Need an online garden guru?

Wanna learn how to start your own garden?  How about a tomato in a pot?  A few years ago I tried to write down all the things I wish I'd known when I started....check it out!

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

Memorial Day, Redux, 2011

 It's funny, I thought this year was much colder and wetter than other years... (we just had our first stretch of warm, sunny weather in the last few days of May)...but looking back one year in the blog, I noticed a post with the same title as this one....apparently, last year memorial day was also the first time it got warm enough to put everything in the ground (especially tender stuff, like the tomatoes and eggplants.)   And I thought I was slacking.  Nope, turns out we just live pretty far north, in the scheme of things.   Reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (my annual re-reading), she talks about putting in tomatoes and harvesting lettuce in the first week of May.  I feel only pissy envy ("Well, if we all lived in Virginia, maybe we could all have an extra two months growing season, and maybe I could grow melons and okra and peppers that needed their own cages!).  

"upstairs" back garden: shade-tolerant

As it is, weather is a huge part of our limitations as gardeners up here, and getting to know, and possibly accept, the growing cycle, is a part of it.   I know I shouldn't be shocked by looking back to last year's May pictures, but when I remember last year's garden, I remember the July version - five foot tall tomato plants and every possible growing space filled with plants, or, less happily, weeds.   Its a big surprise to see how much last year's Memorial Day pictures look like this year's.  I guess I feel like I should be starting earlier, or the weather should be warmer - I should be ready to eat things by now.   But its just not time yet. 

My second attempt at a perennial border, May '11

Here's what I try to remind myself: June is when we harvest lettuce, peas, bok choi, broccoli (if we're lucky) and maybe some tiny carrots.   Beans, cukes and zukes won't be until July, tomatoes and eggplants at the very end.   And then the season goes until mid-september. Be patient, I try to tell myself, but it feels unfair.  It's exciting to be eating fresh-grown stuff right from the backyard - nothing tastes quite like it - but if we want to try to eat garden-fresh all year long, its a lot to bank on basically eight weeks.   This year I opened up a new bed and planted it full of Roma tomatoes for canning - two hybrid romas, two heirloom "paste" tomatoes.   It feels like a luxury to devote a whole bed just for canning (and don't worry, I'm trying to squeeze out every inch of space from it before the tomates get big), but I think its something I want - its been fun to make sauce from our home "cans" this winter, and it would be easier with more Romas, even if they are more "meaty", less spicy-juicy than some of their heirloom cousins.

This year I am trying to be mindful about where my gardening energy goes - I'm trying to think about what I really want to eat, not just how I can cram in the maximum number of plants.   And so far, it feels good.  I know that we can never get enough carrots, peppers, cucumbers or tomatoes, and I love my pickled, canned beans, so I tried to make space (or give space) to a lot of those.

Onions, lettuce, and tiny peas along the fence. 

I loved my tiny golden beets from last year, and now there is a beet patch.   But gone are chard and zucchinis, big broccolis and a huge sunny spot devoted to herbs.   The broccoli takes up a lot of space and barely gets going.  The Zucchinis always get borers.   The herbs have been moved to shadier locations, freeing up space.  And nobody ever ate the chard.   The carrots were planted all at once, instead of the whole-summer labor of love that used to be devoted to getting a new crop every two weeks, like the package recommends, and always ends up confusing me about what to harvest when.   We're working here for maximum satisfaction, maximum yumminess, for the least amount of stress and worry.  I've been putting lots of time into the garden recently, but that's because I have the time, and the weather is beautiful.  Later, I hope to not feel guilty about not doing enough or not eating enough of the produce.   If I don't get a second crop of lettuce or peas, I'll try not to fret.  Sure, I'll work my butt off canning tomatoes and making bean pickles (and possibly sauerkraut, this year) - maybe I'll coerce Dawn into drying some herbs.   But I'm planning on harvesting the lettuce young (no more waiting for it to reach "full size" and have it bolt) and the carrots all at once.  I'm not trying to plant in marginal spaces anymore - I'm letting those go back to weeds and groundcover (and a violently virile oregano plant), and not wasting time planting anything where it won't thrive.   I planted only potatoes and onions in my community garden plot - the kinds of things that can make it through a few hot days without any water, much less TLC.  I'll give away what I can't plant or eat.  Or at least, that's my plan.   In May, this is my intention: to enjoy what I can, and not sweat the small stuff if I can't.  (Let you know how it goes.)

Peas...soon w/ peppers and tomates

Garden diary:  By now, the carrot seedlings have shown their heads as have the beets.  Both are a little patchy.  The spinach is hardly growing, as usual, but the lettuce is big enough for a baby harvest, radishes on their way.   This year I planted a bunch of cabbages (where the herbs used to be), and they are looking good.  Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant in the ground, bean teepee still needs to go up. (pics from May)   Tasted first strawberry today- tart but very good.  


Here's some pictures from the May garden, before the sun came out.  

I'll have more of  the June garden soon...

Monkey

Dawn's front Raised Bed...in May.   Compare with May 2010....

Peas in the back. Party in the front. (radishes in the middle).  Cucumbers coming later.

Schlubby potato buckets (by now they've just sprouted)

Spinaches planted, w space for eggplant (I call this my "no dirt left behind" policy).

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!)

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.