2010 Garden Journey ~ The Harvest begins

Well, folks, here it is October 10th… 10-10-10 and I’m finally getting around to writing about the garden again. Many months ago, it seems, I was good at keeping you up to date on the high excitement of the Huntley garden. Big plans!

I put in a green manure cover crop way back at the end of March, unheard of that early here in New Hampshire. Just around the beginning of May, everything was going according to plan; the cover crop was big and green, so I mowed, and roto-tilled the plants into the soil and waited a week to let the plants break down. Then it rained. Every weekend and mid week for at least a month. Finally, around July 4th weekend, I got the garden planted. Only a month late. Then it never rained again.  The driest summer in a long time.

So here we are harvest time. The almanac says that we can expect a killing frost in these parts somewhere around my birthday (September 17th), and when I was a kid, that was the norm. The last few years, it has been much later… a temporary hidden blessing from the whole global warming thing. Every cloud has a silver lining kind of thing. The garden is still alive and growing. The killing frost predicted for last night never came, although it was 35 degrees out this morning. Tonight is supposed to be another cold one.

Throughout the summer, we ate a lot of veggies from the garden, especially lettuces and summer squashes. As is the pattern, by August, I loathed zucchini. And the damn things just kept coming. We sort of stopped picking them and so we eventually got some thigh sized cucurbits that were useless for anything except tossing onto the bank for the chickens to peck at. At least our feathered friends were thankful for the bountiful harvest they received every few afternoons.

My cucumber/pole bean teepee followed the same course. We had fresh cucumbers galore all summer, in salads, with salt/and vinegar, with salt and lime, with ranch dip as raw veggies in lunch boxes. Maybe we should take up the art of pickling… next year.  I like the natural version using whey instead of salt and vinegar. It makes the pickles healthy, with live cultures, just like yogurt, and they still taste great. Yup, next summer.

We never did get more than a couple jalapenos and 1 poblano pepper. The plants themselves are mammoth. I’ve never had such luxurious pepper plants; and they all had loads of blossoms, just no fruit. I’ve been told that that’s a function of a too fertile soil, that peppers prefer a tougher life…who knows. Anyone?  Any advice?

I had some heirloom plum tomatoes that seemed to be following the same path, except that there were loads of green tomatoes all summer, just nothing red. Then a few weeks ago, they ALL starting turning red. They are thick and meaty and sweet, with few seeds, grown for sauces/salsas. I’m still picking them, although puppy Tessa found a hidden way into the garden and has spent afternoons also harvesting them. Who knew puppies loved tomatoes.

Our kidney beans and turtle beans are ready and Grace & I have been picking those and drying them in the oven.  We haven’t gotten very far yet, and we already have filled a shopping bag with beans for soups and chilly. That idea paid off!  We eat beans several times a week.

 

We also have a lot of sweet little carrots, also an heirloom variety, and Swiss Chard and Kale. I made a Caldo Verde soup this morning, which will simmer all day, and used our own carrots and later I’ll add the kale. It’s gonna be good! Beets and rutabagas also look like they will be harvestable soon.

Last but not least, we grew a few pumpkins. I put in three kinds, little pie pumpkins, little hull-less seed pumpkins and a French variety. Its an heirloom also… Musque de Provence.

We didn’t get a lot of the ones that I planted, but we did get some weird hybrid gourd-ish things all over the yard and in the compost pile. Seeds from some bygone garden or compost. We do have one giant French pumpkin. It looks like the ones you see in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast movie. Huge lobes, not very tall, and flat on the bottom.

It’s funny, but the whole summer just seemed to come and go, like the garden. We were travelling through Spring 2010 with big plans, exciting ideas, optimism for all the summer events, and then… Boom… October was here. For me, it’s like we slept through Summer. If you follow me at all, you'll know that’s not quite true… we did a lot of things and I was very busy with home projects and family fun; it just seems to have gone by so fast, like the garden.

