Life on Tiger Mountain

Christmas vegetables

2011-12-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

I missed the deadline for Matron's Christmas Vegetables post, but I hate to let these photos go to waste.

The lettuce is growing in my greenhouse, but everything else is in beds outdoors. The kale, upper right, needs bird netting to keep the deer from eating it all. Smart deer. Now that we've had several hard frosts, the kale is so sweet you could almost make a dessert out of it.

Can this garden be saved?

2011-03-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

Update: Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better, right? A late, late killing frost took out the wisteria and several shrubs. It took me all summer to accept that they were dead, and I'm still trying to come to terms with the demise of the wisteria. I dug all of the buttercup out of two beds, divided perennials, moved and pruned shrubs. And when I went inside to get the camera, all of the buttercup grew back. Garden Rehab 2.0 is about to begin.

When we moved to Tiger Mountain there was exactly one ornamental plant on the property--a stringy 9 foot tall lilac that sported maybe a half-dozen pathetic blooms at the very top. After the important business of making a falling-down house habitable we turned our attention to the outside. I hired an award-winning landscape designer to create a set of garden spaces on two sides of the house. He brought in a huge backhoe to dig out the glacial till and replace it with his own special fast-draining, root-enhancing soil. He brought in huge granite boulders and laid a patio and walkway of granite slabs. He added some full-size trees and shrubs. It was stunning.
Over the next few years I added more perennials and shrubs. I became a regular at the Heronswood open houses and at the Hort Society's annual plant sale. I shuffled things around, I weeded, I pruned, and I mulched. Some years I had homegrown flowers on my table all 12 months. Even the lilac began to bloom heavily every spring.
Mistakes were made. Some plants just weren't right for my cool summers and failed to thrive. Some (most?) shrubs quickly exceeded their purported 5-ft-at-maturity height. Invasive seed blew in and tried to take over. I changed jobs. My new job required a lot of travel. I expanded my vegetable garden to where it took most of my free time. In a single summer an untended garden can get a bit out of control. In two summers, it becomes overwhelming. It's been mumble years since anyone could call my ornamental garden stunning. It's time to make things right again.
In four months garden bloggers from all over will come to town here. Although I haven't blogged regularly for some time, I tremble with fear at the prospect of, say, Carol asking to come see my hand-forged hoes. Bad enough to be a garden-blogging dilettante; I fear being exposed as a garden dilettante. And perhaps if I can't be an inspiration to other bloggers, I can at least serve as a terrible warning to others. THIS is what happens when you ignore that buttercup creeping in from the fields. THIS is what happens when you choose plants unwisely and end up having to whack them back every year. This is what happens when you don't force your hydrangeas into dormancy before the first cold snap. Fellow gardeners, THIS is my garden at its worst. Don't let this happen to you.

So there's my hall of shame. However, I do believe in redemption. I know that with nothing more than some good hand tools, which I have, and hours of hard work, this garden can realize the potential it had 10 years ago. I can do this. My ground rules are few and really boil down to the single principle that I can't buy my way out of this one.

I made this mess, I have to clean it up myself. No fair hiring day laborers to do the dirty work. Besides, how will they know what treasures lie beneath the weeds and debris?
Covering up the weedy areas with a thick layer of mulch is not an option. Mulch there will be, and plenty of it, over clean ground.
No shopping for distractions, whether garden art or perfect plants already in bloom. New plants have to be propagated from existing ones, or started from seed.

Watch this space. Things are going to get better.

Gifts from the November Garden

2010-11-08T16:22:00.001-08:00

Here are a few of my favorite things from the garden these days.

Escarole frittata:

Beets for roasting and making ravioli:

Pumpkins to stuff with everything good:

A Dozen Daylilies

2010-08-05T11:59:00.001-07:00

I tell myself I'm just thinning them

2010-04-19T18:34:00.000-07:00

Cherry Belle Radish

But really it's that I can't wait for them to get big before I eat them.

Plum Lovely

2010-03-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

I pruned the plum tree today. It's nice to have flowers in this vase again, even if they aren't the most graceful-looking stems.

Lycopersicomania

2010-03-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

I hope that when the fifth edition of the DSM is released it will include recognition of my condition--the compulsion to grow more tomatoes than I can possibly use. I'm positive it's a disease. There's no other explanation why an otherwise [relatively] sane gardener would start 12 different varieties of tomatoes (and about 5 seeds of each variety) under lights when she can use maybe 8 plants total.
Did I mention the cupboard still brimming with jars of marinara and puttanesca sauces, pureed tomatoes, and diced tomatoes? The blobs of tomato paste in the freezer? Apparently I've forgotten how I complained about "the tyranny of the tomato patch" as I picked and pureed and simmered
and dried
my way through August. September. October. (It was a long season.)

I rationalize. I had such great luck with the heirloom varieties (Goliath, Anna Russian, Costoluto, and Marmande) last summer that I can't resist trying them again. I even grew this beauty!
How can I not try for a 20-ouncer this year?

But if this year turns out to be a "cabbage summer" the big beautiful heirloom varieties won't ripen so I need a couple of San Marzanos for sauce, even though I prefer the Costolutos. And if it's a really chilly damp summer, I know I can rely on Ferline and Legend to fight the blight, and for Sungella to ripen no matter what. The obligatory new variety, Mr. Stripey aka Tigerella, promises great yields and wonderful flavor in only 57 days.

I thought I was done with cherry tomatoes but last fall I discovered a method for oven-drying tomatoes and I've been enjoying them all winter in salads, scattered over roasted vegetables, pureed to flavor stews, and just for snacking on.
Finally there are the seeds for a variety from the Azores, Coracao de bois, a gift from a fellow gardener. I can't wait to see how it performs in the Pacific Northwest, but no matter what, it will be a reminder of a lovely afternoon with one of my favorite garden bloggers.

Did I mention the hereditary nature of this disease? I remember my mother used to start literally hundreds of tomatoes in the house every spring. They covered every window sill and the dining room table. I have reason to suspect at least one of my siblings is similarly afflicted.

I guess until they find a cure for Lycopersicomania I'll be grateful for fellow gardeners who seem happy to take my extra plants off my hands. And I guess we'll be having pasta with tomato sauce for dinner tonight. Gotta' use it up in the next 4 months!

A touch of the tropics

2010-03-05T14:12:00.000-08:00

Unless I stand up and move around, the view from my office is mostly that of grey skies, rain, other office buildings, plus one architectural delight. But, on my windowsill. . .

it's a tropical paradise.

Objects in winter may be tougher than they appear.

2010-03-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

This deciduous azalea, rhododendron mucronulatum, starts blooming in February even when there is snow on the ground. The flowers are the most delicate in appearance of anything in the garden. It always amazes me that something so fragile-looking could be so tough.

Worth the wait

2010-03-03T07:54:00.000-08:00

I planted a winter hazel in my front bed so many years ago I no longer remember the name of the cultivar, although I probably have it written down somewhere. This winter it is blooming for the first time. I've been enjoying it for about a month now, when I pruned it and noticed the buds. This week the shrub itself burst into bloom.

I love it when the branch that most needs to be removed from the plant is also the perfect one to display in a vase.

Winter Salad

2010-03-02T13:45:00.000-08:00

Mache, aka corn salad, aka lamb's lettuce, or if we want to be precise, Valerianella locusta, self-sows (enthusiastically so) along the south side of my garden shed. It's usually the first harvest of the growing season. A handful of sweet violets makes a perfect garnish for this soft, almost buttery-tasting green.
At the risk of damaging my locavore cred. I will admit to adding a chopped up orange or two to the salad bowl. It's a perfect combination.

June harvest

2009-06-26T17:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Starting Tomatoes

2009-02-26T21:48:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-15T23:59:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-14T09:35:00.000-08:00

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.

I got Nuthin'

2009-01-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

For this month's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, I mean. Last year I had quite a few things--sarcococca ruscifolia, a hellebore, and a hardy cyclamen, but this year even the flowering houseplants are dormant. (Or they are dead from neglect. I'm not good with plants that I can't water with a garden hose.) So all I can offer is my Christmas wreath, festooned with dried hydrangea and sedum flowers (the brown stuff that doesn't look like pine cones):

and this cabbage 'Pyramid' that refused to form a proper head, and looks kind of like a flower.

However, I do have something really fine--salad greens, and I didn't even have to plant them. They just self-seeded in a bed in my greenhouse. Turns out that miner's lettuce (claytonia) is pretty frost-tolerant.

2009-01-11T19:49:00.004-08:00

So I got this mini-bottle of St. Germain Elderflower liqueur in my Christmas stocking and the tag on the bottle suggested mixing it with champagne. It just happens that there was a bottle of very inexpensive sparkling wine in my pantry and I was in the mood for something spritzy tonight.

Oh. My. God. Talk about your elixer of the gods, this is it. I'm a bit of a nut for elderflower anything. When I can find it there's usually a bottle of elderflower syrup in the frig, ready to mix with sparkling water, on those rare hot summer days and on those dark drizzly days when you think summer, hot or otherwise, will never come again.

When I googled for an image of the bottle, itself a cool object, I discovered that one of the Garden Ranters had discovered St. Germain. I'm tempted to start a garden club just so I can serve elderflower cocktails at the first meeting.

Meet-up!

2009-01-05T13:58:00.001-08:00

Karen over at Greenwalks has organized a meetup for Seattle-area garden bloggers. It's Saturday February 7, at the Center for Urban Horticulture, and I bet lurkers would be welcome, too. Thanks, Karen, for making this happen.

January Harvest

2009-01-04T16:09:00.004-08:00

Sure there's a freezer full of summer vegetables, and there are still plenty of potatoes, winter squash, pumpkins, garlic, and shallots stored in the pantry and the garage. But those are for the nights when I come home long after dark, or those weekends when it's too miserable to want to do anything outside. On a raw but otherwise decent Sunday in early January, it's fun to push aside the mulch* and dig up leeks, parsnips, yellow carrots, and a beautiful red cabbage.

*This year I wanted to see which crops would winter over, given enough protection. I buried a couple of beds ~two feet deep in big-leaf maple leaves, kept in place with wire-mesh panels forming hoops over the beds. So far I've successfully protected all of my root vegetables from temperatures in the low teens. The kale, brussel sprouts, and cabbages seem to be doing okay without any protection.

Essentials Schmessentials

2009-01-01T11:03:00.002-08:00

Hat tip to Pandagon for this one. According to the Pew Research Center the list of things Americans (meaning people living in the USA) consider essential is growing. Their list in order of necessity, and my $.02:

Car. Unfortunately yes. I have nothing against bicycles, but I live 8 miles from town, 10 miles from the transit hub. Via a busy 2-lane road with little to no shoulder. And it rains here. Hard. A lot.
Clothes Washer. Yes. It's a quality of life thing.Nearly every item of clothing I own is washable, including most things that say "dry clean only". And again, it's about10 miles to the nearest coin laundry.
Clothes Dryer. I have one and use it but I could get along without it. I already dry quite a bit of my clothing on racks.
Home Air Conditioning. Don't have it, don't miss it. That says more about the Tiger Mountain microclimate than it does about my stoicism in the face of a heatwave.
Microwave. Have one but I consider it a convenience more than an essential.
TV set. Does it count if there's no antenna so it can only be used for watching movies? My next computer monitor will be both larger and more clear, so the TV set can get the boot.
Car Air Conditioning. I'm glad I have it, but I grew up with the "Model 460 A/C" (all four windows rolled down and 60 mph) and it wasn't so bad. See local microclimate above.
Home Computer. Oh yes. It lets me work from home, thus saving me a lot of commute time and driving in general.
Cell Phone. My employer says yes, so I guess it's a necessity. Most of the people who work for or with me are a couple of time zones away, so the phone gets used a lot. Also I wouldn't know what's going on in younger daughter's life if she couldn't text me.
Dishwasher. I love it but I could live without it.
Cable or Satellite TV. Don't have it, don't want it.
High Speed Internet. See home computer, above.
Flat Screen TV. Don't have it don't want it. Love my flat screen computer monitor, though.
iPod. Seriously? Okay, I admit it, I deeply covet YD's iPod Touch, which came free with her laptop. But not enough to go out and buy one of my own. I do have an inexpensive MP3 player with FM radio, and it's the radio part that I consider essential. During last year's lengthy power outage it was our only source of information about road conditions, school closings, etc.

