Time, it all just takes time

We are currently caught between abnormally dry and moderate drought conditions.  It's been hard on me and the garden.  The garden is my happy place, so to watch the heat and dry conditions wipe out all my peppers a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to cry.  Huge parts of my boxes were just empty and it felt so wrong.  To top it off the community hose had sprung a couple of leaks.  One of my fellow gardeners had patched it, but I knew we needed something new, and more convenient for those of us in the "middle" plots.  So I decided to pick up some stuff at the local hardware store.

I saw a pretty hose stand that had a faucet on it.  You hook a hose to the back end of the faucet and hose to the front end and viola (yes, I know it's a stringed instrument similar to the violin) and watering becomes a million times easier.  As I walk up to the garden, I turn on the main hose and then walk up to my plot.  I do what I need to then turn on hose stand faucet and I'm able to water my garden easily.  The nice thing, because it is a community garden, is so can anyone else.  The blue curly hose someone else brought down to the garden (it was too short to go from the faucet to beyond the first plot so people weren't really using it).  I picked up a standard 50' hose when I picked up the stand and it all worked.

Such a simple thing that makes life so much better for all of us. 

I don't keep the recommended 5-gallon bucket of sun-warmed water because we get mosquitoes pretty badly where we are and after last fall's EEE and West Nile problems, I am trying to make sure there is no standing water in the garden.

My main hope is "Buzzy."  Buzzy is a bumblebee that hangs out in my plot and makes me smile.   He usually hangs out on my walking onions, but he's been buzzing here there and everywhere lately and finding whatever he can land on to pollinate.  I love Buzzy and he reminded me not to give up when I was feeling so low.

He buzzed around my potatoes, he buzzed around the corn and tomatoes and beans.  Just doing his bee thing flitting from here to there and back again, zig-zagging all around the place.  Every time he landed on a different plant, I began to see things differently.  I began to think, what can I do to give me happy and help Buzzy stick around here as a hospitable place?  So I replanted the squash the squirrels ate.  I pulled the bolted broccoli and found some mini eggplant bushes at the local Agway.  I found one of the last flats of peppers in the area and planted lettuce, radishes, and carrots that would come up quickly.  Suddenly everything felt good again.

Then last night the rain came.  We were supposed to have some "unsettled" weather with possible showers.  It turned into a major thunderstorm that made me think Thor himself was coming.  Today I went down to the garden between the rain showers and rolling thunder revue times to see how things held up.   The blue Adirondaks had grown over the box, which I then filled with soil.  I will have to have the guys cut me another set of 2' sections of a 2x4 so I can add another layer as they aren't close to flowering yet.  The red Adirondaks popped up to just over 6" in height so I added soil to them as well.

Talk about exciting!

My eggplants are starting to produce little flowers, the radishes and carrots popped up their greens and everything is just growing and I feel so happy about everything all over again.  It's where things were a year ago, but it's getting there and it feels like everything exploded all at once about this time last year... so patience, patience.

It all just took time.  It always just takes time.

Happy Square Foot Gardening Day!

Happy Square Foot Gardening day!  Today is the day we celebrate those unique raised beds people use throughout the world.  The cool thing about this method and philosophy of gardening is it really is about efficiency and conservation.  Back in the day, Mel Bartholomew, the founder of SFG, had a PBS show to explain how all this works.  There are still clips out there on youtube and other places and I encourage people to really learn more.   The idea of being able to maximize just 16 square feet to produce a bounty of vegetables really attracted me to the concept to start. 

I may have tried to get around things a bit over the years - from drawing square foot patterns in the ground and seeding accordingly to quasi-raised beds - and have mixed results.  The more I learn about the whys of how to do this properly, the more I understand and begin to adhere to original methods.

My beds are a little... well, cobbled together, which is OK.  I use a cement brick designed for boards to be slotted into the sides rather than nail the boxes together.  Part of why I do that is because I realized I can change out a manky 2x8 with a new one and keep the ones that are fine without a lot of effort.  This year, as I rearranged things, it made shifting beds easier.   It was hard work to move them this year, but I'm still not fully satisfied with the layout of my initial 60 square feet of space.  I do love having just a tomato box, just a corn box, and just a squash box, but I don't know about the big box of mixed stuff.  The carrots and radishes are starting to show me they're here and growing.  A couple of the little squash seeds poked their heads out of the ground this week, which made me squee in delight, but it feels big and empty and doesn't feel as happy as the full boxes.