I also realized this summer how much that I really love to plan the garden, buy the seeds, plant the garden and watch it grow.

I love to see how my plan turned out. I like mixing flowers and herbs into the beds and seeing all  the different textures, colors shapes and sizes of the plants. It’s like a big soily canvas with leafy, living paints.

We are just not that good at harvesting! At the end of the summer, when it’s time to pick things,we are tired of the garden and on to new stuff, like Autumn activities.

But I guess that's one of the reasons, that I love living in New Hampshire. By the time you are tired of the season; it changes!

2010 Garden Journey ~ Finally…The Garden is in!

Every year I plant a garden. Some years it’s quite prolific, others years it’s attractive, but offers less in the way of comestibles, and a few years here and there, it has been the domain of weeds, spiders and bees or left fallow altogether.

After last year’s success with vegetables and what I felt was a very artistic approach, I decided to step it up a notch. I drew up nice plans, back in January and ordered organic, heirloom seeds. I wanted to start everything myself in March, instead of buying seedlings in May. I also wanted to try a green manure.

As luck would have it, we had a super warm spring, and I tilled and planted my green manure seeds, (buckwheat, field peas, spring oats, vetch and mustard) in the last few days of March. An early start like that is unheard of in these parts.

Well, that turned out very successful! By the weekend before Memorial Day, the garden was completely covered, about knee high, with all these wonderful, beneficial little plants.

I mulch-mowed them and tilled them into the soil, as the method calls for, and let the soil set a week before planting (or so I planned)

But then, two things plotted against me to confound my plans. The first was my complete distraction with building… YES, you got it…the chicken coop! The second was a nasty period of rain, every other day it seemed.

Finally, around the second week of June, I had my coop done and the soil had dried out, so I started putting things in. My time was limited to week-nights and weekends, but now, two weeks later, I have everything in. What is amazing to me, is how fast things are sprouting. The stuff I put in two weeks ago has already sprouted and is off to a great start.

I planted Italian plum tomatoes; Poblano, Serrano, Cayenne, Jalapeño and sweet peppers; pole string beans, Romaine, mixed leaf lettuces, pickling cucumbers, black beans, kidney beans, kale, Swiss chard, beets, rutabagas, carrots, zucchini and summer squash, & cilantro. The corners of the beds are planted with marigolds and Grace interspersed all kinds of flowers throughout the garden. Outside the main garden, in the back, and up on the bank, I planted pie pumpkins, hull-less seed pumpkins and French pumpkins, and three types of winter squashes: acorn, butternut and delicata.

Do I really expect a grand harvest in the Fall or lots of tasty vegetables over the summer? Not really. My friend Michael saw me buying some last minute seeds at Agway last weekend (stuff I had forgotten to order) and commented how late it was to plant a garden. For me… it’s not the harvest… that is just the bonus. It’s all the thought and the care; the work and the sweat; the sore muscles; its watching the plants grow and seeing how the “plan” turned out. The garden is kind of a moving meditation for me, and a method for artistic expression. If I’m feeling stressed or anxious, I can go work in the garden (or really anywhere in the yard) and it all melts away.

 

I guess it’s the New England gene in my blood that wants to make sure my art or meditation has some practical purpose, at least on paper. Hopefully, we will get at least a salad out of the garden.

In other parts of the world, people practice art and meditation for their own sake; here on Poocham Road, we like to make sure that the things we do are of use…

2010 Garden Journey ~ They’re up!

A few weeks ago, I told you that the first seeds had sprouted in my green manure project/experiment. So far, it has been a great success. The garden is covered with a carpet of green, which on closer inspection, is the result of thousand of little plants growing.

 

On the windowsill, all of my Kale and heirloom Italian paste tomatoes have sprouted too. I planted Poblano, Jalapeño, Serrano, Cayenne, and sweet green pepper in another flat as well as these pumpkins from France that are really cool colored and funky shaped. Nothing in that tray has sprouted yet, but it’s early. The cat hasn’t laid all over the seed trays, yet, either, which is a plus.

