Pickling Hot Peppers

This is my second year participating in a CSA and I'm still enjoying the weekly batch of produce I pick up each week at Badseed Market direct from the farm. Last year I didn't really take advantage of the bulk list, which would have provided more opportunity for preserving food over the winter, but this year I've ordered a few bags and already have much fuller cabinet. Our last order included basil for pesto, pepperoncini peppers, a pound of tomatilloes for salsa verde, and a bunch of jalapenos. If you've been keeping up with my garden blog for a while, then you'll remember last year how I extolled the virtues of pesto; there's already a fat bag sitting in the freezer, waiting for the frost to hit. That particular entry also extols the virtues of salsa, canned and fresh.

Of course, one can throw only so many jalapenos into salsa before it becomes barely edible, and after you're used up all the tomatoes or tomatilloes, it's time to find something else to do with the little buggers. Probably my favorite way to preserve peppers is to pickle them. Pickled jalapenos are a good replacement in any recipe that calls for fresh, and they're an awesome topping on nachos and fall chili. The recipe I use from Andrea Chesman's Serving Up the Harvest is very basic; you don't need much to augment the flavor of chiles, just a bit of salt, sugar, some garlic, and some mustard seeds (I didn't have any mustard seeds in my cupboard, so I left them out). Process 10 minutes and viola!

While planning what to do with my jalapenos, I remembered a recipe I found online 2-3 years ago for a pickled condiment, not unlike a Mexican giardiniera, featuring hot peppers, garlic, onions, and carrots. It's called escabeche, and you can find the recipe online at Simply Recipes. The recipe requires a bit more labor compared with a basic hot pepper pickle, but as I recall, the flavor is richer and more nuanced. I'm sure this comes from the additional vegetables, spices, and frying everything in olive oil first.

Here's a photo of the two recipes after processing:



Looks tasty, eh? All but a couple of those peppers came from the CSA, since my jalapenos have not been supremely productive this year. The carrots, however, came from my garden.

After I spent the day pickling hot peppers, I took the time to reorganize my cabinet, so the oldest items were in the front. It was already quite packed with the whole cucumbers I pickled in July and the strawberry jam I made back in May. I can't wait to see what everything tastes like in another few months when the flavors have had time to blend.



My preserves stay inside an old Hoosier cabinet my mother bought as a birthday present last year:



I'm very fond of the cabinet, since it provides me with an extra work surface and nice dark places to store preserves and potatoes.

Last weekend I picked a bunch of cucumbers from my mother's garden and am planning on making some relish before the weekend is through. Do you have any plans to pickle before the season begins to wane? Or will you be making that last batch of salsa or pesto instead? Do tell!

Long time, no post!

Though the garden has been quite busy this summer, I've been horrible neglectful of this blog. Has it really been over 2 months since my last post? My heads been full of various ideas for entries, but for whatever reason I've lacked the impetus to post. I want to change that. I'm going to start posting at least one entry per week and cover more issues pertaining to sustainability, local food, and urban homesteading. I'll also "redecorate" at some point and redo the layout of this blog, in addition to re-organizing/adding links. So expect lots more activity from now on!

To cover the time I've been away from this blog, here are some bits & bobs from late June and the month of July...



In June the lavender bush bloomed, and I gathered the flowers to dry. I believe it's the 'Hidcote' cultivar, whichever variety is well adapted to wetter, temperate regions. I've had the plant since 2008, and the bush has gotten progressively larger since then, blooming profusely in the summer and showing off its grey-green foliage through the winter. I don't have proper drying equipment, but it's very easy to collect the flowers, tie them into bundles, and hang them around the house for a bit of perfume. The flowers in the photo were too short/small to bundle, so I let them dry on paper towels. When they were finished drying, I pulled off the flowers and stored the herbs in plastic bags.



Here is one of the hornworms I found on the tomatoes near the end of June, thrown into the grass for the robins to find. Usually, I don't have problems with these little guys, maybe one or two a year. This year, in the new vegetable garden, I found a whopping three hornworms. OK...not that many, but more than I'm accustomed to. Haven't seen a one since I took this photo. Cabbage worms are generally a bigger problem for me.



Pretty bronze fennel flowers. My plants returned this year, and the one along the south side of the house is well over 6 feet tall. Amazing. I'm letting the flowers go to seed so I can get some use out of these plants. They don't bulb like Florence fennel does, and their stalks tend to be rough and stringy, so they're not ideal for cooking, but you can use the leaves as an herb/garnish, and the seeds taste just the same.



