sunflowers, tomatoes and potatoes - all to no avail. Now that area is allowed to have just weeds and flowers - a good place for beneficial insects to hang out and feels safe.



I've also tried to tone down my "companion planting" - after three years, I have a better idea of, timing-wise, which plants go together. (Usually I just plant too much stuff on top of each other, and nothing has enough space!) I planted my lettuce close to the base of my eggplant - by the time the eggplant reaches it's full two-foot spread, the lettuce will already be in our salad bowl. I planted cucumbers at the bottom of the pea plants - hopefully by the time the cukes are ready to run up the vertical-support strings, the peas will be done....but every year I miscalculate how late in the season we can harvest peas, so we'll have to see how it goes. And I planted some of my favorite "dragon bean" seeds in between the pak choi - hopefully by the time the beans need more space, we can start stir-frying the Asian greens.



But yesterday I set up my bean tepee for the pole beans to grow up, and Dawn and I hooked up our front-yard soaker hose (expensive, and a small feat of engineering, but simplifies our lives) - we're pretty much ready to go for the summer! yeah, bring on the hot days! (Now all I need is some mulch to keep all that good water with my plants!)

The Garden Website

Hi All! Welcome to the Boston Backyard Gardener Blog! I'll keep you posted on my garden, publish a few rants and raves, and hopefully answer some gardening questions posted by friends and family.....

I've put together a website to share some basic tips on how to start your own backyard garden....I hope it will be a helpful how-to for anyone who wants to start gardening/growing food, or a good forum for folks already doing it.

Please visit, comment, and send posts, comments, pictures, and questions - I want to know how your garden is doing, too!

love,
Abby

The Boston Backyard Gardener Website:

https://sites.google.com/site/abbymachsoncarter/home/boston-backyard-gardener