I’ve also done some improvements to the garden area. I took down the old wattle compost bin, which was falling apart anyway and really just a buffet for the neighborhood dogs, and built a new bin with boards and added a mesh fence on the inside and two sliding access doors. I put all the old compost in the further bin from the garden, and it was already too hot to touch in the center of the pile by this weekend. To me, this stuff is so cool. Its all well proven ideas and ancient technology, but I’ve never really tried composting and the fact that it does generate extreme amounts of heat and turns plant matter into a black potting soil type of stuff is amazing to me.

You may also have heard that we had chickens. Well..our last “lady” Carmela, after surviving the winter alone in her pen, disappeared after only a week of having free reign of the yard again this spring. A little surprising, she was one of the better flyers and lived way up in a hemlock tree. On the bright side…her coop, a 4 x 6 x 7’ tall structure makes a perfect tool shed for the garden. Yesterday, I nailed some wheels onto the supports on the bottom and did a combination of push, drag, left and shuffle to move it to the back of my garden. All good…except for a small mishap. I had lifted the whole thing up about navel high to slide a log underneath. A s I went to lower it, the wood I had hold of broke and the coop came slamming down on my left thigh and knee.  It hurt like a mutha-f… But in true Huntley fashion, I walked it off and kept working for hours till all my little projects for the day were done. Later it hurt more and when I took my work pants off to take a shower, I discovered a big red and purple bruise and dent in my leg. I had to laugh, as I always seem to hurt myself in the name of outdoor projects. Tracy didn’t think it was that funny.

Now I have a garden shed to keep all my garden tools and supplies in right in the corner of the garden. I’m thinking of painting it and adding some left over cedar shakes I have to the roof for aesthetics. No doubt you’ll soon hear that I broke something falling off the roof or have been blinded by paint.

But honestly, hurts and all…I never feel better than when I spend the day “playing” outside.

2010 Garden Journey ~ The first sprouts

My garden journey has begun again this year. The first sprouts are up!

Last weekend, in a spurt of pent up energy, waiting for the growing season to commence, I did the un-thinkable here in chilly New New Hampshire…I tilled the garden and planted. For most people, and for most things that you are planting in the garden, Memorial Day, at the END of May, is the traditional garden planting date. True, the snow was gone and weather had been in the 60’s for a week or so, but we often get snowstorms and sub freezing weather all the way into mid-April. Maybe I pushed it a little.

I have always enjoyed gardening, as a hobby, as a means of artistic expression, and even as kind of a moving meditation. Part of the joy is to do everything organic, no pesticides, no chemical fertilizers, very little or minimized carbon footprint (except for maybe the roto-tiller.) So, ever since I was a kid growing up in Westmoreland, reading organic gardening magazines, making garden plans and planting my gardens, I had learned about and wanted to try something called a green manure. It’s an organic gardening concept, where you plant certain things in the fall or early spring, plants that have some beneficial properties for your garden, and then just before planting time, you till them into the soil.

Some plants draw and free up potassium and phosphorous from the soil, some add nitrogen, some have deep, penetrating roots that break up the subsoil. Some just grow very fast and add a thick leafy matter to the soils to help build up its organic content. One of the plants I chose, Mustard, has an oil that is toxic to fungi and nematodes, both of which can make a beautiful garden go to crap in short order.

So… last week I tilled the soil and planted a mix of buckwheat, field peas, spring oats, vetch and mustard. Of course, that was the end of the the two week warm spell of 60 degree weather and it turned cold and rainy. Oh well, I thought. I’ll have to buy more seeds and try again. But yesterday… all my little seeds have sprouts and are starting to grow.

If it works out well, I’ll do it again next year, as well as hit the garden with the new manure source of 25 chickens that we will be getting in May. Maybe I’ll be able to grow pumpkins the size of a VW.

 

Next time on Life as Russ ~ How I survived the NHLSA Spring Quarterly