Because I consider so few things on that list essential, I believe I'm entitled to add a few essentials of my own:

Land of my own (without restrictive covenants). Land that I can use for planting a garden, raising chickens, hanging clothes out to dry, and just providing an escape from the unnatural world.
A wood-burning stove. Not just for power outages, either. There's just no heat like the heat that comes from a wood fire.
Endless running water. When the power goes out so does our well. It's nice to be able to fetch buckets from the creek to flush the toilet, and wash ourselves.
A cat or two. I've had a cat or two or more for all but a few years in my life, and those were not the best years.

How about you? What's essential to your everyday life?

Good Riddance

2008-12-31T09:40:00.001-08:00

Cruel, even by April standards

2008-04-19T10:38:00.004-07:00

It's snowing on the lower flanks of Tiger Mountain. And doing its best to stick. That little 'Frost' Peach in the foreground? In a typical year every single blossom sets fruit and I have to thin hundreds, if not thousands of tiny green peaches so that I can get a crop of good-sized peaches that don't break the branches. I'm thinking that won't be necessary this year, unless there are some very determined and cold-tolerant bees out there.

The usual suspects

2008-04-15T16:26:00.005-07:00

For garden bloggers' bloom day I was going to point you to last April's entry and say "same old, same old" but it's not the same old at all. It's more like last March. This year the bleeding hearts are barely poking their leaves above the ground, no buds on the maples, no trillium in the woods, no elderberry, salmonberry, or camas lily, no rhodies, no cherry blossoms, no apple blossoms, and no tulips, although blame there can probably be placed on two naughty goats who figured out that the fence charger was on the fritz and wriggled under the mesh to browse amongst the perennials.

What's blooming, or about to break into bloom:

anemone nemerosa
azalea (but only the one in the very warmest spot)
camellia japonica (one, with a single bud)
daffodils
daphne odora
forsythia (late!)
hepatica
hellebores
hyacinth
spireathunbergii

In the orchard:

peach tree

In the woods:

Indian plum
wild cherry,
skunk cabbage

In the lawn:

dandelions

And, in two hanging baskets on my porch, inadvertently ignored on every bloom day post since they were planted back in September, frozen countless times, watered only by the snow and rain, these incredibly stalwart violas.

Friday Five and a Puppy Picture

2008-04-11T11:27:00.003-07:00

Posting has been extremely light for, um, the last six months or so. Blame it on too much travel for the high-tech career that funds my low-tech gardening, baking, and livestock-raising lifestyle. Or the weather. Or an unshakable ennui that seems to be lifting, finally, with a return to longer days.

In an attempt to return to regular posting I'm going to fall back two blogger standbys--a silly list and a cute animal picture. My cats are both notoriously private creatures and so old as to not be particularly cute. So it falls to the puppy, who is 14 weeks old today, to be my muse:

Now for the list. Dang, my muse is napping. Okay, how about five online comics I read religiously:
Indexed
xkcd
Married to the Sea
Wondermark
Get Your War On (Warning: contains strong language and political themes)

Sorry I haven't written

2008-03-09T08:40:00.006-07:00

I've been a little distracted lately:

Oodles of Noodles

2008-01-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

Fresh egg noodles, made with duck eggs. And while I wait for the water to boil, I'd like to take a minute to express my appreciation for my three ducks, W, X, and Y:
As they are notoriously camera-shy and always on the go, I've been trying for weeks to get a decent photo. This will have to do. You see them as they are for pretty much every daylight hour, working to aerate and fertilize my lawn, and eating any slug that crosses their path. Unlike the chickens they do not tear up my planting beds, dig big holes for dust bathing, and they eat slugs. They (W and X) laid steadily through the coldest darkest days of winter--big thick-shelled eggs with huge golden yolks. They continue to out-lay the hens and, did I mention that they eat slugs? Here they are aerating the lawn:
(Top-right is Maria Theresa making a dash for the woods) They drill their beaks right down into the ground leaving perfectly round holes.

W suffered a dislocated leg in of a dog attack last summer that killed most of my flock. I popped it back into place, but she still walks with a limp . And yes, that is how she earned her name.

First Bloom Day of 2008

2008-01-14T16:46:00.000-08:00

I don't know when I've been this excited to post what's in bloom. I've been like a little kid waiting for Santa Claus, ever since I realized I'd have three things blooming in my garden today.

As I predicted last month, the sarcococca ruscifolia is in full bloom, although you have to look closely because the flowers aren't very showy. (Waverly Fitzgerald of Living in Season has a much better photo.)And to answer Chuck B's question last month, it smells wonderful. A single branch will perfume a small room but it's not at all cloying.

Also, as predicted, the first of the hellebores. 'Briggs Double' I think this one is. The annoying thing about hellebores is the way the flowers always face down at the ground, which makes getting a good photo something of a challenge:

Finally, my cyclamen coum, or rather one of them, the only one that I can find this year. I suspect I dug out the rest of them accidentally when I divided my hostas, with which they are interplanted. (If you got a hosta from me last fall check it out; you may have a cyclamen blooming on that spot.) This one may have escaped that fate because I had the good sense to stick a label in the ground last year.

Ever since I saw this gorgeous amaryllis blooming on a stucco wall in Italy a couple years ago, I've wanted to grow a really deep red amaryllis.

This year's is red enough, I guess, but it seems lacking somehow, compared to these:

Think it might just be the background?

Ephemera

2008-01-07T22:08:00.000-08:00

We all have them--those little bits of our personal history mixed in with our present. A hand-drawn Mother's Day card tucked away with a stash of unused greeting cards, or a ticket stub from a long-ago play that turns up every time you use a dressy handbag. A few months ago I bought a new sewing machine. I haven't sewn in years and my box of notions was a tangle of thread. I started to sort it out and came across some thread on wooden spools. The memories unwound faster than the thread--of my mother's treadle sewing machine that I learned to sew on, of using my mother's new electric Singer to complete my first home ec project of pajamas and a bathrobe. The machine had snap-in cams that allowed you to do all kinds of decorative stitches and I made full use of those stitches on my project, which somehow so offended Miss S____*, the home ec. teacher, that she gave me a D- . As she did with every other project in that class. That woman hated me and the feeling was mutual. Okay, so some memories are best left untapped. I digress.

Carol, over at May Dreams Gardens, has been sorting through her seeds, a popular pastime for us northern gardeners in January, and she came across some seeds from 1986 and 1987. She wondered if anyone had any seeds older than hers. I was pretty sure I didn't. I have a few packets of seeds from 1999. For some reason I bought larger packages of seeds that year, in many cases a full ounce instead of the mini pkts, probably because the larger size seemed like such a good deal, and because I was planting in a 60 x 60 foot plot back then. Unfortunately circumstances dictated that I wouldn't be growing any vegetables for the next 4 or 5 years, and never again in that giant plot. (No I didn't move. It's just an unhappy story that I'm not ready to tell.) Apparently I stored the seeds well because the beets, tatsoi, arugula, and peas were all still viable last summer. The butter beans were either non-viable or the field mice dug them up and ate them before they could sprout.

There were other, slightly older packets, gifts mostly, of flower seeds, of the type that you really do not want to plant a lot of, like lantana.

And then I hit paydirt:

Not seeds left over from my now -retired 3600 square foot garden, nor from my plot in the community garden on the campus in Santa Cruz, nor from the tiny beds surrounding my patio in the Santa Cruz condo, nor from the garden I grew in styrofoam coolers on a balcony in New Jersey when my oldest daughter was an infant. These are from one of the early gardens at our first "real" home in Salt Lake City, the year I actually ordered seeds from a catalog instead of just picking up a few sixpacks of seedlings at the home center. They accidentally sent two packets of parsley and apparently I've never opened the second one, probably because parsley seeds just seem to find their way into my garden by other means and really, who needs 500 parsley plants? Funny, though, how a packet of seeds could bring back so many memories. I don't think I'll open the package just yet.

So, 1983! Has anyone found any seeds in their stash that are older?

*I originally typed her full name, but then, just for grins I googled her, and my goodness, that old biddy is still around, heading up the WCTU in my old home town. She must not have been as old as I remembered her, because that home ec. class was a long, long time ago.

Secret Weapon in the War on Gloom

2008-01-05T04:20:00.000-08:00

It's been a particularly wet and dark winter here on Tiger Mountain. The chicken yard is a sea of mud (note to self: must call tree trimmers to have them deliver a few trailer loads of wood chips), the ducks are finding places to swim where there should not be swimming holes, and it's been a challenge to do even the most rudimentary cleanup/pruning/transplanting that really does need to get done this month. More and more I find myself turning to the bottle. No, not the gin, this bottle:

Okay, it's a jar. And the contents are pure liquid (okay, paste!) sunshine. Datil Pepper Relish.

A couple of years ago a blogger down in Florida, whom I have never met, wrote eloquently about a special hot pepper that his family had grown for generations. Later, he generously shared some seeds with another blogger here in the Pacific Northwest, whom I have also never met. Roger grew the seeds in his greenhouse and when he harvested his bumper crop this fall he "paid it forward" by offering to share his seeds with other gardeners.

To my delight the seeds arrived by mail in their natural state, as a handful of the most fragrant little peppers I've ever seen.

It looked to me like enough peppers to make a small batch of relish, and still have seeds for planting. I used FC's recipe as a starting point and ended up with a jar of something amazing. It's not that the peppers are so hot--perhaps they are when grown in St. Augustine, FL, but not up here, not last summer anyway. They're hot enough, but it's the fragrance and flavor that just blows me away. I've taken to adding a spoonful to everything from blackeyed peas and rice to crab cakes. And when it's really storming and dark outside I haven't quite resorted to eating it straight from the jar with a spoon, but I've come close:

I was going through my seed stash this morning and I'm thinking I need to share these seeds out while they are nice and fresh. So, while the supply lasts, if you'd like some datil pepper seeds, email me and I'll send you some. Because it's not just the warm feeling I get from the peppers that keeps me going in the dark days of January. It's the warmth of connection to people living thousands of miles away, sharing their thoughts, their gardens, the natural beauty of the world around them with someone they've never met.

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, December edition

2007-12-15T10:31:00.000-08:00

Last spring Carol at May Dreams Gardens declared the 15th of each month as "bloom day" and invited fellow gardeners to show what was in bloom in their gardens, around the world. I wouldn't miss it for the world, not even in December.

There have been years when something has been in bloom every month of the year here on Tiger Mountain. Some Decembers I've even had the occasional tea rose. This year it's been colder than usual, so I'm not sure what I'll find outdoors, beyond the old winter-blooming standby, vibernum tinus, shown here after a dusting of snow last week:

While I wait for the rain to let up, here's what's in bloom indoors this month.

I'd identify this plant but I have no idea what it is. I got a couple of slips from a co-worker who, in spite of her advanced degree in the biological sciences, isn't much of a plantswoman, because she maintained it was an african violet. Well, it does have fuzzy leaves and violet-colored flowers, but there the resemblance ends. It's a nice sturdy plant, though, one I'm happy to winter over indoors.

A real african violet. I keep my home too cool in the winter for african violets to thrive, but this one is hanging in there and even trying to bloom.

Another one I can't identify. Along with the african violet, it was part of a gift basket of plants last spring. I liked the foliage well enough to bring this one indoors this fall. The flowers were a
surprise.

And a Christmas cactus:

Venturing past the front door, here's my standard grocery store wreath, trimmed up with some berries and blooms from the garden:

I added the berries and blossoms from the vibernum, a sprig of rose hips, berries from a tiny beauty berry (Callicarpa americana) shrub I planted this spring and promptly lost in an overgrowth of pink mallow and lantana, until after the frost when I saw a few clusters of bright purple berries poking out from the leaves. And yes, in the 10:30 position on the wreath, is a sprig of frost-kissed blooms from my 'wine and roses' shrub rose.

It looks like the rain has let up, so lets see what's outside.

