June harvest

Goodness, it's been a long time since I've visited my blog. Chalk it up to the project that ate my brain at work, lots of visiting family, and the demands of my garden. At this rate I hardly dare show my face tomorrow at our SAGBUTT gathering (Kruckeberg Botanic Garden; check our Facebook group for details).

Last year I wanted to see if I could harvest fresh vegetables 12 months a year and I surprised even myself by doing so, easily. I continued to harvest carrots planted last year right up until May, when some carrots that were part of a salad mixture sown in the greenhouse this winter, were ready to pull. I ran out of leeks and turnips and parsnips by the end of March but I'm sure if I had planned better I'd have been able to harvest them for a couple more months. I'm still cutting kale from that same winter sowing. The other salad greens are just a memory.

This month it's lots of long green things--fava beans, anaheim chilis, shelling peas, spring onions, baby garlic, garlic scapes:
The fava beans are a new variety (for me), Imperial Green Longpod. They weren't kidding about the long part.

I planted my favas last November, covering them with a lightweight row cover so they wouldn't get washed out by rain or eaten by mice. I really think I need to start planting more things in the fall and early winter. Parsnips planted in early spring are a disaster for me. The one year I planted them in January I had a great crop.

I'm going to try to keep a tally of my harvest this year just to get an idea of the economic value of my "puttering in the garden" as the undergardener puts it. I've arbitrarily declared the gardening year to begin in June. So far this gardening year I've harvested 4# shelling peas, 4# fava beans, 6 anaheim chilis, a couple of green bell peppers, 12 carrots, 10 heads of garlic, 3# of kale, sorrel, and basil.

Ready in a week or two: Cucino cucumbers, and Parthenon zucchini.

In Memory of Bill Holm

edited to remove the video of Bill reading this poem because it wouldn't display no matter how often I tweaked the code, and to add a few words of explanation that wouldn't come to me when I first posted this.

I mentioned to a friend yesterday that I knew Bill Holm when he had red hair. I remember hearing him play a wheezy old organ in a tiny church in SW Minnesota, and I remember him saying that as wonderful as it was to hear the music of JS Bach it was something else entirely to be able to play the music of JS Bach. And I remember many of his poems, the whimsical and the serious, but none so well as this one, which was printed in (I think) the New Yorker magazine, that I clipped out, and stuck between the pages of an old address book, and that has traveled with me to many homes all over the country for over 30 years, and from time to time it slips from its hiding place into my lap and I pick up that tiny clipping and realize that this poem changed my life because I dared to try to dance those strange steps with jumpy rhythms. Thank you, Mr. Holm.

Advice

Someone dancing inside us
has learned only a few steps:
the "Do-Your-Work" in 4/4 time,
the "What-Do-You-Expect" Waltz.
He hasn't noticed yet the woman
standing away from the lamp.
the one with black eyes
who knows the rumba.
and strange steps in jumpy rhythms
from the mountains of Bulgaria.
If they dance together,
something unexpected will happen;
if they don't, the next world
will be a lot like this one.

Bill Holm, 1943 - 2009

Starting Tomatoes

I planted my tomato seeds this evening. It seemed like the right thing to do on a raw, snowy day.

Tiger Mountain is not a good location for growing tomatoes. The nights are cool (rarely above 50 degrees), the ground stays even colder on account of the numerous springs and seeps just below the topsoil . Still, I wouldn't be much of a gardener if I weren't willing to rise to the challenge.

Over the last 10 years I've learned a few tricks to keeping the tomato patch a little warmer than the rest of the garden. And this will be the fourth year that I've hedged my bets by planting a few tomatoes in the greenhouse where I can really coddle them. Every once in awhile we have a warmer than usual summer, and I'm blessed with all the tomatoes I can possibly eat and preserve. And every year around this time, hope trumps experience and I start seeds of varieties that, if it's a warm summer, will maybe give me a few really nice slicing tomatoes, probably in September.