I just love this combination of textures: the large, broad leaves of the squash with the small, feathery leaves of the cilantro going to seed. I'm not sure if these are "correct" companions, but they seemed to do well together. Still waiting for the seeds to dry so I can have coriander. This is a 'Discus Bush Buttercup' winter squash and 'Caribe' cilantro.



Leaf from the 'Rond de Nice' summer squash, which is the closest to a proper bush variety I've found in this family. Actually, only today I figured out that this was the summer squash, not the 'Discus Bush Buttercup' I also planted (which forms less of a proper bush, more of a stocky vine).



When July came, I decided to visit some plant sales and found quite a few good deals, including this coneflower and oregano plant. When I moved the vegetable garden this summer, I had to rearrange the flagstone path somewhat and pulled out the once-thriving oregano, which I inevitably waited too long to re-plant. The oregano died, so I bought a new plant for a mere $1. Hope it does better!



Another shot of the coneflower, the ubiquitous 'Magnus' variety, of course. I like my echinicea pallida plants, but they have less immediate impact, and I thought some variety might be a good idea. I love coneflowers, though. Can never have too many.





The 'Stargazer' lilies in the front border, putting on their yearly show. I especially like the 2nd photo, because you can see the black seed pods from the baptisia, which is impressively big this year.



One of the lobelias I planted back in May. After I saw these on a camping trip last September, I had to have one. The flowers are on a tall spike and pretty small, but they look a bit more striking in groups. Given the right conditions, these are supposed to spread very reliably. They're native to this region, like wet conditions along river banks, but hold up well through droughts. I'm sure they'd be perfect for a rain garden.



A few weeks ago, we visited my mother and stepfather's house in California, MO and were impressed by how well her garden is doing this year. She planted 3 types of melons, which covered probably 20 square feet or more. They weren't yet ripe, so I just took pictures.

I've avoided growing melons myself, because they tend to put out very long vines and I've yet to find a shorter vined or bush cultivar. If any wayward readers can recommend that works in small spaces, I'd love to hear about it!

A Walk Through the Garden

Since the backbone of the new vegetable garden was completed, the last month in the garden has mostly been filled with busy work in between heavy bouts of spring rain. The last several days have been thankfully dry, leaving me plenty of time to wander around the garden. So I thought it might be nice to give a walk-through everything that's been going on.

Starting from the backyard, here's Molly busy with her usual chore, patiently waiting for squirrels:



Of course, looking at this photo, I'm reminded of all the weeding that needs to be done on and around the path. The violets I let grow by the steps and now threatening to overtake the steps, and you might see the walnut seedling growing nearby. Maybe you can also see the yarrow, creeping thyme, raspberry, bronze fennel and mint? This bed is a bit formless, an afterthought compared to other beds, very much a work in progress.

Turning to where the old vegetable garden used to be, you'll notice big changes:



The beginnings of a woodland garden. Back in January, my mother and stepfather moved to a new house along a lake with plenty of garden, much of it filtered shade. Lots of hostas, more than she wanted. So when we were down a few weeks ago, she dug up a bunch and gave them to me. They're already serving as excellent filler, and there are plenty more to plant along the fence.

The focal point of the woodland garden is a serviceberry (sometimes called juneberry) tree purchased from Suburban Lawn & Garden:



It's an understory tree that does well beneath the filtered shade of the redbuds and larger trees that surround our yard. In spring it produces a show of white flowers and produces small edible berries that attract birds. Apparently, the berries make good preserves, but much like crab apple, the fresh taste is too sour to be enjoyable. The tree should get about 20 feet high when fully mature, and we are attempting to stretch the trunks for a more open shape.

Turning back towards the patio, there's the new rain barrel we installed next to the gate:



We might make further changes to the spot behind the gate, since we overshot the length on the downspout and the gutter is still prone to overflowing. Rather than struggle with the water, I'm considering building a little rain garden. This might also be a great spot for a native plant I really love called Joe-Pye weed.

Walking through the gate, you can see the other rain barrel we installed on the south side:



We got the rain barrels from a local non-profit called Bridging the Gap, which facilitates recycling and other environmental programs in the Kansas City area. They do workshops teaching folks how to build these things, but we decided to purchase a couple of pre-made barrels instead. At $65 a piece, they were a far better deal than anything from a catalog or online. Not so pretty, but I don't really care so much about that. With all the rain we've been having, I've already watered my plants from the barrels several times.

