Category Archives: Gardening

How does your garden grow?

08/10/2016 Nichole 1 Comment

We started our backyard gardening with one raised bed a few years ago, and last year we added a second. My general approach to gardening is beneficent neglect. I prune and water and weed when I wander past, but I don’t do much other than that. You might expect that to be a formula for pretty pathetic yields, but it works surprisingly well for us.

That said, the garden was looking pretty puny when we left for a weeklong vacation at the end of June. Our housesitters were going to water it daily, but I wasn’t expecting much from it. Then we got home and it was all green and thriving, and it was because the housesitters had installed an irrigation system in our absense. I highly recommend inviting a professional landscape designer to vacation at your house while you’re out of town.

The irrigation system kept the garden alive during our long, hot, dry July. Our region has resumed its deciduous rainforest climate over the last few weeks, and I’m beginning to worry that the plants are going to take over the entire yard.

In the Garden

lettuce gone to seed — Our volunteer lettuce, gone to seed.

We didn’t plant lettuce this year, but a volunteer plant from last year popped up anyway. It went to seed, and I decided to see just how large it would get. The answer so far is: very, very large. It has its own quadrant of the garden bed.

I hadn’t planned to plant as many tomatoes as we have in past years, because none of us likes tomatoes. So naturally our tomato plants are always prolific producers. Our neighbor Farmer Ted was giving away tons and tons of tomato starters, though, so we took six of them. They did nothing at all for weeks and weeks, and then suddenly they were ginormous. I’ve had to prune a couple of them because they keep escaping their cages and flopping over onto the pepper plants. Speaking of which: I am in love with the tiny bell peppers we’ve been growing, Pete and I canned some delicious spicy banana peppers, and something keeps eating our jalapeños before they have a chance to grow.

I tried to grow yellow squash in a bucket last year, and it didn’t work at all. This year we put the squash in the garden bed instead, and they were doing great until they started getting hit by pickle worms. I think the eggplant might be suffering from being so close to the zucchini, though. The leaves are blocking a lot of sunlight. We’ll space things out a little more next year.

The cucumber is in the same bed as the squash. Apparently cucumbers grow ninja-style, because some days I go out there and find a full-size cuke where there was only a blossom a day earlier. The cucumbers were doing wonderfully until the pickle worm found them. Now about 50 percent of them have holes in them. At least we got to make a few pickles before the plant was attacked.

Lessons Learned

The raised beds are too close together. It’s not a problem when the plants are small, but right now it’s tough to get between them to pick anything because I keep getting grabbed by cucumber vines or stepping on a squash leaf. I’m not sure we’ll be able to move the ones that we’ve already built, but if and when we add another it’ll be a little farther away.

I miss having a field of lettuce. We’ll definitely plant some next year.

The squash and zucchini need their own space.

We really, really don’t need six tomato plants.

Diversions, Gardening

The time I spent the day at the Mother Earth News Fair

04/13/2016 Nichole

Saturday was a frigid, blustery day, and I spent most of it outside at the Mother Earth News Fair. My mom had wanted to go, so I bought passes for us a few months ago. But Saturday morning rolled around and she wasn’t feeling well, so I recruited my friend Carrie to go with me instead. She’s a good sport.

I went in to the day thinking that the Mother Earth News Fair was pretty much a hippie festival. It turns out it’s more about homesteading and farming, both of which I believe hippies are into. So I guess I was partially correct.

But the fair was about other things, too. Like mead, wood-fired ovens, and “prepping.”

Lots and lots of prepping.

I have mixed feelings about the prepping movement. On one hand, I would like to be prepared for a natural disaster or something that would knock power out for awhile, etc. On the other hand, I’ve read a lot of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, and I’m not keen on living in a society where I’d have to get into a knife fight over a piece of beef jerky or a shoelace. So it might be best for me if I stay unprepared for that sort of scenario, so I meet my demise swiftly after the doomsday event.

Anywho.

I only went to a few of the presentations, and I wasn’t overly impressed with them. There were a lot to choose from, though, so maybe I just picked a few duds. The expo area was pretty fun to explore, though, and I tried a number of new things there. Such as:
– I patted a tiny goat.
– I tasted five varieties of hickory syrup, which until Saturday I didn’t know existed.
– I tried several flavors of hemp soda and didn’t care for any of them.

The goat was very soft. I did not pat the bunny.

