A Gardener's Retreat

How time flies.  Just a couple months ago, we were harvesting zucchini and now, you’d hardly know we had zucchini at all (which we barely did, but that’s another story).  In short, the main harvest season has come and gone and as is usually the case, it was a mixed bag.  When encapsulated into a blog post, it’s going to seem almost tragic but really, it wasn’t that bad.  We got some of everything, just not as much as we’d hoped.

But before we get to recapping the year, the garden is still producing hot peppers, chard, kale in abundance, and carrots.  The flowers look nice and I’m just letting them go now, since there’s little else  going on.

The tomatoes are gone by, the zucchini (we barely knew ye!), the sad little non-starting cukes, all gone.  We didn’t do beans out of fear of bean beetles but people got through the season without any real trouble with them this year.  Unfortunately, the squash bugs made a reappearance and allowed us one lovely two week window to harvest zucchini before devouring all remaining members of the squash family they could find.  So, no cucumbers this year, which was too bad.  I’ll have to go back to scaring them away with strong herbal mixtures.

We got some beets, a few big ones and a lot of little ones.  That was fun.  The carrots were disappointing in their germination rate but what we got were pretty good.  I need to get those seeds in earlier I think.  It warmed up and dried out by the time I got carrots in the ground, and they don’t like that.  Radishes were stellar — tasty, prolific, and huge.

Lettuce did nothing, again, due to timing of planting seed.  I lost two important weeks in mid Spring and paid the price.

Swiss chard did very well, on the other hand, and we enjoyed lots of it.  I planted rainbow chard this year and it made lots of it.  My one error was planting about a dozen borage seeds in the same bed.  Mistake.  Borage are huge enormous plants with many flowers and arms and giant leaves and monster hairy stems.  One would have been sufficient, two on the outside, with lots of room around each plant.  That said, we got lots of chard.

Kale is also ridiculously healthy, as it usually is.  I allowed about six plants to grow.  Again, too  many.  One of each of two different types would be ample.

We enjoyed our garden, as we do every year, and continue to have ideas for improving our harvest.  I have a couple books on improving soil and getting more out of a small plot that’ll make good winter reading.  I also have homemade wood ashes to spread which I’m hoping will decrease the soil’s acidity as well as a bunch of kitchen compost to spread once the plants are cleared out for the season.  This was a good year.  Next year will be even better!

We spent an hour or so at the garden this morning, planting herbs in the Herb Garden and looking after our vegetable plot.  The rain last night seems to have come in the nick of time for our chard which was starting to tire of the heat and dryness.  Everything else looks great — a bountiful feast for the eyes as well as the palate.

We harvested a bunch of gigantic radishes, so gigantic that I have been jokingly referring to them as “radish gods,” after the character in the animated film Spirited Away (highly recommended, by the way).  The watermelon radishes did exceptionally well, and have been making large to giant radishes that are mild but firm fleshed and look just like watermelon when you slice them up.  We’ve been enjoying them in salads for weeks now.

"Prize" First Zucchini

Over in the zucchini patch, we have exceptional productivity on the part of our pair of cast-off starts.  We harvested two nice size zucchinis today and have four or five more still on the vine, so to speak.  One plant seems to be producing more than the other, and we’re not sure why.  But we think it will catch up over time.  Meanwhile, in the same general area, our seed-grown cucumbers are at the 6″ high stage and just starting to make flowers.  Can fresh crunchy cucumbers be far behind?

The big excitement is the tomato plants which are tantalizingly covered with hard green tomatoes.  Only the Sun Golds are starting to ripen.  But I was pleased to see that a bunch more tomatoes have formed and it looks like the Jet Star (highly rated by Walker Farm) is starting to come into its own.  Surprisingly, both the Black Krim and exotic Blue tomatoes are putting out lots of fruit too.  I had expected them to be a little less prolific.

Meanwhile, the Rainbow Chard is still making leaves but is suffering a bit of crowding from a flock of over-exuberant borage plants.  Borage is a giant of a plant, with fat, fleshy stems and large hairy leaves.  The flowers look like blue/magenta falling stars and are formed in profusion from large umbelliferous flower heads.  We grew ours from seed and based on how happy they are, I would say that’s the way to go.

Otherwise, the garden didn’t need much tending today.  We trimmed off some dead leaves, planted a few more carrots (why not?), and weeded, as always.  One of the plants we are NOT weeding out is the mullein, which happily seeded in all over our plot this season.  I love mullein for the wonderful cold and cough remedy it provides; this year, I’ll have plenty of organically grown leaves to dry in advance of the winter flu season.