In this photo, you'll also notice my tomato cages and filled-out flower/herb border. The lavender and thyme plants have really taken off this year. Here's another photo taken a few steps down the path:



You can see how the yarrow, salvia, and perovskia are doing quite well. The pale coneflowers are a bit too slender and diminutive to be seen in the background, but I'm hoping that with some time they will spread. They get around 3-4 feet tall in summer.

Along the path near the gate, you can still find some pennyroyal:



Beside the gate is my new bed for the raspberries:



As mentioned previously, it's 'Caroline', ever/fall-bearing variety that produces big juicy red fruits from August to October. Soon I'll string some wire or twine along the posts and bring a bit of order to this bed. I'm waiting until fall/winter pruning before filling the box up with soil.

On to the vegetable beds! Look at the lovely little surprise I discovered a couple weeks back:



It's a volunteer potato in my hot pepper and basil bed. When we dug up the soil from the old boxes, I searched for any remaining potatoes and other bulbs and roots, but found nothing. So imagine my surprise when this little baby popped up. It's probably on of the 'Caribe' potatoes I grew last year. I'm going to let the vine grow and flower and see if it produces more of those violet-skinned beauties.

Elsewhere in the vegetable garden, a bush beans waits:



I've got two 2'x1.5' bush bean plot, but I failed to mark them after planting and am not sure which is the 'Gold Crop' and which is the 'Jade'. Guess I'll know when the pods start appearing this summer.

What else is growing in the vegetable garden? Well, we have some Swiss chard:



Typically, chard and spinach are started outdoors, but I started a few indoors, all of which died in the great cold frame debacle. The plants started outside have suffered a few insect attacks and are just now getting their 3rd and 4th leaves. I've had to cover the spinach and chard plots and do a bit of reseeding, but the chard is holding through admirably.

Despite similar insect attacks on the raab and cole crops, the plants have continued to persist:



Actually, I fashioned makeshift cloches to ward off further damage until the plants got large enough to hold their own:



I'm sure you can tell that it's just the top of a soda bottle, the cap of which can be removed to let cooler air in. I've been saving these a few years for just such a purpose, and they work pretty well.

And here's a partial view of the vegetable garden from the east:



The mulch we bought ended up not being enough to cover all the paths, but at least we've got the landscape fabric to stifle the weeds. I also wish the beds looked more abundant than they do, but I'm hoping it looks more impressive by July.

Anyway, on to the front border I never seem to talk about anymore:



The Siberian irises look quite impressive, and the baptisia makes for a wonderful backdrop when in full bloom. The current plan is to remove the tall red-orange Asiatic lilies that clash with my relatively cool color scheme and give them a new home, perhaps elsewhere in the yard or with family. The 'Stargazer' Oriental lilies, which are a more pleasing fuchsia-streaked white, will go in that spot. Or perhaps that's where I'll put the lobelia syphilitica. I like how the reddish tones and white pop beside the blue and violet. The lobelia won't bloom until late summer and fall, at which time it'll be the main show.

But those irises look lovely...



Don't they?



Elsewhere in the front garden are little surprises:



Finally, there's the rock garden I started last year in the northeast yard along the rock wall, a spot that is dry and gets a fair amount of sun during the day. The 'Ultra Violet' hybrid salvia (or desert sage) I planted last year is now in bloom:



I think the yellow flower of the sedum makes a lovely contrast. Below that is one of the purple hens & chicks that I started with last year, along with a blue-green sedum I bought about a month ago:



I'm still looking for more succulents and alpines to fill the space, but as with most of the plots in my yard, I've decided to take a slow-paced piecemeal approach to design. Wandering through my garden, I'm starting to really love how everything's taking shape and looking more like the space in my head.

Rebuilding a Garden

Back in December, I discussed my plan to move the vegetable garden from the backyard to the space on the south side of our house. This spring we've been working hard to turn plans into reality, in spite of circumstances intervening and things going slower then planned.