I bought a jar of sweet and spicy pickles from GR Picklers. They are delicious and so spicy that I can only eat one little pickle chip at a time. Speaking of spicy, I also bought a jar of Fire Cider. It’s apple cider vinegar with a touch of habanero and horseradish, among other things. It tastes terrible. I bought it for Rockford’s dad, who takes apple cider vinegar every day and loves horrifically spicy things. I haven’t gotten a report back from him on his opinion of it yet.

Other cool things I saw at the fair:

This wreath was made from succulents, and it was lovely and oddly soothing to gaze upon. It was also $70, which is why I did not bring it home with me.

The hand-forged garden tools from Homestead Iron in Missouri were so beautiful that I don’t know if I’d be able to put them in the dirt. They looked very sturdy, and they come with a lifetime guarantee. I was very, very tempted to buy one, but I didn’t because I was low on funds and I don’t do much gardening. Carrie bought a trowel, though. I look forward to finding out how much she loves it and then buying one of my own from their website.

I don’t normally make a practice of accepting free cookies from people in trucks, but I made an exception for the King Arthur Flour people. The King Arthur Flour truck is ridiculously cute, with a big red spatula on the top and a rolling pin bumper on the front. They were matching donations made to the local food bank, so I left some money and took two cookies and a recipe for their chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.

Other than the Arctic winds, it was a nice way to spend a Saturday. I’m not sure I’d buy a pass for the full weekend again — we didn’t go back on Sunday — but I’d like to go again next year just for the expo.

Gardening, partner campaign, Reading, reviews

How to hide a whole salad in your front yard

02/02/2016 Nichole 2 Comments

Farmer Ted is a gentleman in our circa-1955 neighborhood who has converted nearly all of the property around his home into an urban farm. He has fruit trees, a small pond and some ducks in the back yard, and a grid of raised beds covers his fenced-in front yard. He has chickens, too, and he made an ingenious wheeled coop for them that he moves from raised bed to raised bed every season. I admire the whole set-up every time I walk past it, and I almost always notice a small detail or smart feature that I’d never spotted before.

The neighbors across the street from him, however, are not so impressed. According to Farmer Ted, they’ve reported him to the city for all sorts of infractions in an effort to shut down his sustainability efforts. I haven’t discussed the matter with them, but he says they want the neighborhood to look like it did 55 years ago — with a green lawn and some nice, tidy landscaping.

So Farmer Ted wants to grow his own food on his own land, but his neighbors want the view from their living room to be more landscape than farmland. Is there a compromise to be found? Well, maybe not for Farmer Ted and his neighbors. I’m pretty sure the neighbors listed their house for sale recently, so I guess Farmer Ted won that fight.

Angela England's "Gardening Like a Ninja" It may be too late for our neighbors, but you can avoid a lot of gardening-related contention with your neighbors by becoming a Ninja Gardener.

Angela England’s new book, “Gardening Like a Ninja: A Guide to Sneaking Delicious Edibles into Your Landscape,” tells you which edible plants are most easily hidden in your traditional landscaping and shows you how to arrange them to look picture-perfect, but it’s a great resource even if you don’t have cranky neighbors to assuage. The book contains impressive lists of edible plants, their uses and their ideal growing conditions. Angela shows you how to build your edible garden from the ground up — lingonberries or strawberries down low and lavender or persimmon up top, perhaps? — which is very helpful for gardening novices like myself.

The list of edible plants in Angela’s book is as eye-opening as it is informational. You’d expect a plant like rosemary to be in such a guide, but did you know you can eat parts of a hosta? Dice that into your salad and eat it. (Or wrap it in bacon and broil it, maybe. Angela says the tender, leafy shoots are somewhat asparagus-like.)

So far we’ve kept our gardening efforts confined to the back yard, but “Gardening Like a Ninja” has me looking at the long-neglected island bed in the front yard in a new way. There are two dogwood trees and a big bush whose name I don’t recall anchoring it, and there used to be a lot of lavender around the anonymous bush. As much as I’d love to have some fruit trees, I’m not going to take down the big guys already there to make that happen. The lavender is pretty well dead, though, and everything else out there is ornamental, so I’m going to spend some quality time with “Gardening Like a Ninja” over the next few weeks and see if I can’t come up with an appetizing way to bring that sad space in the yard back to life.

Disclaimer: Angela England sent me a copy of “Gardening Like a Ninja” for review.