Recently, I found the most wonderful book at a Library book sale.  Published by Storey Publishing, the book is Secrets to Great Soil: A Grower’s Guide to Composting, Mulching, and Creating Healthy, Fertile Soil for Your Garden and Lawn by Elizabeth P. Stell.  If you have found yourself confused about how to improve your soil, this book is the answer.  It’s become my Bible in this year’s effort to get our garden soil into shape.

The first step, according to Stell, is to figure out what kind of soil you have, so in an effort to answer that question I did a couple soil tests on the soil in our plot.  This soil is somewhat better than what would be there otherwise, but is still pretty close to the basic garden dirt that we’re all dealing with.

The first test I did was a “structure” test.  I took a set of four samples from different parts of the garden, and took them in such a way that I got a slice of dirt from the surface down about 6 inches.  I mixed the samples together and then put about a cup and a half in a mason jar, to which I added water to the very top of the jar.  I then added 1/2 teaspoon of ‘natural’ dishwashing liquid and shook the jar.  Over the next couple days, I watched and waited as sediment layers developed.  The results are shown below:

My amateur assessment of what I saw is that the dirt I sampled is about 97% homogeneous sandy loam, with another 1-2% dark organic matter, and a trace amount of outright silt. (The silt is that fine powder that lies on top of most of our garden plots and tends to blow away when it hasn’t rained in a while).  The sand in our sandy loam is fine grained with just a bit of grittiness when wet.

One noteworthy tidbit:  it took a long time for the some of the silt to settle out of solution. Moreover, the water that remained never did completely clarify — some of the silty clay remained in solution a week after the test.

pH Test Tube

On to the pH and nutrient tests.  I will admit, I did not spend top dollar on my test kit.  It was a RapiTest product that cost $5.98 at Agway and has enough test tubes and test chemical capsules to do 4 pH tests and 2 each for Potassium, Phosphorus and Nitrogen.  After much mixing, shaking and adding of water (making me feel a little like a Junior Chemist), I succeeded in capturing some results.

Here’s how the least improved soil from our garden plot tested out:

pH – very acid – 5.0 or below
Nitrogen (N) – very low
Phosphorus (P) – low
Potassium or Potash (K) – very low

I was not at all surprised by these results.  The soil samples I took were from areas where I hadn’t added any soil amendments recently, so it was to be expected that soil fertility would be low.  I was a little surprised by the acidity as I would have thought that the absence of leaves and evergreen needles in our plots natural compost would have kept it more neutral.  Not so, as it turns out.  My sample tested unmistakably acid.

While a number of vegetables will grow in soil with a pH of 5.0 and up, my researches tell me that they are happiest in the 6.0 – 7.0 range.  However, Stell says that if you add lots of organic matter (humus, compost, leaf mold, manure), your plants will be able to tolerate greater acidity.  The task for me is to figure out how to raise the pH of  our plot into the neutral range.  I’d like to do it without adding lime, so now I’m looking at mulches again to determine which is the most ‘neutralizing.’

We’ve had our garden plot since 2006 and grown a lot of food in it.  But up to now, we’ve not given much back to the earth who made those tasty vegetables a reality.  But after a couple disappointing seasons and a sober look at our situation, we realized we needed to revitalize our soil with something more substantial than just organic fertilizer mix.  Our dirt needed organic matter, specifically, the kind that you get from decaying plants.

I did a little research and learned that leaf mold is a great source of organic matter for gardens.  Fortunately, that’s something we have in abundance at home, so we carted large batches of it over to the garden in tubs and added it everywhere, but especially in all the places where we knew our future crops would want rich soil.  That was a good start but I wanted more, and soon I had my sights on the Nature Mill XE Plus Indoor/Outdoor Composter.  My father-in-law obligingly bought me one for my birthday and since then, we’ve been able to side dress the more hungry crops with homemade compost.  It’s pretty hot, having only seasoned a few weeks, but our plants seem fine and if anything, beefier than usual.

Today, we checked on everything after the rain and were impressed with how much our seedlings and starts have grown.  The beet and chard circle in the middle of our space is packed, and although I had thought I was planting sparsely, it looks like at least a few of those borage plants are going to have to go somewhere else…  The kale is also performing well, and the tomatoes too.  Over in the squash patch, the zucchini are puny but have lots of flowers, whatever that means, and the cucumbers which I planted recently are struggling up at a glacial rate.  But I have no doubt they’ll be flourishing soon enough.