I may just reconfigure everything into smaller sized boxes that are more easily changed up and controlled.  I'll give a season before I fully decide on what to do for next year.

The bean teepee isn't in a raised bed... this year.  Next year I may build a narrow bed for that.  I haven't decided yet, but I'm leaning that way because weeding the mugwort, mint, and sundry of other ghosts from gardeners past is time-consuming.  I like being able to weed with just two fingers.  It's really satisfying.  Currently. I'm pulling all sorts of things that are sneaking in from the sides and it really is a matter of dig and pull another knot of roots.  I thought about putting in an edging border to cut down on weeds, but it just didn't work the way I wanted and yanked it, putting it to the side until I figure out what I really want to do with it next.

The potatoes are going gangbusters.  My blue Adirondacks really need more soil, as do the reds.  The problem is, everyone is a gardener this year, and raised beds do need a particular mix of soil to balance drainage and moisture retention.  Everyone, from the farm stores to the big box stores to everything in between, is out of raised bed soil.  That means mixing my own from a blend of peat moss, compost, and coarse vermiculite.  I didn't want to have to do that for topping off... so it goes.

While I often focus on the "downtown" garden over in the community plot, I also have the "uptown" garden on my deck.  That is mostly my kitchen herbs, patio tomatoes, and some bits and bobs as they say.  Because Ms. Tessie wanted to grow her favorite vegetable, French Fries, I decided to grow potatoes.  The two boxes downtown are going to have a third added as soon as I mix up some soil.  On my deck, I have a 10-gallon potato bag.  It started with a couple of inches of dirt and a couple of seed potatoes called "Eva."  Evas are similar to Yukon Gold and are a Canadian breed of potatoes.  The guy at the Agway store told me they're great mid-season potatoes for beginner growers.  I figured at 89¢ a pound, I could afford a couple.  If it worked, awesome.  If not, I was only out a couple of bucks.

It's working all right!  That bag is filled with soil.  I kept adding soil every time the plant grew six inches.  Now it's still growing and there isn't any more room to add soil!  I am going to have a 10-gallon bag of potatoes before long.  I'm pretty excited and I can't wait until Ms. Tessie comes over so we can make French Fries together later this season.

Oh, and to celebrate Square Foot Gardening day, I have completed level 1 of the SFG course and start the Master's level tomorrow.  Right now there is only a handful in New England.  When I complete the course, I should be able to help teach and set up gardens for others and teaching is what I do.  I'll keep you posted.

Learning Patience

Someone told me the other day that gardening is the world's slowest performing art form. 

I'm not quite sure given I have seen things like the Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon, but I understand the sentiment.  Last week I was so disheartened.  So many of the plants I had grown from seed and nurtured throughout the spring couldn't handle the sudden heat wave that descended upon New England to close the Spring.  I looked at my almost empty boxes and almost cried.

The chipmunks ate all but two of my squash plantlings.  The heat had killed off all the peppers and some of my tomatoes.  The broccoli had bolted and everything looked empty and sad.

I fell back on two things.  One was a book I used to read my boys when they were little called "Hester in the Wild" by Sandra Boyton.  Hester is a pig that canoes down the river to go camping and loves the hole in her tent that lets her see the stars... until it rains.  She cleverly flips the tent over only to have a bunch of gophers get all excited to find a dry place to party.  She tricks them into leaving, pulls her sleeping bag over the hole, and goes back to sleep, only to have an angry bear awaken her because his friends the gophers are now sad and wet.  He kicks a hole in her canoe.  She is sad, tired, and now there's a hole in her tent and canoe.  So she sits and listens to the river and begins to hum.  She cuts a new hole in the tent to fix the canoe and paddles off into the sunrise.

I was in that "Hester" moment as I've come to call it.  I was standing there in my garden looking at blank spaces, overgrown mugwort along the fences, and just started listening to the birds.  As I listened, I decided to reseed some fast growers.  I put in some radishes and lettuce (and some carrots - which take longer to grow, but that's cool).

I weeded along the fences and just kept working until things were clear again.  Things were still looking empty, so I decided to go to a local farm to see if they had any seedlings left.  It's been tough as this year people are trying to garden.  Our own little community garden is seeing people who have ignored/didn't have time for their plots return and three or four new families come down to start growing things.  It has been a lovely thing to watch grow along with the plants.

I decided to look at what was working.  

My painted lady beans started growing all of a sudden.  I found out they were named for Queen Victoria and how she would paint her face white and her cheeks rouge as the flowers apparently look like her makeup.  I found some more bamboo stakes and planted some scarlet runners, which are teeny tiny right now but popping their sprouty heads out of the soil.