In the greenhouse, somehow surviving the recent frosty nights:

Beneath the bench, a japanese anemone that I bought on clearance this fall shows its gratitude:

Behind the greenhouse, in what I euphemistically refer to as my "nursery bed" (It's got an awful lot of plants that are plenty big enough to survive in the ground, if I only knew where to put them) I got a surprise--primula 'Francesca' thinks it's spring:

And a mustard plant blooms in a bed I didn't get around to cleaning up this fall:

Can there possibly be anything blooming in January? My money's on this sarcococca, which is showing flower buds:

And this hellebore, also in bud:

Hope I get back here before January 15th, but if not, I wish you all a blessed solstice and a happy new year.

November Blooms

2007-11-14T22:16:00.001-08:00

To make up for missing the last two months' * of Garden Bloggers Bloom Day here is the photo-heavy, text-light November edition of what's in bloom on Tiger Mountain. It's amazing what you can find in bloom this time of year if you look hard enough.

Alpine Strawberries (the Energizer Bunny of strawberry plants):

Aster (Lady in Black variety):

Azalea (yes, this one gets confused every year around this time and puts out a few blossoms):

Calendula:

Chrysanthemum:

Dandelion (just one!):

Eupatorium, aka Joe Pye Weed (okay, it's not exactly blooming, but the seed heads are really pretty.):

Feverfew:

Hydrangea (faded but still going):

Lamium, aka golden dead nettle (as bloomy as it ever gets, but I love the foliage!):

Lavatera:

Marigold (oops, I can't find that photo now)
Nasturtium:

Rose de Rescht (blooms in November and fabulous fragrance, too!):

Vibernum tinus (I planted this because I love the iridescent berries, which really dress up a winter bouquet of greens, but the flowers are a nice bonus this time of year):

Speaking of berries, they really should count as blooms, especially when they are as colorful as these:

or these rose hips, on my 'Kathleen' musk rose:

or these lingonberries which are even redder than this photo shows:

I think beautiful foliage should count for something too. Like this azalea:

This little deciduous rhody:

And the native big-leaf maple whose abundant leaf fall almost makes up for its lack of spectacular fall color (because after all, jumping in a big pile of leaves is what it's all about!):

*I missed September's bloom day because I was in Amsterdam and while I was busy taking photos of what I found in bloom there, I then realized I didn't have a way to upload the pictures. I missed October's bloom day because it snuck up on me while I was trying to catch up on work after my vacation and we had moved into that time of year (and career) where it's dark when I leave the house and dark when I come home. So this month I cheated and took my pictures on the 11th.

P_I_C_T_U_R_E_S OF MY K_I_D_S

2007-08-22T19:54:00.000-07:00

No this blog isn't about to go all personal with family pictures. But we have kids! Pygmy goat kids, that is.

We picked them up Sunday and then, instead of getting to work with them on their social skills I had to leave town for a few days. Younger daughter obligingly sent me these photos. She reports that they are learning to walk nicely on leash, that they have learned that a white plastic bucket contains yummy grain, and that they go to bed without fussing.

Bracken just turned 1 year old, so she's ready to be bred, if we can find her a baby daddy.

Bramble is 5 months old, and full of the dickens, but oh, so cute.

The Great Pumcchini

2007-08-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

Last year a volunteer pumpkin plant sprang up next to the compost pile. Clearly my compost doesn't heat up properly because those seeds must have lain there for a long time. I had not grown or purchased pumpkins in a couple of years. Even better, the pumpkins were fantastic--about 10" diameter, thick flesh that was sweet and not at all stringy. I made pumpkin soup, pumpkin pies, pumpkin bread and still have two containers of pulp in the freezer. Which is a good thing, because. . .

I saved the seeds from the best of the pumpkins of course. I was on to something here--a sweet eating pumpkin that could thrive in my cold-soil garden. In an homage to Territorial Seed Company's "We don't know what the heck we ended up with so we'll call it Wild Garden Whatever and sell it to you at a fancy price" I called it "Molly's Wild Garden Pumpkin". Shared the seed with my sister. We both got fine healthy plants. Hers, having the benefit of warmer weather, set fruit first. I get a phone call.

"What are those pumpkins supposed to look like?"
"Oh, they're kind of squat, not at all like jack-o-lantern types."
"Well, mine look an awful lot like zucchini!"

Ooops. Gotta' love those bees! I wandered out to take a closer look at my plants. All the vigor of the original pumpkin plant was there in the huge leaves, but with the tell-tale silvery splotches of the zucchini I grew last year. And at the base of the first female blossom, a fruit that looked like a short, fat, green zucchini. Genes are funny things. Those were yellow zucchini I grew last year.

I thought I already had plenty of zucchini plants already, so I pulled out all but two of the zupkins to give more growing space to the winter squash. Also one of the zumpchinis had plain green leaves and looked to be setting round fruit.

Two months later the round fruit are clearly a cross between one of the varieties of winter squash I grew last year, Delicata, and the pumpkin. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the flavor is somewhere in between the two. The zumpkins are simply amazing. The blossoms are easily 9"-10" across, all the better to lure in the bees, I'm sure. The squash never get more than about 9" long and about 4" in diameter. And even when they get that big, there isn't a trace of bitterness to them. I'd been throwing the big ones to the chickens but last week I wanted to make a chocolate zucchini cake, so I brought one into the house. I'm thinking I'll let one of them get ripe and save the seeds.

Oh, about the chocolate zucchini cake. Best use of oversized zucchini ever. I had intended to use Inland Empire Girl's recipe but it would have required a trip to the store for buttermilk, so I used this one from the appropriately-named Chocolate and Zucchini blog. Don't worry if you don't have a 3-litre springform pan. I used a 13 x 9 cake pan and it was fine, just not quite as high.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day Post for August

2007-08-17T16:39:00.001-07:00

Update: I forgot to mention the Shasta daisies, crocosmia, and

evening primrose.

Late to the party as usual, so I'll dive right in. Of my entire dahlia collection only one has survived. Fortunately it's also my favorite, Bednall's Beauty.

A few years back I bought some hydrangeas in 2" pots from Heronswood Nursery. I didn't expect them to amount to anything for several years, especially not when a couple of them suffered severe winterkill every year. I moved a couple of them to warmer spots last fall and they've rewarded me by blooming this summer. This one has a real mouthful of a name-- Hydrangea macrophylla GartenBaudirektor Kuhnert:

Over the years this variegated hydrangea has become less variegated, both in foliage and in bloom every year. It used to have huge splashes of white on the leaves, and both pink and blue flowers. It's less flashy now, but so am I:

One of my new daylilies, Ruffled Apricot:

Rudbeckia:

Also in bloom: Coneflowers, most of the roses, gladiolus, sweet peas (finally!), nasturtiums, and calendula.

More fun with hardneck garlic

2007-07-17T21:29:00.001-07:00

So what if you can't braid hardneck garlic? You can make a lovely bouquet that won't wilt.

Allium sativum 'Music'

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, July Edition

2007-07-14T20:11:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Carol at May dreams gardens, it's bloom day!

(It's also Green Thumb Sunday but apparently I was kicked off the GTS blogroll for failing to participate sufficiently! Bad Molly!)

Lavatera:

Here's a mysterious passalong plant that I received from my landscaper. It lights up the shady corners of my border. I've never seen it anywhere else except in my cousin's garden in Hilversum, Netherlands. She told me the name but I forgot to write it down. Anyone recognize it?

Update: Lina from Iceland (wheee! A gardener in Iceland read my blog!) correctly identified the mystery plant as Lysimachia punctata. Thanks, Lina!
Googling the proper name turned up the common name, yellow loosestrife. Further googling reassured me that this particular loosestrife is not invasive, at least not in the Pacific Northwest. If it were Lysimachia vulgaris, I'd have to rip it all out. whew.

All of the hostas are in bloom, including this miniature that I moved to a pot on the porch so it wouldn't get trampled or lost, both of which were happening to it in the garden:

hosta 'Blue Mouse Ears'

~~A trio of thalictrum. Um, thalictra? thalictrums?~~Three species of the genus thalictrum:

Thalictrum flavum ssp glaucum

Thalictrum delavayi (Chinese meadow rue or Tibetan meadow rue, depending on your politics)

Thalictrum 'Elin'. Ten feet tall, so I'm not even sure what the flowers look like.

A trio of hydrangeas:

Hydrangea paniculata

H. Macrophylla 'Miss Belgium'

H. Serrata 'Blue Deckle'

In the woods, besides the ubiquitous blackberry brambles, one of my favorite native shrubs:

Holodiscus discolor, aka Oceanspray

All of the daylilies are in bloom, too. Enough that I think they need a post all their own.

Where was I?

2007-07-14T19:09:00.001-07:00

Right. Well. Sometimes you have to choose between gardening and blogging about gardening and that's been the choice I had to make for the last month. Gardening, harvesting, jam making, spending time with my daughters, caring for a dying dog (she was diagnosed with cancer less than a month ago), and of course the omnipresent day job, which pays for the roof over our heads, the garden, and the internet connection. I started taking pictures this evening for Garden Blogger's Bloom Day and discovered the camera battery had gone dead. While it recharges, (boring entry alert!) a state of the garden report for my journal.

Soft fruits: I'd attribute the record strawberry harvest to the fact that the dog was too sick to do her share of surreptitious harvesting, but everything else is bearing heavily this year as well. The black current bushes were so loaded that some of the the branches lay flat on the ground. I put up 4 pints each of black currant jam, jelly, and strawberry jam. The golden raspberries are bearing better than ever, but nothing we can't manage to eat out of hand. Likewise the cherries that we were able to get to before the birds stripped the tree. The wild red huckleberries seem to be having a banner year as well but I never had time to go down to the woods to pick them.
Peas: I normally get just enough shelling peas to use as an ingredient in some other dish (pasta shells with peas, chopped mint, and prosciutto, mmmm). This year we are pigging out on peas, and I've even put some in the freezer. Same with the sugar snap peas, which in spite of the heat wave last week, are still going strong. The secret to getting a good crop seems to be: get them in early--late January is not too soon, inoculate the seeds, and most of all, cover the planted rows with floating row covers, well anchored, to keep the field mice from digging up and eating the seeds! (Seriously. My two worst garden predators are not deer and rabbits, they're field mice and slugs)
Speaking of slugs, they have wiped out my last three plantings of lettuce, in spite of my best efforts at controlling them. I think they may have actually acquired a taste for Sluggo pellets. Diatomaceous earth doesn't faze them in the least.
I've harvested nearly all of one row of carrots, out of fear that the temperature fluctuations would cause them to split. It must have been too warm by the time I got the Japanese turnips into the ground. They all bolted, without ever bulbing up. As soon as the weather cools off I'll replant root crops for Fall.
Harvested most of the main heads of broccoli, but the varieties I planted will provide plenty of side shoots for the rest of the summer. My romanesco broccoli hasn't formed heads yet.
Out of 6 or 7 zucchini plants, I still have three (slugs again!) and one or two tiny zucchs that will be ready to pick in a few days.
In the greenhouse all the tomatoes, except Anna Russian have set at least some fruit. Ferline and Sungella are leading the pack, with Early Girl and Early Goliath not far behind. San Marzano is, quite simply, in a class by itself.
Eggplants are blossoming. This next week will tell whether I've gained anything by burying the heating cable in that bed, if those blossoms turn into eggplants. One pepper plant has set fruit, as have some of the melon vines. I had hoped I wouldn't have to artificially inseminate my melons again this year, but looking back at last year's entries, I had bigger melons on the vine on this date.

In other news, the ducklings look like actual ducks now, and they've moved to their new digs in the orchard. (photos to follow when the camera is ready). The Cornish hybrid chicks are huge, and I've lost a couple to the heat. I won't raise them again. They are just too fragile, not to mention stupid.

While I wait for the battery to charge here's a a couple of parting shots of my gardening companion for the last 10 years. There never was a better dog.

Nothing to Say

2007-07-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

I will get around to updating this weekend. Right now there's a huge hole in my heart and I have nothing to say.

Wherein I discover a brand new vegetable

2007-06-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

I first noticed them at a farmers' market stall about a year ago. I wondered what a cook would do with them. Thinking of the flower stalk on other alliums, I would have expected them to be woody to the point of inedibility. Since then I've learned a bit about garlic scapes, which have become the darling of the vegetable world.