In March, Rob dug up the forsythia, which ended up taking a couple of hours and a sledge hammer. The results left a nice little pit of dirt and at last no stump to contend with:



After that was done, I pulled up the old beds we built back in 2007 and took a look at the boards. My assumption was that the bottom portions would have some decay but would be otherwise usable in the new plot, so I was a little surprised by the severity of the decay on some of the boards. Here's a photo to illustrate what I'm talking about:



The heaviest decay occurred on the boards further downhill, which is lightly shaded throughout much of the shade and obviously gets more water when it rains. It's also worth mentioning that we built the beds with 1"x8" untreated pine boards. After 3 seasons in-ground, some decay is to be expected. Less expected were the termites that infested 2 or 3 of the boards; our house suffered minor termite damage in the distant past, but we've never seen any sign of the critters. When I first discovered all this, I was afraid we wouldn't be able to reuse the boards at all, but after further assessing the damage, we were able to salvage half for use on the small 2'x2' and 2'x4' frames. Not bad!

For the rest of the boxes, we settled on untreated pine 2"x6" boards, which would give us a good bed height without having to double them up. Initially, I considered the more rot-resistant cedar, but it wasn't as cost-effective. In theory, the sunniness of the new spot and the thicker weight of the boards should help stave off decay longer than in the previous plot.

But before we actually built the frames, it was onto the new step, which was clearing out the grass. Originally I considered doing what a lot of raised bed gardeners do, which is starting right on top of the grass and blocking out weeds with cardboard, newspaper, or landscaping fabric. We'd lay some cardboard along the paths to kill the grass and eventually lay some pebbles or mulch. This idea wasn't really that great, though, since it would end up diverting more water down the path, which would pool up near the gate. Not cool. So we decided that removing an inch or two of sod would be a better idea.

Last weekend we rented a sod cutter and spent an hour or so ripping out lawn:



A bit of a spotty job, but nothing a shovel can't fix.

The last step was building the frames and installing them, which takes more effort than you can imagine. It's hard to tell in photos, but the south yard slopes ever-so-slightly, necessitating the leveling of each bed. Once this task was finished, we broke up the remaining layer of soil (mostly clay), removed offending root masses, and brought in the wonderful soil from the original vegetable garden that took 3 years and a lot of compost to build. We ended up having lots left for the future woodland garden, the backbone of which we'll start building in another week or two.

While the renovated vegetable garden has gone brilliantly, I've had an awful time with seedlings and have lost most while in the cold frame. It does a terrific job trapping in heat during the hottest parts of the day but seems not quite able to block out the frost. 2 weeks ago we had a few nights when the temperatures dropped near freezing, effectively killing the bulk of my seedlings. It's also possible that I have not left the cover on long enough to generate the necessary heat. Whatever the issue, I'm going to try and work it out before autumn, so I'm able to extend my crop a bit longer than usual. I look forward to the challenge!

Happy Equinox!

I took this photograph about a week ago, when the temperature hit a balmy 60 degrees and evidence of Spring's arrival was sprouting throughout the garden. Spring officially dropped by on Saturday, but you wouldn't know it from the weather. Snow fell from morning to night, and the temperature hovered in the 30s. I transplanted lots of spring bulbs the day before--daffodils, hyacinths, magic lilies, and Stars of Bethelehem. The cold spell was luckily too brief to kill them, and much of the snow melted today. Here in Missouri, Spring is always a precarious endeavor.

How to Build a Cold Frame

The title is not completely accurate, i.e. this entry will not lay out detailed instructions on building your own cold frame. Instead, it's about how we (my significant other and I) finally built our own cold frame from an old window and some 2X4 cedar boards. For the uninitiated, a cold frame (or cucumber frame, as they say in some parts) is sort of like a miniature greenhouse with a basic frame and a hinged roof on top. What's the point of building a cold frame? Well, it's a good way of extending the season in your vegetable garden. You can start plants early inside the frame or keep plants inside after frost hits. You can also protect young seedlings from possible frost in the early spring.