My blue Adirondak potatoes popped up with a lovely bluish-purple center to the plant and I have added the first layer of soil onto them.  The red Adirondaks are popping out too, but they aren't ready for soil yet.

The local farm had some bell peppers left and a couple of tomatoes.  I felt sad seeing them sit there all by themselves, so I took them home with some Thai Basil and filled my tomato box up again.  They also had two good looking mini eggplant bushes and I thought they would be lovely to replace the bolted broccoli.

The corn box has shown growth every day and it makes me smile.  I have no doubt the corn will be "knee-high by the fourth of July" at this point.  The plants' true leaves are growing and the stalks are starting to form on a couple of the plants.  I even noticed that I'm going to have to build some tomato cages and supports from my PVC before long.

Suddenly things looked like a garden again. 

Patience, patience, patience.  That's what it really took, the patience to just sit back and breathe a little and listen to nature as I hummed, planted and paddled off into the sunrise.

Here we go again.

I've been playing a game of lost and found with this blog.  It gets lost in the cyberverse and, every so often, I find a link that brings me back.

Last summer was pretty successful.  My last harvest was the day before Thanksgiving.  I dug up the last of the Parisian carrots and roasted them for our family feast with some local creamer potatoes.  I cut large chops, tossed them in a little olive oil, sea salt, ground pepper, and an herb mix from the "uptown" garden I had made earlier in the season.

It felt wonderful serving that to my family.

the new squash box

This year, I decided to rip up the internal fencing... you know, the stuff I rolled through last year when I hurt myself... and reconfigure things a bit so moving around the place would be easier.  I managed to get things ripped up, weeded (the ongoing battle between me and the wild mint and mugwort is a never ending one) and reconfigured.

The important thing I learned this year?

Moving raised beds are a pain in the tuchis!  I got it done, but boy was it exhausting! I did manage to build a box just for squash, reconfigure and realign things and was quite happy with the 60 square feet of growing space.  I had a box just for tomatoes, a box just for squash, and a U shaped area for everything else.  I had plans and sketches and seeds and...   well you know what comes next.  If you want to make the Divine laugh, just speak your plans.

Mid May rolls around and I get a call from the person in charge of the garden plots: the person with the plot next to mine moved.  Did I want to add to my space?

"Why not?"  I thought.  So I added a 14' x 16' weed plot to my plot and got to work. 

So much green stuff that was just wrong.

I was up to my thighs in wild mint, mugwort, and who knows what else and spent a weekend digging up weeds and hauling them to the scrub pile behind the garden area wondering the whole time what to do with the space.

That was when I got the news my 3 year niecey-niece was moving to a new home about a couple of miles from me and I got really, really happy.  I asked her mom what kind of veggies did she want to grow and the response was so 3 year old, it was awesome: french fries.

The decision was made: it was time to grow potatoes!  And what's a garden for a pre-school aged kid without a bean teepee?  Painted Lady and Scarlet runner beans were now on the order list.  My husband casually mentioned he was a little bummed I wasn't going to grow corn this year, but now there was all this space, so I ordered some corn seeds. 

So, not the greatest use of space but enough so I can get things rolling for this year. 

The one thing I discovered was that a previous gardener past had used whatever they could get their hands on for fencing.  So the plan going forward is to replace the catch as catch can poles and fencing with something more uniform.  I hung a gate over the entrance and this weekend fighting the ongoing weed battle.

By the way, whoever had "heatwave in New England late spring/early summer" on the apocalypso bingo card.  Congrats.  Whoever heard of a 90*+ week in mid-June around here?????  Heatwave it is.  My broccoli has all bolted, the peppers dried up and a chipmunk ate almost all my squash plants.

But something wonderful happened that kept me from breaking completely.   My blue Adirondak potatoes began to grow in their box.  I didn't expect that lovely purple center to the leaves.  In that moment of joy, I knew I had to keep going.  So I did a lot of new seeding this week.  I planted radishes, Parisian carrots, Rouge d'Hiver lettuce, and some winter squash.  Yes, it's late, but I figure it's worth a shot. 

My corn, again which went in late, is all growing, the painted lady beans are starting to grow enough to be trained toward the teepee posts, and I start to believe that maybe, just maybe, this will all work this year. 


Now if I can figure out how to keep the squirrels from digging up the uptown garden on my deck, I'll really be cooking with gas!

I'm not going to let this season break me.