The scape is removed from the garlic plant in order to force the plant to put its energy into the bulb. Garlic farmers used to discard them but now they've become a bonus crop. Recipes for using them abound on food blogs everywhere, with garlic scape pesto being the most common.

Last fall I planted several varieties of garlic, but in my usual haphazard way of gardening I forgot exactly which varieties I'd planted where. I was delighted to discover yesterday that a couple rows of plants had sent up scapes. That would be the hardneck variety then. (Apparently only the hardneck varieties produce scapes.) I picked them all and headed back to the kitchen to play with them.

The scapes grow in a curl, like a pig's tail. I didn't have my camera handy but anyways, you should go to this web site to see what they look like because Floyd the Food Guy's photography is some of the best on the internet. I harvested mine when they were 9-12" long and they had the tender crispness of an asparagus spear and a delicate garlic flavor. The ones I saw in the farmers' market were 2-3 feet long; I suspect at that size they aren't nearly as tender and smelled quite strong.

I used a dozen of the scapes to make a pesto--just the scapes, about 1/2 cup olive oil, and a few handsful of grated cheese (I used Trader Joe's Quattro Formaggio, which is a blend of asiago, parmesan, fontina, and provolone because it's what I had on hand). The sauce was a beautiful pale greenish yellow and the lightest, sweetest garlic taste you could ever imagine.

The rest of my scapes went into a stir fry with chunks of tofu, ground pork, dried fungus, ginger, and soy sauce. They kept their bright color and crunch throughout the cooking and made a nice contrast to the cubes of tofu and the other textures.

It's the softneck garlic that you want for winter storage. The hardneck varieties don't keep more than a few months. But I'll definitely be planting a lot more hardneck garlic this fall. I'm sure I can find someone to take any surplus heads of garlic off my hands, and I am in love with this new seasonal vegetable.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

2007-06-15T23:31:00.000-07:00

Quickly now, before it becomes Bloomsday (which I guess it already is for everyone east of the Pacific time zone) instead of garden bloggers' bloom day, here is a compendium of what's in bloom on Tiger Mountain today.

First, the report.
In the vegetable garden: peas, potatoes, squash, topsetting onion, and tomatoes
In the herb beds: thyme, sage, lavender
In the woods: foxglove, himalayan blackberry, alpine strawberries
In the bog: water hemlock
In the borders: clematis, campanula, hardy geranium, oriental poppy, viola, deutzia glauca, tradescantia, astilbe, and roses! (Souvenir de la Malmaison, Rose de Rescht, Madame Hardy, Just Joey, Kathleen, Wine and Roses, Joseph's Coat, Cecille Brunner)

On to the pictures! I arrived home late from work this evening, and by the time we'd had dinner, it was getting on towards twilight. Shooting in low light without a flash gave me some interesting effects, in some cases almost like a watercolor.

Rose 'Kathleen', an old musk shrub rose

'Just Joey', hybrid tea

'Wine and Roses', another very old shrub rose

'Madame Hardy' damask

Oriental poppy

geranium

foxglove

tradescantia, in the shadow of a variegated cornus alba

astilbe, also in the shadow of cornus alba

giant lupines

Made it, with 1 minute to spare!

They grow up so fast!

2007-06-13T12:48:00.000-07:00

Seems like only yesterday they were sleepy little fluffballs:

Now they're two weeks old and life is all about eating, not sleeping.

They've moved into the big girls' coop, with their own corner fenced off where they can get away from the bossy hens, but still have plenty of room to roam around, and eat their own food, which the hens always seem to prefer to their layer pellets.

I just realized I never posted pix of the khaki campbell ducklings I received a few days after the chicks. Here they are, then:

And now:

Yes, they're adorable also, but more dimwitted animals you've never seen in your life. At least the chickens have the good sense to drink their water, not splash it out all over their bedding and then stand shivering in a soggy mess.

Unwelcome guest

2007-06-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

Alfalfa pellets are a popular inexpensive organic fertilizer. Because the roots of the alfalfa plant grow deep into the ground the plant (allegedly) is a valuable source of trace minerals, as well as nitrogen. All I know is my roses love the stuff. But I was not expecting the bumper crop of alfalfa that has sprung up around my Golden Wings heirloom shrub rose, and which threatens to choke it out if I don't get in there and do something about it soon. And because the roots of the alfalfa plant grow deep into the ground. . .ugh.

Babies!

2007-05-28T21:53:00.001-07:00

Most people in the US don't get mail delivery on Memorial Day, but this was a special package:

Behold the cuteness:

Note the gardening hands. Desperately in need of a manicure!

This one has attitude, doesn't she?

The colorful ones are brown egg laying pullets.

The chunky yellow ones are Cornish hybrids, aka "meat-type" birds.

They figured out the drinking part right away.

And lost no time in catching up on the day's news.

The dog is so happy. She loves babies of all kinds and we haven't had baby chicks in a few years.

Tower of Flower

2007-05-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

This clematis has had its good years and its off years. This year is definitely one of its best. After deciding that it would never get more than 6 or 7 feet high, I planted a wisteria opposite its post, and that may have inspired the clematis to climb much higher this year.

And the wisteria must have been reading my mind ("if that thing doesn't bloom this spring it's outta' here") because it has put out a few blossoms of its own. Still, it's the clematis that is getting all the good reviews right now. I like how it complements the azalea on the other side of the walkway.

Which in turn, shows off the cat to great advantage.

Doing Something About the Weather

2007-05-23T07:17:00.000-07:00

It's cold on Tiger Mountain. Not USDA hardiness zone cold. Oh, no. The USDA says I'm Zone 8, which is also the zone for much of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Missisippi. Riiiight. I beg to differ on the zone itself, because I get single-digit (Fahrenheit) lows every winter, sometimes for weeks at a time. So, lets say I'm zone 7. That's still the hardiness zone for parts of the above-mentioned Southern states, central California, parts of Arizona. Think hot, muggy nights, hotter muggier days. Not my always-sleep-with-a-blanket-and-never-wish-for-air-conditioning climate.

No, it's not the winter cold we are dealing with here, it's the spring, summer, and fall cold. We're past the last freeze date but overnight lows are consistently in the low 40's and will remain below 50 well into July, when they will occasionally inch up into the low 50's, until August, when it cools off again. Daytime highs can be all over the place, from the 60's to the 90's, but the nights stay cold, even in the greenhouse, which provides plenty of daytime heat, but loses it rather quickly when the sun goes down. Not good for most solanums--eggplant, peppers, tomatoes--which refuse to set fruit at temps below 50 degrees.

So, I broke down and purchased heating cables for the greenhouse planting beds. My conscience and I struggled with the contradiction of using artificial heat to grow food when one of the reasons for growing my own food is to reduce our energy consumption. I've finally rationalized (wonderful thing, rationalization) that the increased harvests will more than offset the energy consumption from the heating cables. The cables are thermostatically controlled to shut off at 71 degrees, so they should be working only at night.

A week ago I buried a heat cable and a soaker hose in one of the planting beds, and planted out some sacrificial tomato plants.

The plants were so leggy from living in pots on the windowsill that I had to lay them in trenches, with the roots of each one practically touching its neighbor.

To trap the heat, I draped the bed with grow-therm:

I ran the lead to a min-max thermometer to the center of the bed, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

I'm delighted to report that, even with nighttime temperature in the rest of the greenhouse being in the mid-low 40s every night, under the tent it's been consistently 10 degrees warmer, right into the magic numbers needed for my heat-loving plants. The tomatoes are thriving. I've never known them to grow this fast. I can hardly wait to dig over the other bed and plant out my peppers, eggplant, and melons, all of which produce meager crops last summer, just as soon as the lettuce that's growing there begins to bolt.

And I can't help wondering--do you suppose I could grow okra?

Catnip Junkie

2007-05-17T12:24:00.000-07:00

I loved this photo of one of Yolanda Elizabet's cats blissed-out on catnip. My cats are such terrible junkies that the catnip has to be protected from their predations. I moved a couple of seedlings into the greenhouse last fall and they went undisturbed for several months until I left the door open one day and one of the cats wandered in, probably looking for a nice warm place to take a . . . nap. Now when they see me headed for the greenhouse they race to be at the door when I open it. The catnip plants are somewhat the worse for wear, but at least now when one of the cats misses evening curfew, before I start worrying that a predator has gotten to him, I know to check the greenhouse.

IM IN UR GREENHOUZ STEALING UR HERBS

Volunteer of the Month

2007-05-17T08:44:00.000-07:00

I took my hanging fuchsia baskets down from their winter location in the greenhouse the other day. Only one of the 4 survived the extra-cold winter but it was time for some new plants anyway. I was surprised to see this cute little violet nestled alongside the fuchsia. Surprised, because in the summer these baskets hang a good 15 feet above the ground (second-storey porch), and I don't have any of this type of violet growing in my yard. I think it's a marsh violet, viola cucullata, in which case I may well have hundreds of these growing in my yard next if I leave this one to set seed. Aw, but they're so cute when they're little!

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day

2007-05-15T06:53:00.000-07:00

I have been a bad blogger lately and for that I apologize. So much stuff going on (yes, work, what else?) that I can barely find time to garden, let alone write about gardening. I've composed dozens of posts in my head, of course, each one more thoughtful/enlightening/witty than the last. I'm so sorry I haven't been able to share them with you.

It's been cold on Tiger Mountain! So much so that my window sills are still crammed with tender vegetable plants that in another year would have been in the greenhouse by now. But night time lows are still in the 30's every night, even inside the greenhouse. Zone 4 and 5 gardeners who envied everything that was growing for me in March and April, you can gloat now. Irises aren't showing buds. The peas I planted in February are thriving but not a single blossom. That peony that was shooting skyward and setting buds on April 9? Six weeks later it’s still just in bud:

But. Enough complaining. On to what's in bloom on Tiger Mountain on Garden Bloggers Bloom Day.

Because it’s been too cold for most of my perennials, it’s mostly shrubs that are in bloom this month:
daphne ‘Carol Mackie’
enkianthus campanulatus
evergreen and deciduous azaleas.
double file virburnum
viburnum sargentii
Aronia melanocarpa
clematis x cartmanii 'Avalanche', a pretty little evergreen clematis, blooming for the first time ever.

There are some perennials in bloom:
columbine (lots of different cultivars), icelandic poppies (they're loving this weather!), and a lovely little single peony I acquired in 2003, Paeonia veitchii var. woodwardii, also bloomed for the first time ever. Worth the wait.
Finally, because I haven’t been time to weed out my “be careful what you wish for” plants, there’s myosotis (forget-me-not) and sweet woodruff everywhere!

azalea (I think this one is R. calendulaceum) and myosotis

enkianthus and myosotis

viburnum plicatum (double file viburnum) and sweet woodruff

aquilegia and mysotis

aquilegia and sweet woodruff

Iceland poppy and myosotis

viburnum sargentii (these flowers turn into clusters of golden berries in the fall) I cropped out the myosotis, but trust me, it's there.

In the meadow: buttercup, aka ranunculus repens, aka the bad ranunculus, to distinguish it from the sweet non-invasive ranunculus in my borders.

In the woods: Pacific Dogwood, Stinging Nettle (marking the end of the nettle foraging season), thimbleberry, and Himalayan blackberry (aaargh)

Breaking bud: Joseph's Coat climbing rose. Ignore the black spot on the leaves. That's what I do.

It's the Most. Wonderful. Time. of the Year

2007-04-27T13:03:00.000-07:00

I returned late last night from another week-long trip, hopefully the last of those for couple of months. The one thing that makes these business trips bearable is that they are to the state where I was born, 1400 miles east of here, and where two of my siblings still live. I returned home with an extra suitcase filled with daylilies and hostas, from what's becoming an annual tradition--raiding my sister's garden. Which reminds me--the garden blogger's book club selection for this month is Passalong Plants, which looks like a fun read.