As I mentioned in some entries last year, I've been planning on building a cold frame for a couple of years. Last spring I made a makeshift cold frame using one of my raised beds and a glass window, and it worked well enough for protecting seedlings at the time. I toyed with purchasing a frame, perhaps a high quality cedar box, or a cheaper plastic box, but since a lot of people makes their own using an old window and a wooden frame, things we had access to, it made more sense to go the handmade route. So I chose the biggest window in the basement (the previous tenants kindly left us plenty) and measured it. 61"x28". Plenty of room. I consulted a number of websites, including some videos on YouTube, on the construction. This particular demonstration was especially helpful:



We decided to go with cedar, since it resists decay better than pine, and I want my cold frame to be a more or less permanent structure within the garden. Most of the construction was done by Rob, who laminated and screwed the boards together to ensure sturdiness and keep out any drafts. The photo above should give you a clear enough sense of how he put it together. Very basic, nothing fancy. Once the box was finished, we painted the window and the box, using the same trim paint the previous owners had so graciously left behind. We attached the window with two hinges and used an old metal pull we found on a cabinet in the basement (more leftovers). While the paint was drying, I dug up almost a foot of dirt from the spot where I planned to place the frame, lined the square with bricks for the frame to stand on, and then added a layer of gravels and rocks for drainage.

And here's how the cold frame looked yesterday:



While the cold frame is about 6 feet long, it looks pretty small in context of the landscape. The fact that it's buried about 6" in the ground helps too. It's going to be another week or two before I can tuck some seedlings inside, but I've already noticed the window collecting condensation and how warm the soil inside is compared to soil outside. I don't have a thermometer to test it, but I'd guess there's a 10 degree difference.

So that's how we built a cold frame. The task that had been persistently dogging me for over a year is officially finished, and I'm looking forward to another spring. Next, we'll be ripping out the grass along the south strip, tearing down and rebuilding our raised beds, and relocating the vegetable garden to make way for a woodland garden in the backyard. Perhaps we'll make headway on the grotto this summer? Stay tuned!

New Seeds for 2010

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lollyknit/ / CC BY 2.0

It’s February and just about time to start seeds for spring crops. I’ve already purchased my seeds for 2010, fewer than last year, since I’ve been thrifty and managed to save quite a few packets. But I am trying out three new tomato varieties and testing a couple of varieties of spinach. As with last year, I am focusing primarily on open pollinated varieties in order to achieve my long-term goal of self-sufficiency.

Here’s what I got this year:

From Pinetree Garden Seeds
Parsnip, "Harris Model"
Radish, "French Breakfast" (heirloom)
Spinach, "Giant Noble" (heirloom)
Spinach, "Viroflay" (French heirloom)
Swiss Chard, "Bright Lights"
Tomato, "Country Taste" (F1 hybrid)

From Territorial Seed Company
Fennel, "Perfection"
Rhubarb, "Victoria"
Tomato, "Chocolate Cherry" (cherry tomato)
Tomato, "Cuore Di Blue" (oxheart sauce tomato)
Tomato, "Japanese Trifele Black" (Russian heirloom)

Territorial is currently throwing in a packet of "Nantes" carrots for you to plant and donate to a food bank or soup kitchen, which is a neat idea. Hopefully I’ll get a decent return this year and have enough to give away. I highly recommend ordering through Territorial. Their seeds are high quality but not too expensive, and they sell a lot of heirlooms and open-pollinated seeds, in addition to organically grown seeds that can sometimes be hard to find elsewhere.

If you’re looking to spend less money for something unique, Pinetree is another great company. They sell smaller packets of seeds than most companies, about all you need for most kitchen gardens, and they specialize in heirlooms and ethnic vegetables and herbs. I always have a good experience when I order from them and spend about half as much.

Before I begin seed-starting, I need to assess my equipment and see if anything needs to be replaced. I also desperately need to get my gardening area in the basement in order and buy a proper bench or table to store my collection of odds & ends. I’m pretty methodical about seed-starting in that I try not to plant more than I can use. This happened a couple years ago; I planted 2-3 times more tomatoes than I actually needed and was never able to find homes for several plants. What I do now is figure out how many plants properly space will fit in each square plot and throw in a few more in case some seedlings don’t make it.

I’d be curious what methods any of my wayward readers use to start seeds. Do you reuse containers or make your own? Or do you, like me, have better luck with seed-starting systems (like the ones Gardener’s sells)? Cowpots, perhaps? What other methods have you tried?

2009 in Review

Better later than never. 2009 was, for the most part, a disappointing year in the vegetable garden. Though I was able to harvest earlier than in 2008, I did not manage the kind of yields I’d hoped for, apart from a few specific plants. Part of this was due to weather conditions; the 2009 growing season was about as wet as 2008. The snails and slugs were abundant, as were the crickets in late summer. The mold that was rampant on some plants in 2008 was mostly absent, however, and I’m not sure if this was based on some subtle shift in conditions or better monitoring on my part. But there were a few happy discoveries and surprises, and gardening for food continues to be a learning experience. So here’s an overview of what I grew, the successes and failures, and some hopes for 2010.