Cedar Waxwing - Masked Bandits of the Birds

The surprise for this week was the radishes, which had been producing big bushy tops and puny radishes.  I thought the soil was perhaps too fertile and that I might not get much of a crop this year.  But today, I noticed a large purple radish bursting out of the soil under a giant leaf top.  Hmmmm, I thought — that doesn’t look underdeveloped.  So I looked around some more and noticed that I had a few other radish gods going that had come out of nowhere.  Across the aisle in the other radish bed, the radishes were large but not huge, and the tops less bodacious than those of the first set.  So I’m guessing that the big tops do have overly fertile dirt but nevertheless, they are making big radishes so I can’t complain.

Pest alert:  if you’re wondering what got your strawberries, it was the cedar waxwings (a type of bird) who became bold and besotted with them just at the time they reached their peak of perfect ripeness. Alas.

This weekend, the first full weekend in May, we spent quite a bit of time out at the garden plot, laying out our seed beds, putting in all kinds of soil amendments, and planting some seeds.

In the past we’ve always gone with boring rectangles for our seed beds.  They worked and were simple to lay out, but for some reason I’ve never been satisfied with them.  This year, we decided to shake up our usual four-square arrangement, and lay in some curves and circles.  So except for a square strawberry bed, everything else is curvilinear.  I’m especially proud of the new beet and chard bed, which is an oval island between paths.

A tip:  We found that laying in the new paths with straw helped us to see the seed beds better.

Another new thing this year is flower borders.  I’ve always admired those French and English kitchen gardens with their pretty and useful arrangements of flowers and vegetables.  So this year, I bought a mixed seed packet of “Water Wise” flowers and I’m planting them in borders between beds.  I also planted borage with the beets (who knows if they like each other, but I thought they might look interesting as a pair) and climbing nasturtiums between our pea plants.  Can’t wait for seedlings!

Soil amendments this year include bags of manure from Agway, bins of leaf mold out of our back yard, and some North Country Organics fertilizer mix (from right here in Vermont!).  We also plan to straw mulch as soon as we have some plants going.

Not much else to report except that we discovered (and unfortunately dislodged) a medium sized brown toad from the dead sage plant in the middle of our plot.  We are leaving that area of the plot semi-wild and I left a bunch of dead sage there so he or she can move back in if it wants. In the wildlife department, we’re also going to leave the large healthy cinquefoil and celandine plants which took up residence this spring.  They make pretty flowers and this time, they seem to really want to stay.

Pictures next time!  We forgot the camera….

Chris and I wandered over to the garden on Saturday, April 9 to see what was going on in our plot.  The answer was: not a whole lot.  As expected, the raspberry bush was enormous (we removed it).  Otherwise, the only things looking perky and green were the strawberry plants and the perennial chives which look like they’ll be bigger than ever this year.  It looks like the catnip survived the drought as well but it only has about three leaves so far.

But all that dirt with nothing growing in it yet is great — because we have big plans for this growing season.  For starters, we want to amend the soil with anything we can find that will increase its organic content.  This is a constant battle, but with effort, we can do it, I think.  The ingredient I’m most excited about using is fish heads, which we used a few years ago to great effect (huge tomatoes).  Hopefully, our efforts will pay off once again.

Otherwise, there are plants to be selected, which is the fun part.  This year, in keeping with my fascination with tri-color mix packs, I’m doing three colors of beet, as well as three colors of bush bean, and five colors of radish.  What can I say, I like variety.

Is it too early to plant lettuce yet?  We’ll find out…

So many things are on the verge.  There are blooming beans and blooming zucchini and tiny green tomatoes on the vine.  Our carrots are growing underground while nearby the cabbages look like giant purple roses as they start to take shape.  The cucumbers are proving to be a bit slow this year but I think in two weeks we’ll be pickling cukes.  And our red lettuces (from the second crop of seeds that we thinned and transplanted) are looking fine and almost ready to start eating.  I hope the buttercrunch (a few weeks behind) do as well.

As our plants grow and make fruit, the grasses likewise grow. They grew between and among each carrot plant, throughout the lettuce beds, the cucumber and squash patch, and all around the herbs.  They grew abundantly despite the fact that I had just fully weeded those beds a few weeks before.  Grass is inexorable — it has great life spirit.  Says Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine:

“It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and mowers shattered to cereal flakes of rust.”

That said, we play our role in the annual battle between man and grass.  We weed.  I have learned that the best way to pull a grass plant from the ground (a little one, that is) is to grasp the stem firmly but gently and gently pull it out, roots and all.  This method feels slow but as soon as you speed up, you succeed only in ripping off their tops leaving roots intact and ready to send up more shoots.  So slow and steady wins the race with grass weeding.  And the result — weed-free beds with plenty of room for our vegetables to grow.