Of course I had to make the rounds of the greenhouse, the flower beds, the vegetable gardens, and the windowsills first thing this morning. All the hostas that were just tiny nubs poking out of the ground a week ago are tall cones of furled leaves now. Lilacs and azaleas are starting to bloom. Beets, chard, parsnips, potatoes, and radish are coming up, peas are ready for staking, and the broccoli and brussel sprout seedlings I set out before leaving town are leafless stubs. harumph. I knew I should have put down floating row covers before I left.

But! What makes this the most wonderful time of the year is my favorite plant sale tomorrow. Imagine being able to visit over 75 specialty nurseries in a single day. That's FlorAbundance. Unlike my behavior in previous years this year I intend to exercise some restraint. (I can already hear a certain gardening friend choking in disbelief.) I shall buy only what I can carry. Really, I only "need" some new dahlia tubers to replace the ones that froze winter-before-last, and perhaps a broadleaf evergreen shrub or two.

Next weekend is my second most favorite plant sale, Seattle Tilth's edible plant sale, which I had planned to skip this year, but it looks like I need to pick up some broccoli plants to replace my leafless stubs. grumble. I notice they will also be selling a new dwarf variety of eggplant, Fairy Tale, which they say produces harvest 50 days from transplanting.

Another sure sign of spring: This morning I had to stop the car on the road while a mother duck led her 8 just-hatched ducklings out into the world for the first time. There was a brief moment of panic (on my part;Mrs. Mallard never even blinked) when a truck came around the corner in the opposite direction and stopped just in time to avoid making pressed duckling. The other driver and I exchanged smiles and "awwww"s through our closed windows as the duck family headed for the lake on the other side of the road.

Late to the party, again

2007-04-16T17:51:00.000-07:00

Update: How could I have forgotten Baby's Breath Spirea (spirea thunbergii), camellia japonica (a single pink form and a red and white striped double). And, in the woods, red elderberry. I'll have to post a photo of the elderberry trees. Unfortunately it's not an edible, or cordial-making species of elderberry, but this time of year they are covered with white cone-shaped flower clusters, making them look almost .like white lilacs. Fairly quickly the flowers turn to clusters of brilliant red berries, which don't last long either because the birds love them. Also, I spotted the first flowers of the Pacific Dogwood yesterday afternoon.

I've been away from both the Internet and my garden for several days so I'm late in posting a list of what's in bloom yesterday for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day . Here's a quick list of what I found this afternoon when I returned home (why yes, I did head straight for the garden before unpacking. Doesn't everyone?)
In the garden:

tulips,

bleeding heart, myosotis, sweet woodruff, scilla, alpine primrose, primula kisoana, primula 'Kingston twilight', lungworts, hellebores (still! Get the hook!), sweet cicely, lamium, sweet violet, checkered lily (fritillaria lanceolata) rhododendron 'rosemundi', and a dwarf rhody whose name I can't quite recall but that has lovely single blossoms the color of unsalted butter.

In the orchard: montmorency cherry, sweet cherry, italian plum, and a pear which I may never know the variety because its pollinating partner died in saplinghood, so while it blooms heartily it never sets fruit. Also blueberry and lingonberry shrubs.

In the woods: salmonberry, indian plum, wild bleeding heart,

trillium,

more trillium (I'm excited because I've never seen this one before),

Few-flowered shooting star (dodecatheon pulchellum),

camas lily (Camassia quamash) and

big leaf maple.

Anemone. And another nemone.

2007-04-10T13:38:00.001-07:00

When my daughters were very young they had certain words that they really liked rolling their tongues around. One such word was "anemone" although both of them, at a certain age, thought it was two words, either "a nemone" or "an enome". "I'm gonna' tickle that 'nemone!"
They were referring to sea anemones, and a favorite pastime when exploring tidepools our favorite beach--lightly touching the center of the anemone and letting its tentacles curl in around your finger.
The woodland anemones on Tiger Mountain--anemone nemerosa--don't get tickled by budding marine scientists. The greatest threat to their existence is my forgetting where they are after they go dormant, and accidentally digging them up to plant something else. The workaround for that has been to plant them beneath a shrub, or interplant with hostas, which are just barely poking their shoots up from the ground when the anemones are at their peak. With any luck this strategy will eventually provide me with clumps large enough to plant out in my woods.

Worthy of protection:

anemone nemerosa 'allenii', growing under the protection of a badly winter-killed hydrangea

anemone nemerosa 'Robinsoniana'.

Back in the saddle again

2007-04-10T09:27:00.000-07:00

Remember this? My sister, also an avid gardener, said to me, "what on earth were you thinking, having foot surgery in March?"

On Friday the doctor told me I could stop using the crutches, at least for brief periods. So, on Saturday. . .

I wrapped the walking cast so the dressing would stay clean and dry.

decided to give disposable vinyl gloves a try because with regular garden gloves I get irritated and fling them off the first time I can't pick up a tiny seed or get a grip on a weed,

and I was off to plant up some of my new 4' x 10' raised beds!

By Sunday night (my definition of "brief" being anything less than 48 hours) I was aching all over but I'd planted 3 kinds of potatoes (Carola, All Blue, and Chieftain), a row each of carrots (Mokum), swiss chard (Bright Lights), parsnips (Cobham), beets (dutch ball), radish, and the way too many onion and shallot plants that I started from seed back in January. In the greenhouse I pulled out all the sprouting broccoli that the mice have been eating the sprouts from as soon as they emerge and gave the plants to the chickens.

(You'll notice there's no rooster in that picture. Mr. Darcy fell victim to testosterone poisoning last week. By which I mean that he was so full of himself for surviving the coq au vin incident that he took to crowing about it from the top of the gate. All. Day. Long. If you were a coyote in the neighborhood, it was impossible not to notice. Still, he would have been fine if he hadn't decided to test his invincibility by clearing the 7 foot high coyote-proof fence and strutting around in the pasture. Idiot. Without a "Mr. Darcy" in the picture, what am I going to name this year's pullets, due to arrive any day now?)

Planted up the bed where the 24-hour mouse buffet once stood with lettuce seedlings, which the mice don't seem to care for. Baited for slugs. Took a bunch of pictures to remind me what's in bloom right now.

I just barely had time to pocket the camera and cover the planted seed beds with poly row cover before it started pouring rain. The gloves stayed on all day, but even with layering two pairs, I wore through a couple of the fingertips at some point, so kiss that manicure goodbye. It was worth it. The worst day gardening is still better than the best day at work.

What a difference a week makes

2007-04-08T19:38:00.000-07:00

Join
A week that included a few days of unseasonably warm weather here on Tiger Mountain sent buds and shoots a-popping. For my Green Thumb Sunday post I thought I'd post pictures of the same plants I posted last week.

peony: last week just shoots, now there are leaves and buds

Lady Doneraile in full bloom

Likewise Rosemundi

And even the azalea is opening. You'll notice I don't qualify the azalea with a varietal name. In truth, it's just one of those little potted plants they sell at Trader Joe's. The kind that gardening experts tell you to enjoy while it's in bloom and then throw it out because it will never amount to anything. This one was a hostess gift from a good friend and I didn't have the heart to toss it. Besides, there was this gap between two big rocks in the garden that was crying for a bit of green. So I stuffed it into the gap and it has thrived there, hot afternoon sun and all, for about 4 years. It blooms early in spring, long before any of my fancy named azaleas, holds its flowers for weeks, and usually blooms again in the fall. Not bad for a grocery store plant.

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Future Tense

2007-04-01T20:02:00.000-07:00

Join

For today's Green Thumb Sunday I decided to take pictures of buds and shoots. Enjoy.

Peony shoots

anemone nemerosa 'Lady Doneraile'

rhododendron 'Rosemundi'

azalea

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

What is so rare. . .

2007-03-31T08:39:00.000-07:00

. . .as a hosta in springtime that the slugs have not yet discovered? I'm not sure I've ever seen a hosta in my garden that was as un-chomped as this one.

hosta venusta

FYI, most of my hostas are still just tips barely poking out of the soil. This one grows under an overhang on the south side of the house, where the soil warms up particularly early.

Green Thumb Sunday

2007-03-25T18:32:00.000-07:00

I haven't quite got the Green Thumb blogroll link thing worked out, but this tulip foliage begged to be shared.

Then these tulips demanded equal time.

It didn't seem fair to ignore pulmonaria 'Blue Ensign'

Join
Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Seedlings!

2007-03-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

In a tie for 3rd place, with three of five seeds germinating: Early Goliath and Anna Russian.
In second place, with four of five seeds germinating: Sungella.
And the winner, with five of five seeds germinating, only four days after sowing, is Ferline!

Oh, yeah, that's better

2007-03-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

It was a matter of mild frustration that I had not had time between travel and hospital to get my tomato plants started. I had only gotten as far as bringing a tub of seed starting mix onto the porch last Monday when I remembered that I still needed to plant the bare-root rose that had arrived in the mail while I was out of town. This week the seeds sat at the foot of my bed taunting me. The problem was that I needed some small pots, and a propagator of some kind. The Overprotective One (TOO), while willing to fetch whatever I needed from the barn or the tool shed, isn't too good at translating vague requirements, or at finding things even when their location is well described. TOO is also The Sensitive One, so you have to make do with whatever he brings back from the mission, or deal with hurt feelings for-friggin-ever. So, when TOO headed out to run some errands yesterday afternoon, I saw my chance.

Armed with a plastic grocery bag I set out on crutches, carefully down the 12 front steps, across the yard, first to the tool shed, then to the barn, avoiding the soggiest patches whenever possible. In the barn I hit paydirt--a stash of 4" pots and a 20" round plastic platter with a clear, domed lid, whose possibilities as a propagator I'd recognized several weeks ago, and had even drilled out several vent holes in the lid. Carried the 4" pots back to the house and rummaged around until I found a canvas tote bag big enough to hold the platter and lid and made another trip out to the barn. Stopped to visit the plants in the greenhouse--someone hasn't kept up with the watering there--grab a handful of arugula to munch on, then back to the porch, where I switched from crutches to rolling chair.

In no time at all I planted up eight varieties of tomatoes (5 seeds each), two kinds of peppers (jalapeno and salad mix), eggplant, and celery. I don't usually start peppers and eggplant from seed as they need a tremendous amount of coddling (and a greenhouse to live in all summer long) if I'm to get anything but leaves, but the seeds were freebies, so I thought I'd plant them and see how they were doing come late May when I would otherwise be buying plants.

So there they are, tucked inside the Costco Vegetable Tray Propagator, on top of a heating pad, where I can keep an eye on them from my bed/office.

The tomato varieties are mostly experiments, with some standbys. Super San Marzano did well for me in the greenhouse last year, and I've never found anything better for making sauces. The long season heirloom varieties I tried last year, thinking they'd thrive in the greenhouse, were duds. This year it's back to the short season tomatoes, such as Stupice, which ripens dependably even outdoors. The Totally Tomatoes catalogue touted the virtues of "Early Goliath" (58 days) and challenged me to compare it to Early Girl, which I have grown before, but never in my cold-summer garden. I ordered the bush version, which should make a nice patio plant. Anna Russian (65-70 days) intrigued me. I'll try it both outside and in the greenhouse. Valueseeds.com tempted me to try Legend, a new blight-tolerant determinate variety. Finally, I planted up some gift seeds from Thompson & Morgan: Sungella, which I am looking forward to because people around here rave about it, and another blight-tolerant variety, Ferline, this one an indeterminate, that is said to do well indoors and out.

He has to leave the house again today. I think it's time to start some more flower seeds.

Cabin Fever

2007-03-20T07:32:00.000-07:00

The view on the far side of my laptop:

The worst part of this foot-remodeling is the immobility. I'm a restless one at the best of times. If I get around on crutches, I can't do so much as carry a cup of tea from one room to another. If I scoot around on my desk chair (a desperate purchase last weekend)I can do stuff and carry things around with me, but I'm limited to the indoors, and one level of the house at that. Worse, The Overprotective One (TOO) thinks it's a bad idea to go on crutches up and down stairs, and out into the garden. TOO has a point. The ground is pretty soggy.

Command Central for the housebound gardener:

But. I'm tired of reading about gardening. I've sorted my seeds. (Such a lot of seeds!) I've planned out the vegetable garden on graph paper. There comes a time when a gardener simply must. plant. something. TOO is heading out to run some errands. This is my chance.