Successes

As mentioned in my spring 2009 review, I had good luck with fast-growing spring greens and lettuce. The kale held up through mid-summer, and I was able to plant more kale, bok choy, and raab for a second late fall harvest. I will likely continue with this plan for next year, planting as soon as we build and set out the coldframe in February or March.



But the biggest success in 2009 was the almost continuous harvest of raspberries from August through October. Back in 2008, I planted 5 "Caroline" raspberry bushes in the south garden and backyard. Two of the plants ended up dying that year, but the rest held through the winter and produced their first scant harvests in the spring of 2009. Not expecting much in the way of a second summer/fall harvest, I was surprised when I found the plants abundant with flower and eventually fat red berries. For a few weeks, I was throwing berries on my cereal and yogurt every morning at breakfast. I made several small batches of jam, a few jars of which were given as Christmas presents. After a disappointing season in the vegetable garden, it sure is satisfying to enjoy homemade raspberry jam on your toast.



Another small success came with the “Black Turtle” shelling beans. While the total harvest after shelling turned out the be less than I thought (enough for one meal), I was impressed at the speed with which the plants produced fat pods of black beans in the summer heat. Like most shelling beans, I was able to use them as snap beans when they were young, but most I allowed to dry for later harvest.

The only variety of tomato that produced a steady crop in 2009 was the “Enchantment” saladette. Nice little tomatoes, decent flavor, but definitely not something I’m itching to plant again as my main crop hybrid.

Additionally, I had good success with most the annual herbs I planted, especially the parsley and the dill. The cilantro performed well until mid-summer, after which it died back, a typical habit in this region.

Semi-Successes

While I didn’t get as good a harvest of potatoes as last year, it was solid enough for a meal or too, and I can certainly recommend giving the purple-skinned "Caribé" variety a try if waxy potatoes are your thing. I had decent harvests of the “Jade” and “Gold Crop” bush beans, though it was really only enough to augment what we got from our CSA. The “Dakota” shelling peas and “Sugar Sprint” snap peas also garnered mild yields, but I had hoped for better performance overall. I got a few “Cherokee Purple” and “Striped German” tomatoes, a scant harvest at best. And I harvested a few tiny heads of the Nutri-Bud broccoli.

Failures

I failed to get a harvest from the following:
Fava Bean, "Broad Windsor"
Buttercup Squash, "Discus Bush"
Romanesco Broccoli, "Shannon"
Broccoli, "Waltham 29"
Cabbage, "Early Jersey Wakefield"
Cabbage, "Danish Ballhead"
Cauliflower, "Early Snowball"
Summer Squash, "Ronde De Nice"
Tomatoes, "Black Krim"

Thr brassicaes held up well through the spring and summer, but around the time they started developing heads suffered critter attacks from which they were unable to recover. I do think that if they had been planted in a sunnier locale and able to develop larger heads faster, they might have stood a chance. But alas, it was not to be.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the fava bean plants only produced one pod before wilting in the summer heat. And the summer and winter squashes were doing quite well until succumbing to stormy conditions.

Lessons for Next Year

The main lesson I’ve learned over these few years of vegetable gardening is to pay close attention to weather conditions, to light and shade and wet. As I pointed out in my previous entry, I misjudged the conditions of the space I chose, which has led to struggles with certain pests, fungi, and overall plant sizes and yields. Luckily, I had a back-up plan in case the space did not work and am going forward with implementation. Rather than being irritated at having to move everything, I’m pretty upbeat about the project and hoping for greater success this coming season.

Another thing I learned in 2009 was the benefit of extending the season with early spring and late fall. With a makeshift coldframe (a glass window over one of the smaller beds, I was able to set out lettuce and spring greens in March when the frost had not quite subsided. And I was able to harvest raspberries, kale, raab, and bok choy through October and into November.

I’ve already started planning for this year’s garden and have bought another batch of seeds, which I’ll be discussing in my next entry.

What were your best and worst gardening experiences of 2009? What did you learn?

Planning

Not surprisingly, I've managed to allow nearly 3 months to slip by since my last post to this blog. In that time, I've finished the last harvest of the summer crops, planted a few greens for fall production, and attended to various end-of-season chores. Next month I plan on doing another end-of-the-year wrap-up, covering the new vegetable and plant varieties planting and posting some favorite photos from the year I haven't yet posted.