Knee-high by July

This weekend, we hit the garden ready to weed.  This was a good thing as we had plenty of volunteers to contend with, mostly tiny grass seedlings that love to spring up in colonies between carrot rows, in lettuce beds, and magically around the edges of everything.  We duly weeded, clearing maybe 2/3 of our plot of grass and lambs quarters.  I’m tolerating a few things, as always.  The clammy groundcherry would require me to dig up entire beds to remove it, something I’m not willing to do.  And there is a bladderwort that I’m letting be there, just because.  Red clover can stay if it wants but not the wild mustard which survives (imo) by impersonating radishes….

So what’s looking good this week — seedlings mostly.  I had to reseed the pickling cukes but they’re up now, along with the long green cucumbers, the pattypan squashes and the beans.  The carrots are growing in well too, now that they’re finally established.

Carrot tops

The tomatoes, peppers and basil that we put in last week are basically just sitting there.  I think it was a bit cool for them here in the early going.  But I’m hopeful that all this rain will help.  

Then there are the crops that we’ve already been getting:  The mesclun is still giving us lots of salads and greens but some of the plants, esp arugula, are starting to shoot to seed.  The first crop of radish is about gone by but we have a second crop coming along.  And in the last week, we’ve been able to enjoy small portions of snap peas which despite the puny size of the momma plants are still delicious and tasty.  I have a feeling they’d be taller if we’d fed them more but what the hey.  I wasn’t expecting much so anything we get is bonus.

And that’s it for the garden this week.  Overall, I think our plants are a bit small compared to other people’s and I think the difference is manure.  Most gardeners, I’ve noticed, seem to really pile on the manure.  We didn’t and our plants are definitely less lush.  I guess we’ll have to invest in a few extra buckets of the brown stuff and look into some of the other feeding methods so we can get our plants up to par, as it were.

C's Popcorn

For us, the highlight of the season is Tomato Planting Day.  Once last frost is over with, we get antsy.  So we took advantage of good weather this weekend to buy all our starts and set them out in the plot there.  It was great fun.

We bought all our plants at Walker Farm and only splurged a little.  We got a six pack each of basil,  mixed hot peppers (jalapeno, paprika, ancho, habanero, and our personal favorites, cherry bomb) and marigolds.  As for tomatoes, it’s hard to remember what we got exactly but I know Purple Calabash was one, as well as Old Brooks, a marbled yellow and pink number, and another pink eating tomato.  For cherry tomatoes, we got Sweet 100 because that’s what they had.

Once out at the plot, we had a lot of work to do watering, prepping, weeding, manuring and all the rest.  It was another marathon (by our standards) of around 3 hours.  When we were done, we had all the summer vegetables in the ground.  

As for everything else, our results remain mixed.  Going around the seed beds, the beans are up! the mesclun is starting to shoot to flower, there are three more kale seedlings than there were before (after reseeding), the second crop of radishes are up and it looks like some of the reseeded carrots are too, the eating cucumbers are up but the pickling cukes are not, the pattypan squashes are just getting started, and the lettuces remain pathetic.

If we’ve had one big crop so far this year, it’s radishes, which we always hope will be the case.  This year, as some readers may remember, I planted half brand new seed (Easter Egg Mix) and half mixed bag old seed.  I got great results from the new seed and very small radishes if any out of the old seed.  But yesterday was the big bonanza — I brought home at least 25 radishes, some quite large and globular.  We ate a bunch in salad last night and they were positively juicy, as well as spicy and sweet.  I’m not sure if there are any health bennies to radishes but I felt healthy eating them.

Now we’re just sitting back and hoping for rain.  If the current forecast is any indication, we’re bound to get lucky one of the next three days…

So Memorial Day is come and gone and so is the last frost date.  But wouldn’t you know, they’re forecasting widespread frost tonight.  That didn’t stop us from planting a whole lot more seeds but it did prevent us from putting in tomato and basil.  We’ve decided to wait until the next astrologically auspicious planting days — June 5 and 6 — to put in the warm season starts like tomatoes and peppers.

That said, we put in a bit of a marathon this weekend with two or three hours each weekend day.  On Saturday, Chris cleared weeds and scythed grass while I prepped and seeded.  I put in cucumbers where the peas didn’t happen, and pattypan squashes in the long bed, nearby the other Sugar Ann snap peas which are the only ones that came up.  We figure by the time the squash are in need of space, the snap peas will be done.  We can just cut the tops to the ground, leave the roots in as fertilizer and let the pattypan take over.

Read the rest of this entry »