Future insights?

It is July... in fact, a week into July for that matter.  This is when I see people posting pictures of things they are harvesting and other gardens and I feel, well, like I'm way behind.  I know, I know, that's not how all this works, but I still feel like I'm just not getting it.

Then, after a day of couch dwelling after Fay ripped just west of us, I went down to do a quick water before getting on to the errand run.  I was greeted by a beautiful little flower on the Blue Adirondacks. 

It's so pretty and so delicate and reminding me, "It's OK.  Be patient."

The purple tinge of the leaves and the rich greens make me smile every time I see them, now I have these little flowers to look forward to when I go down and suddenly I'm not as worried that I only have male flowers on the summer squash and zucchini plants or that my squash keeps having to face all sorts of challenges this year.

But the truly exciting moment beyond that was the formation of my first tomato.

I planted my tomato seeds on March 1 and tended and watched over them for months.  They struggled when I first put them in the ground because we got hit with an unexpected, and quite unusual, heatwave.  I didn't think my tomatoes were going to make it at all.  But the Solar Flares and Yellow Pears fought back against the odds and this morning I spied the beginning formation of a Solar Flare tomato! 

Then I heard the whisper, "Patience, patience, patience."  A virtue, to be honest, I seem not to be entirely blessed.  Persistence and stubborn determination, absolutely, but patience not so much.

Another thing is that, as I study my SFG materials, I need to demonstrate the grids on my boxes.  As someone who started out as a mechanical artist, I'm more of an eyeball and, when necessary, just draw lines in the dirt kind of girl.  Grids are OK, but I don't like their aesthetic and I have my planting square to help me with spacing.

But I need to show my grids if I want to pass my class.

I looked to my tomato box for ideas.  I need to cage my tomatoes as they are really starting to do what tomatoes are supposed to do - grow.  I built a prototype cage for myself out of PVC - and I do love PVC - and started thinking: can I adapt this to make my "grid" for my class?
Hmm...

So I did some calculations in my journal and I think I can adapt this in a way that I can build higher if I need to per the individual plant and still show my grid.  I feel like I should imbed a meme of Groo saying, "Lightbulb." Now I have a plan, so when the weather cools a bit today, I'll start on that down in the garden.

My mini eggplants are really starting to grow.  There is something so pretty about a little eggplant just hanging out and growing.  I wish I had some full-sized black beauty eggplants this year, but the heat killed them off with my peppers early in the season, so this is from Agway and all they had left were the minis at that point.

The summer squash and zucchini are flowering, but as I said earlier, it looks there are only male flowers which, while are a lovely bite when breaded and fried up, doesn't give me fruit.  They're still little, so I am hopeful that I will get some summer squash of some type this year.

As I said, the squash has been through so much between the chipmunks and vine borers.  (The DE seems to be helping that situation and I saw one of my butternuts put forth another set of leaves, so fingers are crossed as tight as I can get them.) 

I am seeing lots of crickets and ants this year.  I know snakey is taking care of the crickets for me and I'll have to put out a borax trap for the ants.  I know they're pollinators, but they are bitey ants and they are EVERYWHERE!  So yeah, a borax trap to knock them down to a reasonable population is probably a good thing.

I'm trying to keep the words from today's Old Farmer's Almanac in mind: "The zucchini crop for which you had big baking plans may never come to pass.  Despite everyone's best intentions (not just yours, but theirs, too, no doubt!), annuals sometimes droop and die off before the season has barely started.  Perfection is impossible, but there are no failures - just insights to guide you into the future."

Here's to those insights... and maybe, if it's not too greedy of me, some zucchini too?

Weeding again..

You may recall that Sunday I was concerned about fencing.  I originally wanted to work with what I had, but it was clear that the existing fencing wasn't going to work.  So what's a girl to do?

She goes to the local unnamed hardware big box hardware store of doom to pick up what she needs... right?  Well, apparently the UNBBHSOD was out of fencing.  Seriously, they are out of fencing.  They had one roll that was the wrong height and 1 roll of deer netting left.  No landscaping cloth of any kind, no fencing, no hose sprayers, practically no hoses... well, no lots of things!  One of the guys who ripped some wood for me to build up my potato boxes said that between people doing "projects" (yes, he used air quotes) and factories shut down during the pandemic, they are running out of all sorts of things like lumber, fencing, piping, you name it.  If there's a home project or DIY thing, people are running in to pick up odd things.

It's funny, I had noticed the lumber was lower than usual inventory, but it hadn't really registered with me until he said that.  I was happy they had a 2x4x8 to rip into 2' pieces so I could raise the boxes from 12" to 16" because, as I said to my potatoes, I'm greedy for potatoes this year.