In this entry I'd like to talk about one winter garden chore that's already underway, which is the replanning of the south strip of yard that dominates most of my gardening activity. When we moved into this house, there wasn't much in the way of a garden beyond the somewhat neglected border along the east front walk. The sunny strip of lawn leading to the back gate contained one forsythia bush, lots of spider lilies, and not much else. The backyard was worse, containing only a brick patio and a small untended plot that had maybe been planted with marigolds at some point. I'd complain about weeds, but I've always liked the collection of violets, clover, and mock strawberries that grow throughout our yard. I spent a year holding back and just evaluating the space, deciding what I'd like to do with it. I checked the footprint and boundaries of our lot, measured the details (like bushes, fence, air conditioner, etc.), and in 2007 drew up the plan you see on the left. From the very beginning, I've always shot for a simple, organic design, building everything off a single undulating, snake-like path. While I'm pretty pleased with the execution of the concept overall, I've since realized that I didn't do a very good job accounting for the light conditions throughout the season. While there is a good strong patch of light on the deck and patio throughout the day, most of the backyard is dominated by filtered light throughout the height of the growing season. Of course, you wouldn't see this if you were looking at the backyard in late autumn through early spring, when all the offending trees lack any leaves.

I've been asked if it's possible to keep a vegetable garden in filtered or part shade conditions, and the answer is yes...sort of. More experienced gardeners are probably aware that spinach and other types of greens handle shade pretty well. Most other plants will survive at 4-6 hours full sun per day, but after two years of such conditions I can't honestly say they will thrive. Sure, my crops have been productive, but most of the fruits have been small. Not to mention the yields.

I began to think about this last year, concluding that I'd wait another year, see how the crops did, and move the garden if I continued to run into the same setbacks. One of the major problems in a small city lot like ours is finding space with reasonable levels of light, without trees or houses to block the sun. The optimal strip in our yard has always been dominated by the forsythia bush:


Now, I love forsythia bushes as much as the next person, but this one has just been a problem. It's so big that, for the throughway to be at usable, we're forced to trim it back in the late summer when it's sending out new shoots. These trimmings are apparently what's been keeping the bush from producing those gorgeous yellow flowers in early spring. Not that we've had much of a choice.

So, Step #1: Remove forsythia bush. Like so:



Now, I don't recommend removing an overgrown 10+ foot tall forsythia bush unless you absolutely have to. It's not quick, easy, or especially fun. But if you have to, start by trimming down the branches. Cut everything down to the stump. It'll make the rest of the job a lot easier. The only other step is to grab a shovel and dig the thing out. You'll notice that we haven't done this yet, having decided to wait until late winter, when the branches and roots are brittle and some of the plant has (hopefully) died.

Having cleared up that problem and feeling impatient to begin, I measured the details of the space and began laying the new plan out on paper. Along the strip where the bush had been, now covered in grass, I wanted to set new boxes where they would get optimal light and use roughly the same amount of square feet as in my current space. While it would have been convenient to move all the boxes we built in 2007 straight to the new space, the restrictions prevented that from being a possibility. I spent an hour or two sketching out rectangles on tracing paper before arriving at the final plan on the right. The skinny 2' wide raised beds turned out to be a lot more flexible in the narrow strip in terms of space, and they're also easier than the 4'x4' raised beds to reach into (for a shorty like me, at least). I was able to eke out roughly the same square footage and will be adding a box around the raspberry, which is one of the easiest ways to manage the brambles. Between the boxes, I will have the same 2' wide paths, possibly covered with landscape fabric or mulch (I haven't really decided). I'm trying this time to avoid removing large tracts of sod, since it's back-breaking work and not absolutely necessary when planting in boxes. Many potager and square-foot gardeners simply lay something at the bottom of the box to block out weed and tree growth. The hardest part of this new plan will be dismantling and rebuilding boxes from scrap and building new ones as needed. Not to mention moving the layers of soil and compost I've built in the last two years. Honestly, I'm looking forward to all the work ahead of me this spring. I hope it will bring me closer to my goal of producing a more substantial portion of my own food.

As far as the space left over when the vegetable garden is moved...well, I'll be working on replanning that this winter as well. As mentioned in my previous blog, I'd like to create a beautiful woodland habitat of mostly native plants with some edibles thrown in. More on that in the future!