Still Life With Crutches

2007-03-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

I had foot surgery a few days ago and my wonderful team at work* sent me this basket of blooming plants. The timing and basket contents were perfect as I just threw out my last sickly African Violet and, as Inland Empire Girl says, you can never have too many primroses. The basket is the perfect size to hold a trowel and seeds on planting days. The bow, however, will have to go.

*I guess this means at least a few of them weren't upset about their reviews last week!

Now Appearing

2007-03-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

Hepatica [nobilis] and the Hellebores!

Also in bloom right now: forsythia, daphne odora, viburnum tinus, narcissus rupicola, cyclamen coum (still just one blossom), a couple of daffodils, sweet violets, primula, pulmonaria, rhododendron mucronulatum, petasites japonica, which I really must get into the ground one of these days, and one siberian squill.

In the woods, salmon berry, skunk cabbage and flowering cherry.

The crocus have come and gone, battered by rain from the Pineapple Express that roared through here last week.

I made up this bouquet last Monday to keep my company while I recover from foot surgery this week. Just a few sprigs of daphne is all it takes to perfume a room.

In the wings, 'Red Riding Hood' Greigii tulips 'Red Riding Hood'.

I am the shooting star

2007-03-10T08:43:00.000-08:00

Part of the downside of managing people is delivering the annual performance review, and the muddy bottom of the downside is delivering the review to low performers. The company I work for has suffered from the Lake Wobegon Effect for decades (if you work for Acme you are by definition an outstanding performer) and now the fortunes of those at the top depend on recognizing that we do have low performers and either bringing them up to standard or managing them out. Finally we have the opportunity to evaluate performance instead of participating in the usual love-fest.

However, no matter how hard I try to put a positive spin on the review the news doesn't sit well with the LPs. An actual exchange with a LP yesterday:

"I am a star! I have always been a star!"
"No, you are not a star."

You know how you sometimes get a song stuck in your head? Well, this little exchange got a poem stuck in my head and 24 hours later it's still playing. I will never be able to read this poem again without thinking how to incorporate these lines into a performance review.

Litany

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.
- Billy Collins

The Secret Ingredient

2007-02-25T18:07:00.000-08:00

Foodwise, I consider myself an oportunivore, which is to say I will eat anything that's put in front of me. I'm hard put to think of anything that I'd refuse to try, although I have not been truly put to the test, as no one has offered me, say, a beating snake heart. Same thing goes when I'm in a market that caters to a clientele from a different culture. If something looks interesting, I'm liable to buy it just to see what it tastes like, without asking what's in it.
In this way I've acquired a taste for the Vietnamese desserts sold at a deli near my office. They tend to be not too sweet, flavored with coconut or almond, and sometimes downright mysterious.

Recently they added an ingredients label to one of their treats. For a while I thought I might want to re-think this policy of not asking what's in things, then I decided something must have gotten muddled in translation.
Panda: it's what's for dessert. :)

Not in Bloom

2007-02-21T02:29:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, especially when you wake up in the middle of the night in late February, and it's raining and the coyotes are howling outside your bedroom window, and you can't get back to sleep. . .well, you just wonder if it might not be a good time to try to upload a photo to blogger.
Like maybe a memory of high summer:

No point to this post, really. I was just interested in seeing how responsive blogger might be at 3:00 am.
Very responsive, as it turns out. Yawn. Back to bed.

Jack Frost, artist

2007-02-19T16:01:00.000-08:00

A post yesterday from the Iowa Gardener reminded me that I'd downloaded some pictures from my camera earlier this year and promptly forgot about them. We had some unusually cold weather this winter (unusual for the last several years, anyway) and one morning I was lucky enough to catch these frost patterns on the greenhouse walls.
Frost patterns were plenty common on our storm doors when I was a kid in Minnesota but I hadn't seen them in years. They reminded me of how I used to borrow my mom's thimble and make pictures on the frosted windows, because that's what Laura and Mary used to do in the wintertime. Which got me to wondering, what book was that in, anyway? Little House in the Big Woods? Or Long Winter. Googling took me to this wonderful frost photo, and my answer!

Now in bloom

2007-02-11T21:45:00.000-08:00

Carol at May Dreams Gardens has declared the 15th of each month to be “Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day”. I love that idea. For the last few years I've been organizing my garden photos online by month and year. It's fun to look back and see what was in bloom this time in years past.

Ordinarily my hellebores would have been in full bloom by now. Sometimes they are even blooming by Christmas. But It’s been a cold winter and the buds are just beginning to appear above the mulch. The sarcococca and daphne odora are late as well. But the other day I found a couple of snowdrops under the sumac tree and a single cyclamen coum blossom.

And today I picked my first bouquet of the year, of black pussy willow, salix gracilistyla 'Melanostachys'. Unfortunately the photo doesn’t begin to capture the glossy jet black catkins that almost make up for how coarse and unattractive this shrub is the other 11 months of the year.

In the wings: hepatica and the hellabores. (Sounds like a good name for a band)

And yes, I am jumping the gun by a few days because I will be traveling on the 15th.

Confessions of a seed junkie

2007-02-11T17:13:00.000-08:00

My name is Molly and I am addicted to seeds. I thought I had my addiction under control, taking my time with this year's orders, checking my seed stash twice to make sure I really needed another packet of pole beans or cucumbers. And then along comes the eclectic gardener writing "Imagine a cross between Thompson and Morgan Seeds and the Dollar Store."
aaaaaahhhhh! In one click I was at the Value Seeds site where, eclectic gardener wasn't kidding, every packet of seeds is $.99 or less. Funny how those $.99 packets add up, though.

Gotta' plant!

2007-01-18T10:39:00.000-08:00

Because of the unusually snowy weather we've been enjoying, I've had the luxury of doing more than my usual amount of armchair gardening this month. But there comes a time when browsing the seed catalogs, sorting through the seed stash, and re-reading my favorite garden writers just doesn't cut it. Tuesday evening was one of those times. It didn't help that I was looking at a week-long business trip in the frozen Midwest. I went out to close up the chickens and the greenhouse beckoned to me in the twilight, "Come i-i-i-i-in. You know you want to. . ."

The greenhouse was a chilly 32 degrees when I hauled a bag of seed starting mix out of the barn. The hoses were frozen solid as were the jugs of water I store in the greenhouse for watering the winter beds, so I filled a couple of watering cans at the kitchen sink and when that warm water hit the planting mix I swear it smelled like March in my greenhouse.

I've been looking at the WinterSown website (by the way, check out their free seed offers!) and while I don't see winter sowing as a good way to start tomatoes, it makes sense for onions and peas and other plants that can take a little bit of cold without going into a month-long sulk.
I had some free leek, onion, and shallot seeds from Thompson and Morgan, plus some leftover salad onion seeds from Territorial. And several pinches of Thumbelina carrot seeds, 3 years old but they were still viable last year.

Half an hour later the temperature in the greenhouse had risen to 37 degrees (hmm, those old Christmas lights put out quite a bit of heat!) and the first dirt of the 2007 Planting Season was under my fingernails. Back to the fire, and some more armchair gardening.

A garden meme

2007-01-10T22:24:00.000-08:00

From Carol at May Dreams, via Jenn the Garden Djinn:

What kind of a seed buyer are you?

I represent the triumph of hope over experience.

Do you carefully read all of the seed catalogs sent to you and then browse the Internet to compare and contrast all the options, then decide which seeds to buy?

Why, yes. How did you know?

Do you buy seeds from 'bricks and mortar' stores and get whatever appeals to you as you are browsing?

Yes. Much as I try to avoid making eye contact with the seed racks at the nursery and the feed store, there is always something I just have to have.

Do you buy vegetable seeds in bulk where they scoop them out of seed bins, weigh them and put them in hand-marked envelopes?

No. I have to draw the line somewhere, don’t I? Oh, wait, that’s how I buy my seed for winter cover crops. Um, and my garlic starts. And seed potatoes.

Do you buy seeds for just vegetables, or just annual flowers? Do you buy seeds for perennial flowers?

Yes. Oh, yes! And Yes! Actually I’m just getting started with perennials from seed.

Do you know what stratification and scarification are? Have you done either or both with seeds?

But, of course! I have some seeds stratifying right now, as a matter of fact.

Do you order seeds from more than one seed company to save on shipping or buy from whoever has the seeds you want, even if it means paying nearly the same for shipping as you do for the actual seeds?

Heh. Last summer I got so carried away by an order with Thompson and Morgan that they waived all shipping charges. And gave me several packages of seed for free. Otherwise I try to keep it to one seed company a year. I try.

Do you buy more seeds than you could ever sow in one season?

Try “more than I could ever sow in this lifetime.”

Do you only buy seeds to direct sow into the garden or do you end up with flats of seedlings in any window of the house with decent light?

I end up with tubs of seedlings in the furnace room under grow lights, and on all the windowsills on the south side of the house. And did I mention the greenhouse?

Do you save your own seeds from year to year and exchange them with other seed savers?

Sometimes. More with flowers than with vegetables. I had a particularly nice volunteer pumpkin plant this year—no idea where it came from because I hadn’t bought or grown pumpkins in years—and I saved the seeds from that. Otherwise, I have so few vegetable gardening beds right now that I’m loathe to risk getting some weird hybrid crop.

Do you even buy seeds?

Ahem. See above.

Do you have a fear of seeds? Some gardeners don't try seeds, why not?

I used to fear seeds because they never came up. I’ve learned a few tricks along the way, such as covering the seed beds with polyester row covers, and setting mouse traps in the greenhouse. See, the seeds can’t germinate if they’ve been dug up and devoured by field mice or free-ranging chickens. Duh.

Do you understand seeds? I once bought seeds at a Walmart in January (Burpee Seeds) and the cashier asked me, "Do these really work? Yes, they do. "Isn't it too cold to plant them now?" Well, yes, if you are planning to plant them outside. I don't think this cashier grew up around anyone who gardened.

I understand that they can be temperamental little buggers.Thanks to the most excellent catalog put out by Johnny’s Seeds I finally understand what it takes to germinate pepper seeds. I couldn’t provide them with that environment naturally (they want a warmer house than I do), so they never came up.

Do you list all your seeds on a spreadsheet, so you can sort the list by when you should sow them so you have a master seed plan of sorts?

Oh, now that’s just sick!

Do you keep all the old seeds and seed packets from year to year, scattered about in various drawers, boxes, and baskets?

In years past, yes. Now they are pretty well confined to erm, [embarrassed shuffle as she counts them up] a bunch of airtight plastic boxes. Except for the ones in the African market basket. And some in 35 mm film canisters (remember film?) in the greenhouse.

Do you determine germination percentage for old seed?

I have done that. More often I just sow old seeds three to five times as thickly as I would otherwise.

I suspect the answers to the above would tell us a lot about what type of gardener someone was.

I’m afraid Carol is right. My seed habits show me to be impulsive, optimistic, a little greedy, and highly gullible.

I blame it on my ADD

2007-01-10T08:14:00.000-08:00

I was doing so well Saturday morning, carefully recording the progress of the kind of meal I make only every few years--elaborate and all from scratch. (I purposely avoided photographing the more grisly aspects of the meal.) And then around the time I started to make the fresh egg noodles, I forgot all about the camera, so the only record of the feast that followed is in the memories of the participants.

However, last night there an encore presentation of the coq au vin au bourguignon, this time with roasted garlic mashed potatoes instead of noodles.
As with most rich, winey stews, it was even tastier on the second round. And, this time I remembered the camera.

Good old Branwell. I shall always remember him fondly.

Something's cooking today

2007-01-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

Water, water

2007-01-02T10:44:00.000-08:00

Rainwater catchment is pretty low on my list of gardening priorities because my soil is deep and loamy, our dry season is so short, and we do have our own well. But eventually I expect I'll be living in the city and I'll need to make every drop count. Hopefully when that time comes, these tanks will be available in the US.

"The waterHOG is a slim, rectangular, modular, plastic rainwater tank which is designed to fit into the usually empty cavities of the house, for example between floor joists and wall studs when spaced at 600mm centres.