So with no fencing available (yet), I turned to another round of weeding the ever invasive mugwort, mint, and who knows what else is growing.  Sunday I was just dejected at how a couple of good rainstorms, that we absolutely needed, could bring everything back so quickly. The only way to fix it was to take my shovel, turn over the ground, and pull more and more roots from the loosened soil.

I won't lie, it's hard work, but the place feels like there is breathing space again.  Of course, I also unearthed a colony of mini ants, so I'll have to set some borax traps to get rid of them.  I also discovered the shell of a squash vine borer, so this afternoon will be looking up how to get rid of those jerks.  My poor squash crop has suffered enough!

The other necessity for the day was building a couple of support cages for the eggplant.  See, this is the beauty of PVC, I have all the pieces already.

Of course, startling "Snaky," the little garter snake that hangs out protecting my garden from frogs and things, did elicit a bit of a scream with an apology.

It's a little boring to have to line up and organize all the cut pieces to find what I needed, but before long, the eggplants have been caged.  The big payoff was discovering a baby eggplant growing!

That brought a squee of excitement!

I am excited about eggplant and the squash is beginning to flower. As I build and start to trellis them, I will examine them to see they are male and female flowers to ensure pollination for fruit, but for now, seeing flowers after all the strife my poor squash have been through this year is a good sign.

As I hauled another wagon full of weeds to the scrub pile today, I did write a poem in my head:

Red Wagon

I measure my work by the wagon load

digging and filling each load,

hauling the unwanted survivors 

to another part of 

the world

where the unwanted 

seems to reside

with the help of

a rusty, red wagon.

Digging holes

Before I started

After weeks of looking, I finally found a post hole digger.  For those of you unfamiliar with this tool, it's essentially a couple of mini trenching shovels on a scissors-like pair of poles.  You shove it into the ground, pull it closed, and then pull up the captured dirt.  After you get down a certain distance, you stick in your fence pole and then fill it back up.  For more permanent fencing, you might mix up a batch of cement to pour in the hole to really secure things.

Starting to add posts

If I wanted to be that jerk, I would do that, but ...  community garden and all that.  Now the problem with my plot is that the fencing is really piecemeal.  Wooden poles, fencing poles, sticks - you name it.  Some of the fencing itself is welded wire, other is nylon, some is garden center special edging, all of it is a mess.  So I have to think through things, such as how much do I put up an effective, uniform fence in all this?  I'm thinking the real way to do this isn't happening this year.  I would want to dig a foot deep trench all around the garden, place a bottom bar on which to set my PVC into with the fencing strapped to that bottom bar, then fill the trench and make sure the fencing reaches at least 4' above the ground to stop burrowing animals, like the "fat beavers" (aka groundhogs aka woodchucks) from digging under the fence but be high enough to be a pain in the tuchis for the deer to jump.

View from the top of the plot

After two hours of setting poles, and just attaching the current mess with zip ties to keep it out of the way of folks getting to their plots (and making it clear my plot is still not a walk in all you can eat buffet)  until I pick up a roll of fencing.  Who knows, maybe I'll get a bit crazy and dig the trench still. 

I also spent some time digging up the pernicious weeds that never want to leave my plot.  Just like the wild things, they love it so.  I am being like Max and saying, "No."

Of course yesterday I made the grand mistake of visiting the vegetable garden at Tower Hill Botanical Gardens.  If you have never been there, it is a wonderful place full of interesting plants and gardens and things.  Currently, there are fairy houses scattered throughout the gardens.  They are truly delightful, but the vegetable garden made me sad.  It is so far along compared to mine.  The cubanelle peppers are producing fruit, there are tomatoes and it looks green and lush and perfect.  I keep trying to tell myself my garden is right where it's supposed to be, but sometimes it's hard not to compare.

egg plant flower

radishes :) 

I mean, I grew those tomatoes from seed and they are looking healthy and growing, my beans are climbing up the teepee poles and those potatoes!  I started the third set of potatoes "downtown" so they'll be ready for a slightly later harvest into the fall rather than at the end of the summer.  The corn is "knee-high by the fourth of July."  My eggplants are starting to flower.  Sure, I bought those from the local farm, but they are happy and thriving.  My radishes, which I planted from seed a few weeks ago are popping up like, "Hi, we're here and almost ready to go!"

My lettuce failed, so I'll try a different kind this week.  The carrots are really thriving.  I may plant some more to come up when I start pulling potatoes.  Tomorrow my trellis netting should be coming in so I'll start building my trellises for the squash.  I'm going to try to build an arch for the zucchini and summer squash and I'll build my PVC trellis for the full squash box.  Three of the six seeds I planted are starting to sprout.  My one cucumber and pumpkin that survived the chipmunk attack are needing the support.

The tomato trellis is next up.  Since it's the whole box, I think it will be a number of trellised walls, we'll see.

Tomorrow morning, I'll dig some more holes and get some more fence posts in, clear out some more weeds that are creeping into the overall plot.

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.