San Marzano is my standby for cooking and canning. It's loaded with pectin, and not very juicy at all so it makes wonderful thick sauce. This one is most reliable in the greenhouse, but I get bigger harvests from the ones I plant outside.Fortunately the green ones ripen well indoors.
Stupice isn't the tastiest tomato by any means but I know that no matter how cold a summer we have, I will get some ripe tomatoes from this plant. They'll be small and misshapen, but by god, I will have my tomatoes!
Ferline and Legend are my hedge against early blight if we have a wet summer with cool nights. I can't tell the two apart, but I continue to plant both, and marvel that a disease-resistant tomato of such perfect appearance could also taste so good.
Loveheart, because one must have a cherry tomato.
Sungella is like the popular Sungold cultivar, but a little bigger, about the size of a hen's egg. It produces reliably no matter what kind of a summer we're having, and it's so good I don't know why I bother with Stupice, except that the undergardener is deeply suspicious of tomatoes that are not red.
Early Goliath is the only beefsteak-type tomato I have ever gotten to ripen outdoors here. It's worth battling the slugs for these. They're that good.
Marmande is getting a second try. I've tasted this one and know how wonderful it is, but I didn't get a single ripe one last summer.
Anna Russian is another "stretch" tomato. Last year I didn't get any ripe ones. Two summers ago I got a few, and they were so good I just have to try again and hope for a hot summer.
Early Girl, only because the seeds were free and I remember growing this one in Utah, where just a couple plants bore well enough to give me a 5 gallon bucket of tomatoes every few days.
Costeluto Genovese is a new one for me. It's an old Italian cooking variety and I don't know what I was thinking. The climate here is nothing like Genoa.

Last year I surrounded my plants with gallon jugs of water. The idea was that the water would heat up during the day and keep the plants a little warmer at night. It seemed to help. This year I'm going to paint the jugs black so the water will get even warmer during the day. And I'm going to erect a cloche over the bed to keep the plants covered at night and on cool days.

This is going to be the year for abundant ripe tomatoes. I can feel it. I have hope.

GBBD February 2009

Not much to write because this behemoth is working its way through a couple acres of neglected pasture right now and it's fun to watch it chew up years of overgrown brambles.



In the garden: snowdrops (almost), cyclamen coum, hellebore, and black pussy willow




In the woods: hazel (so why won't my garden hazels bloom for me? They have far better growing conditions than these nut trees!), and skunk cabbage.

To see more pictures of what's in bloom around the world, head on over to Carol's place.

February Harvest

Updated to edit photo of garden bloggers. ;)



Looking a little weatherbeaten but still very edible, brussel sprouts and kale (winterbor, red russian, and tuscan black). I used to regard brussel sprouts that didn't form nice tight buds as a failure until I discovered this recipe, which is actually easier to prepare when the sprouts are loose and leafy than when they are firm and rolling around on the cutting board.

From the ground: scallions, turnips, carrots, rutabaga, jerusalem artichokes, one beet (the rest were too small to bother with), and one potato that I missed when I dug last fall. I dug around in vain to find some more parsnips but I must have gotten them all last month. The potato, which grew from one I missed the previous year, is in better shape than the ones I have in storage, making me think that some varieties, at least, might be better off left in the bed and dug as needed.

Celery, garlic chives, and miner's lettuce are still going strong in the (unheated) greenhouse.

The jute coffee bean bag on the ground represents a harvest of a different kind---a wonderful crop of new acquaintances, courtesy of the first Seattle Area Garden Bloggers Meetup, which some of still cannot resist calling SAGBUTT. We're a diverse bunch, ranging from professional to amateur gardeners, from talented artists and designers to the aesthetically-challenged (that would be me), from people who love to write to those for whom writing is like passing a kidney stone (that would be me, again). We all left the get-together looking forward to the next one, our heads full of shared ideas, and our arms full of shared produce, flowers, and the wonderful jute bags that Paula brought, some of which are now keeping the grass down on some of my more challenging garden paths. Thanks, Karen and Melanthia, for helping to bring us together.