The waterHOG units can also be installed like conventional rainwater tanks, fixed to the side of the house or to a fence. The narrow profile makes the waterHOG a good water storage solution along sidewalls, down narrow passages and underneath decks and house structures."

Positively brilliant.

A good day to die

2006-12-31T20:38:00.000-08:00

It was a beautiful winter day today, sunny but crisp and cold. Four roosters met their end--Branwell, Mr. Collins, and the two youngest who never had names, as did Nellie, a mean little hen who, once she promoted herself to head hen, never laid another egg. All are lying in state in the refrigerator waiting for rigor mortis to pass, and then they will marinate in red wine for a few more days.
Woman with Needlework will be relieved to know that in the end I couldn't bring myself to put the cleaver to Wendolyn; plump and unproductive as she is, she's just too sweet and good natured to kill. Mr. Darcy, now that he's the sole surviving rooster, is being more of a jerk than ever, attempting to bring the SGS ladies, who are a couple in their own right and do not wish to consort with a rooster, thankyouverymuch, into his harem.

Re-creation story

2006-12-31T20:37:00.000-08:00

On the 4th day there was the Older Daughter home from college, making one more pair of hands to haul water and firewood, and it was good.
And on the 6th day the cell phone towers were repaired and OD could talk to the boyfriend she left at college and she was no longer grumpy and it was much better.
And on the 8th day there was light and running water, and it was really good and meant we got our Christmas tree decorated before Santa showed up.
And on the 15th day the landline came back and we all yawned, because really, no one ever calls us on the landline anyway but at least it meant that the pissing contest between Qwest (telephone) and Comcast (cable) was finally over.
And on the 18th day the Internet came back and all was well with the world.

Lights Out!

2006-12-16T11:32:00.000-08:00

High winds the other night knocked out our electricity and broadband and phone lines and they tell us not to expect to get power back on in our area before next week. Apparently it's the high-tension lines that bring power from the dams on the other side of the mountains that are damaged and the outages are widespread.

Right now the outage is, for us, still in the category of "minor inconvenience." We have a wood-burning stove for heat, and a propane camp stove for cooking, and a creek to provide water for flushing toilets and such, and even a water filtration device to make the creek water potable if we run out of clean water. We have nifty little LED head lamps to read and cook by and plenty of candles for ambient light. The power stayed on at my office in the city so I drove in this morning to shower and read the newspaper online and blog.

Last night I emptied the contents of the refrigerator into baskets that are stored on the porch where daytime temps are still in refrigeration range and we are eating our way through the perishables. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the food in the big freezer in the garage stays frozen. While I don't have anything like Lottie's quantities of food put by, there's an awful lot there to try and use up if it begins to thaw.

I'd planned to bring in the Christmas tree and start putting lights on it but of course that's a job that's easier to do if the lights are lit. Same with the lights on the trees outside, which I'd planned to do last weekend but it was raining too hard. Maybe I'll start wrapping presents instead.

In chicken news, someone laid an egg this morning! It's been over a month, what with molting, and cold, and dark, and some of the girls having gone into retirement. I guess they know what I have in mind for the week I'm off work after Christmas. That won't help the roosters, though. Five roos are four roos too many and I'm keen to try this recipe.

Fun with Food

2006-12-10T12:03:00.000-08:00

For a while now I've been occupied with getting rid of stuff around the house that takes up space without giving something in return. The pleasure of ownership is lost on me. I expect my "stuff" to have practical or asethetic value, or at least provide a decent orgasm. Currently I'm eying the cookbook shelves.

There are a handful of cookbooks I wouldn't part with for the world--anything by Deborah Madison or Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher's The Cooking of Provincial France, (part of the Time Life Foods of the World series, from which I learned how to cook when I was in my 20's), Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook. These books form the basis for my reputation as a decent cook. There are more that I could get rid of if I just copied the two or three recipes that I use into my personal recipe notebook. There are still more that I browse from time to time, either for a visual feast or as a form of armchair traveling, or to prepare for an actual journey by learning about regional specialties.

And then there are the other hundred or more that have ended up in my posession (I didn't buy them!) that I will never use--glossy works designed to promote use of certain products (The Spam Cookbook, The Tang Cookbook, The Spry Cookbook, The Joys of Jello) and cookbooks published by the Junior League, the Young Republicans, the DAR, the Bird Island St. Mary's Catholic Church Missionary Society. Cousin Judy's Better than Sex cake, Mrs. Murchistan's Easy Holiday Salad, and Duck a l'orange made with powered Tang are good for laughs. Once.

So this weekend I've been culling the shelves, paging through each one to make sure I'm not throwing out pure gold, or missing a good laugh. This morning's stack included The Popular Potato, which contained not a single decent recipe but did provide some amusement in the chapter devoted to Childrens' Special Spuds.

This dish might be good for encouraging abstract thinking. In case you couldn't tell, it's a person driving a car down a road. An egg person with shredded carrot hair and raisin eyes driving a potato car with cherry tomato tires and a cucumber hood ornament? steering wheel? down a road paved with cheese and striped with peas. Yum.

I'm thinking a lifetime of therapy awaits the child who confronts this dish at dinnertime.

Late Harvest

2006-12-04T10:02:00.000-08:00

During my brief blogging hiatus I did make time for one of the more important short harvests in a gardener's biennium. I refer, of course, to the tomato stake season which in my locale runs for a mere 48 hours, beginning at 1900 hours on the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November in even-numbered years, with occasional small harvests in other years.

This year the environmentalist in me was heartened, and the gardener dismayed, to discover that my preferred candidates had used recycleable materials--a printed polyethylene sleeve over a wire frame. Much as I hate to do them the favor of disposing of their waste, I was left to clean up the opposition's signs. One candidate, whose mulititude of signs had the best quality stakes, had waged a particularly odious campaign. Unable to campaign on his own qualifications, for he had none, he flung the foulest sort of dirt at the incumbent during the primary. It worked and he, not the incumbent, was on the November ballot.

I mentioned the waste. Once you've separated the tomato stakes from the actual signs, you're left with a stack of sturdy, weatherproof, non-recycleable, non-biodegradeable, corrugated plastic rectangles. There must be some way to use them, I thought, as my gaze fell on the chicken coop. The new coop

is bright and airy, but with single-wall construction it's also drafty. I've considered finishing off the interior walls with something. Perhaps the signs would work.

Two of my young roosters, Darcy and Collins, have taken to roosting on top of the nest boxes. I don't know how they manage to stay up there, given the slope, but they've made an awful mess of the plywood. It occurred to me that a slick plastic surface would either make it impossible for them to maintain a toehold, or be easier to clean if they were able to hold on.
Behold the candidate (who lost the election), useful at last:

And when those signs wear out, I have replacements at the ready:

Strange bedfellows

2006-12-02T09:49:00.000-08:00

Much like politics, the high price of heating oil sometimes makes for strange bedfellows:

Thought you was dead.

2006-11-29T17:12:00.000-08:00

I've been a bad blogger lately, and for that I apologize to my readers--both of you. Chalk it up to a combination of business travel, deadlines, a torn rotator cuff, which until it is repaired next year motivates me to stay away from keyboards as much as possible, and pure laziness. Add to that the desire to take advantage of whatever daylight hours are available to do fall cleanup on the garden, frustration with blogger (some of my best material is out there in the ether), and. . .enough with the excuses.

Speaking of things thought to be dead, I've been moving a lot of shrubs and perennials around this fall. Apparently conditions are favorable enough in my planting beds that some plants quickly exceed even the upper bounds described in the planting guides. Or perhaps I just couldn't imagine that a plant in a 2" pot could so quickly reach a 36" diameter. Also, I don't have great design sense, so it doesn't occur to me when I'm setting out plants that perhaps they aren't all that appealing en masse, and would look better scattered throughout the beds. So I move things around until I find an arrangement that suits me.

What made all this shuffling around exciting was discovering lost plants--those perennials that were overwhelmed by their more vigorous neighbors. Like me this last month, they weren't dead, just buried.

For instance, when I pulled up a thick mat of golden deadnettle, there was a cyclamen that I'd received as a housewarming gift years ago, which I had just assumed had gone on to that great compost heap in the sky:

From the looks of the curled stems, it's been blooming away under cover without my ever getting to appreciate it.

And the tiny cyclamen coum that I thought the chickens had scratched out when I found the plastic marker (yes, I keep the plastic markers next to my small perennials until they get well enough established for me to remember where they are, so sue me!) lying in the middle of a dustbath spot some 6 feet away from where I had actually planted it, it turns out. I should know better than to plant miniature things, as my experience with several very expensive miniature hostas should teach me, but I love the way these stand up to the coldest weather and bloom even earlier than the snowdrops some years.

Under the hellebores I found a couple of tiny alpine lady's mantle plants, which are supposed to be invasive, but apparently not where I planted them. And these heucheras:

Now how does one lose a heuchera? I have others that run rampant, I divide them, give divisions to friends, who give divisions to their friends. These were fine full plants, overflowing their 6" pots. I've relocated them to similar pots and am wintering them over in my greenhouse in the hope that they will regain some of their former glory. Especially 'Monet', in the lower left-hand corner. The prettiest little green and white heuchera I've ever seen.

It appears that the key to getting into blogger and successfully uploading pictures is to do it early on Saturday morning when the rest of the denizens of the blogosphere are still asleep. Point taken. See you next week.

For Firefox 2.0 Users Only

2006-10-30T09:35:00.000-08:00

I recently upgraded my browser to Firefox 2.0, which I was happy to discover solved the one irritating feature of Firefox--the inability to select text from a web page and paste it into an Outlook email. However, 2.0 comes with a new annoying feature--automatic spell-checking--with no documented way to turn it off. If, like me, you can spell just fine, thank you, or if you can't spell to save your life but you just don't care, here's what you need to do to disable this feature:
In the browser address bar type
about:config

(Note that there is no http:// preceding the command.)You'll see a whole host of registry-type settings for your browser.

In the Filter bar type
layout

Scroll down to the value "layout.spellcheckDefault" and right-click on it. Select "Modify", and change the value to 0. You're done. No more annoying red squiggly lines under the words the browser doesn't recognize.

Lifehacker writes about a few more things here that you can do to tweak your browser just-so.

Not a garden post

2006-09-26T17:25:00.000-07:00

On the whole, I'd much rather be outside today, gardening or kayaking or looking for mushrooms, but I'm stuck in my office. This was made much more tolerable by a colleague's email notifying me that The Royal Society has opened its online archives containing every paper published in the Royal Society journals from 1665 to the present day. Access to the archives is free to the public for the next two months. So I've just spent a pleasant hour reading a letter of Mr. Isaac Newton , Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors , published in 1671. Too cool! He held a prism up to a beam of light and observed the shape of the refracted colors, an activity that never failed to delight my daughters when they were toddlers.
"It was at firft a very pleafing divertifement, to view the vivid and intenfe colours produced thereby; but after a while applying my felf to confider them more circumfpectly, I became furprifed to fee them in an oblong form; which according to the received laws of refraction, I expected fhould have been circular." Uh, yeah, I guess we never got quite that far in our obfervations.
Darn, why couldn't they have waited until January to open the archives to the public!

The winter garden

2006-09-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

Petunia's Gardener asked what other folks were planting in their winter gardens. I started to leave a comment but quickly recognized a blog-hijacking-in-progress, so I retreated to my own space where I can babble on ad infinitum.

Because the nights are so cool on Tiger Mountain, some portion of my winter garden gets sown in the springtime. Sown in April, but not yet ready for harvest, are brussel sprouts and parsnips. The brussel sprouts are just forming and should be ready by November. They'll stand all winter as I pick off the largest ones from each stalk and leave the rest to grow. Ready for harvest, but left for the cooler weather are winter squash (delicata and butternut varieties) and kale. Kale seems to need at least a light frost to sweeten up and the winter squash keeps so well, I like to wait until other things are finished before bringing it in to cook.

Things we've been enjoying all along, and will continue to enjoy for at least the first part of winter are carrots, beets, and swiss chard. Last year I left beets in the ground to harvest until they started new top growth in early spring.

I sow lettuces continously throughout the summer and right now I have baby romaine, arugula, purslane, and a crinkly green leaf lettuce. Lettuce seems to survive the worst winter weather here, including getting snowed on, but it gets so beat up outside that it's not very appetizing in a salad. My outside lettuce is under a slight overhang, but I grow most of my winter lettuces inside the greenhouse.

In early August I planted out new seedlings of sprouting broccoli. This is a new one for me, inspired by the Allotment Lady's success last year. The purple sprouting variety is a true biennial. It won't begin producing florets until April or May of next year. Another variety, Rudolph, is claimed to produce sprouts in time for Christmas. I'm not holding my breath on that one. I do have about a half dozen Rudolph plants started inside the greenhouse, but they are actually not as far along as the ones growing outside, owing to either flea beetles or a brassica-loving mouse having stripped the leaves down.

In October I'll plant garlic. Last year was the first time I've tried growing garlic (or rather, the first time I did it correctly instead of trying to grow it in the springtime from sprouted cloves from the pantry) and it was a rousing success. I got a nice head of garlic from each clove I planted, the presence of the garlic seemed to have discouraged all the burrowing rodents from that bed, and absolutely no effort on my part after planting.

Inside the greenhouse I've started some more swiss chard and kale. When the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and melons are done producing, I'll put in more leafy greens, both for salads and for braising--chicories, mustard greens, tatsoi, mizuna, and arugula. I'm thinking I might try to get some more carrots growing under cover as well, maybe the Thumbelina variety.

The greenhouse is unheated, so it's really more like a walk-in cold frame. During our recent cold snap it got down to 44 F 4 feet above ground, and 48 F at the soil level.

So, that's my winter garden. I'd love to learn what other people are growing and/or wintering over.

Stonehenge, as she were

2006-09-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

Reading about Robin Andrea's adventures in misanthropic photoshopping reminded me of one of my favorite photos, taken just after dawn on August 1, 2005. My daughter and I had expected this site to be deserted at that time, or possibly occupied by a group of Lughnasadh celebrants, but it was crawling with a busload of tourists. As the sun rose, I did my best to capture the stones alone, but every time I clicked the shutter another fleece-clad person would have popped out into view.
After a bit of cleanup (I took out the fences while I was at it) I now have what we came hoping to see:

A few more garden photos

2006-09-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

Time was when my garden had to be all tidy beds and made-to-purpose trellises. These days when my day job takes nearly all my waking hours, I find myself using whatever is at hand.

Above: pole beans and kale. The trellis is an old pitchback that my daughters used to use to sharpen their soccer and lacrosse skills.
Below: Growing winter squash in the compost bin. The bin, which is about 4 feet tall, was full of compost that wasn't quite ready to use, so I added a couple shovelsful of soil and planted my squash in it. They probably could have gone all summer without my watering them.

Nice Melons

2006-09-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

Ripe melons on chilly Tiger Mountain!

I ended up with about a dozen melons, ranging from 3-4 pounds each, from 6 plants. Well worth the effort.

Most. Sensuous. Tomato

2006-09-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

First Sunday in September, which means it's the moment of truth for the contestants in Dr. Charles' tomato competition. And thank you, Doctor, for giving so many tomato-philes an opportunity to strut our stuff online.

I had my own requirements for potential contestants:
1. Talent. It was not enough to be a pretty tomato. If you didn't taste good you weren't going to finals. That ruled out 'Health Kick'.
2. Community service. The divas who think it's enough to put out a tomato or two over the the course of the growing season can just think again. The tomato had to at least contribute something to the awareness of larger issues, be it global warming, or poverty and hunger. Sorry,
'Prudens Purple' and 'Brandywine'. Nice pedigree, but you didn't earn your keep this year.

Note to Carlito: no animals were harmed in the production of these tomatoes, except for the ones the spiders caught and ate.

And now, the contestant from Tiger Mountain, Super San Marzano. Modest-sized plants festooned with clusters of 5, 6, even 7 luscious fruits, some weighing as much as 125 grams. Lovely to behold, and to hold.

A wonderful cooking tomato--sauce thickens up to almost a jam-like texture after a brief simmer. I love these guys!

On the advantage of nearsightedness

2006-08-27T10:29:00.000-07:00

I can't afford to own a Monet to hang on my wall. But I can paddle my kayak into Mercer Slough, point it toward a patch of waterlilies, and remove my glasses.

Vegetable of the Month

2006-08-11T18:15:00.000-07:00

I can't quite decide, though. Is this carrot (which I just pulled from my garden, I didn't go looking for trouble) suggestive and immoral and should be sliced, diced, and boiled? Or is it being appropriately modest, and thus a role model for vegetables everywhere?

Found Poem

2006-08-10T12:17:00.000-07:00

Documentation that my company publishes online includes an email address for customer feedback. Not surprisingly this generates a lot of spam, all of which gets trapped by our spam filter, but which requires a quick skim every few weeks to make sure a legitimate customer question didn't get quarantined by accident. When it builds up to a certain level, say 500 messages or so, a kind of poetic rhythm sometimes emerges in the subject lines. I'm not sayin' it's good poetry, just that it's there:

Invalid Information

Status:
Order status, milori blue
Order status, needle palm
Order status, night-eyed
Order status, Pan-gothic
From us it much better.

All products for your health!
Your health, milk snake
Your health, minister-general
Your health, ninety-three
Your health, Non-scandinavian
From us it much better.

Better Future, winder-on!
Your future, navel pipe
Your future, needle cast
Your future, ocean-smelling
Your future, pasture rose
From us it much better.

How much does your image cost?
Your cash, moon-tipped
Your money, oyster grass
Your cash, night heron
Your money, Parcel-greek
From us it much better.

Hi, never-trodden:
Is read of berry cornice
That listen no courtesan
All to communicate the mindset required
The word ecstatic comes to mind
From us it much better.

First Sunday Tomato Check-in

2006-08-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

Tiime for a status update in the tomato contest of Dr. Charles.

'Health Kick', aka 'Just Another Pretty Face' tomatoes are ripening nicely. They are pretty, aren't they? Too bad they taste like cardboard. I'm glad this is a determinate variety because that means I'll be able to pull up the plants in another month and put something else in that bed.
Still, they are undeniably attractive. And on Tiger Mountain, ripe tomatoes the first weekend in August is something to cheer about. I'm thinking these might work just fine in a lunchtime BLT:

'Super San Marzano', clearly a contender for "most sensuous". I mean, just look at the exquisite form. You can't see them all in the photo, but in the cluster that is beginning to ripen there are seven tomatoes:

'Brandywine', beginning to show color. This plant shows its unhappiness with our cold nights (still getting down to 49 F most nights inside the greenhouse) by refusing to set fruit, but the few that are produced are wonderful:

And finally, 'Prudens Purple' giving 'Brandywine' some serious competition for "greenhouse diva". Prudens has set just this one fruit, which holds great promise, but c'mon! One lousy tomato on a 6 foot tall plant?

Disappointment

2006-07-30T18:10:00.000-07:00

There are few events a gardener looks forward to more than the taste of the first homegrown tomato of the summer. It's the herald of things to come, of walking out to the garden in pajamas, barefoot, to pick a juicy ripe tomato and eat it on the spot, before coffee, even. It's even more exciting here on Tiger Mountain when that first tomato ripens in July.

Alas, the plant that offered up the season's first is one that was given to me this spring by a fellow gardener who was excited about the health benefits of a tomato with "50% more lycopene!". Sorry, but I eat tomatoes because they taste good, not because they are good for me, and I've had tastier tomatoes from the supermarket.

Compared to their decision to close the Heronswood Nursery this year, creating this tasteless fruit is a relatively minor crime on the part of Burpee & Co., but still. . . what were they thinking?!?!?
Let the gardener beware. 'Health Kick' from Burpee is not something you want to waste your time with.

Pollen Party

2006-07-30T17:32:00.000-07:00

One of the hollyhocks fell over the other day, and the bees took advantage of the gravity assist to party on the pollen until they passed out. When I nudged one of them to see if they were even alive, it buzzed sleepily and burrowed even further into the flower.

Awwwww

2006-07-28T10:47:00.000-07:00

There's just nothing cuter than a baby chick, even when it's not wearing a yarmulka.

Miracle in the hen house

2006-07-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

Forget visions of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, or Christ Himself revealing his profile on the surface of a tortilla. When a chick emerges from the egg wearing a yarmulka, that's gotta' be a sign of something, right?

This Melon's Life

2006-07-24T22:03:00.000-07:00

Coming along nicely. A few other assisted melons made it, perhaps 1 in 10. Better yet, the bees showed up last week and are taking care of business.

The Tomato Contest of Dr. Charles

2006-07-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

Above: Health Kick
Below: Super San Marzano

Below: Brandywine
Not shown: Prudens Purple, which still hasn't set fruit

Dr. Charles has a tomato contest going, and I loves me some competition, even in contests where all odds are against me. Growing tomatoes, for example. I live in the foothills of the central Cascades. Even in July night time temps are typically in the 40s, low 50s. Getting even the short season, Siberian varieties to ripen takes constant vigilance and nurturing. And guess who forgot to plant any short season, Siberian varieties this year? I got too carried away with starting plants from some packets of seeds I had lying around, and one thing led to another and I ended up with a bed plus a planter full of paste tomatoes, and long-season heirloom varieties. Plus it's a good six weeks past the start of the contest. Still, any excuse to post pictures of my tomatoes, which are doing surprisingly well under the circumstances. I'll consider this my baseline against which my finish in future competitions can be compared. And if the good doctor considers adding an underdog category, I am so in!

ART for melons

2006-07-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to grow melons this year for the first time since moving to this chilly climate. As with my tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, melons need to be grown under cover to have any chance bearing fruit. But the problem with the greenhouse is that bees are reluctant to enter, or at least bees are reluctant to enter mine, even with the doors thrown open wide, because they can smell the spray I used to take out a wasp nest in there, weeks ago. At any rate, I got tired of seeing female buds form:

And then shrivel and drop off:

I tried using a camel hair brush to transfer pollen gently from the male blossoms, but that didn't work. Clearly my reluctant melons needed a more aggressive approach, assisted reproductive technology, if you will.

Notice the tiny green stem protruding from the center of the female blossom in this photo? It's a male blossom, stripped of its petals and literally stuffed inside the female.

I feel like such a perv, doing this over and over. . .
But 48 hours after this adventure in fertility, this one hadn't shriveled up yet.

And 4 days later, it's looking real good:

Stay tuned. I'm off to breed more tasty little melons.

Happy Birthday E.B. White

2006-07-11T13:10:00.000-07:00

It's the birthday today of the man who gave us Charlotte's Web and The Elements of Style. More personally for me, it's the birthday of the man who taught my daughters to read, and who taught me to write.

Charlotte's Web was how I introduced my daughters to "chapter books", as they called them, ~~when I could no longer stand reading 20 2o-page books in a row~~ as soon as I felt they no longer required pictures to hold their interest during our marathon reading sessions. They loved Trumpet of the Swan also (and both eventually forgave Mr. White for Stuart Little, which they hated) but it was their love for Wilbur that help motivate them to teach themselves to read at an early age. They literally wore out those first chapter books, and the tattered ones remain on their bookshelves alongside their worn, but less tattered, replacements, cherished souvenirs of that magical time when printed words first came alive for them.

E. B. White did not have a place on our bookshelves when I was growing up, unfortunately. I discovered Mr. White as the other half of Strunk & White, and I've been through as many copies of The Elements of Style as my daughters have of Charlotte's Web. And, come to think of it, TEoS has much of the same sense of wonder and beauty that made CW such a joy to read aloud.

How to honor the memory of the man who gave us Wilbur and Charlotte? I guess the least I could do is to refrain from eating pork today.

It's not mock anything

2006-07-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

Too pretty to be called "mock orange". It's real Philadelphus coronarius variegata.

And finally, the rose

2006-07-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

'Pegasus' is a David Austin rose. It does horribly here on Tiger Mountain, sometimes losing 90% of its leaves to black spot and going into sulks over the least extreme of temperature and humidity. It's useless as a cut flower and not particularly attractive as a shrub. The fragrance is slight. In short, it lacks just about everything I expect from a rose. But on its good days, like this one, I can forgive every shortcoming.