Posts Tagged ‘garden’
October 8th, 2009
Day 8: Modular Garden Fencing Instructable
I’ve wanted to write something for instructables.com for about a year now. And once I decided on a fitting project for the site, I’ve pretty much just wanted to write and publish the following…. I haven’t been able to make myself do it, however, until this post-a-day endeavor forced me to.
I wasn’t involved ’til about 80% through this design/build (as it was a birthday surprise). Kate, Kevin, and Dad helmed this garden-protection solution and I think they did a great job. I hope I’ve described how you can replicate it in a clear, step-by-step manner.
I am going to provide an embed of my article now, in the interest of “test-driving” this online resource, though I’m not a big fan of Instructable’s embed interface. I’d suggest visiting the Instructables page, or maybe you’ll find this embed more bearable than I do:
Modular Garden Fencing – More DIY How To Projects
October 3rd, 2009
Day 3: Spring a-fed/Fall snack
So Steph and I have pulled up 75% of the plants from our spring garden. The vast majority of them were still healthy and growing when we did it, so I thought there would be feelings of guilt during the act, but it ended up being extremely gratifying.
I don’t know if it was the tactile joy of ripping something up, the excitement over making such a drastic change to the space, or the relief of finally doing away with so many of these needy, needy organisms that we’d coddled and cajoled and what did some of them give us in return? Barely a mouthful of edible matter….
Not to name any names….cucumbers.
Seriously, two cucumbers this whole time? That’s all I’m going to get? Did you even think about the salads we could have made together? I enjoy cucumbers, so I’ll be attempting them again next year, but I am majorly put-out with this particular veggie.
Following closely on cucumbers’ heals for the coveted “Worst Plant in Our Garden” award is the lima beans. And I know my inexperience as a gardener is to blame here. As I mentioned in the post I made at planting time, I put things in pretty tightly in some places. The row of lima beans had tomatoes on one side of them and pole beans on the other, and as those plants grew tall, these poor guys in the middle were completely shaded out. During the peak of the season, we yielded just enough to make one pot. They were tasty, but the picking process (i.e. squatting down, searching for pods that look very similar to leaves on the shrubby little bushes while the surrounding plants’ branches beat you about the head and shoulders) and, once you get them in to the kitchen, the shelling, have me thinking they are too much work for too little benefit.
Jalapeños: never again. These things were far too prolific. I planted an entire row for some reason and going out and plucking 10–15 per day off of their stems got old fast. Even if you made a dish, every single night, that warranted jalapeños, how many would you use? One? Two maybe? I couldn’t even give them away in any substantial quantity. Same with the cayenne peppers. When it comes to the spicy stuff, Steph is in the category referred to as “wuss,” or, as she claims it’s more accurately known, “hasn’t scorched her taste buds so badly that they can no longer feel feelings.” Either way, I can’t throw hot peppers in with our cooking, and, honestly, once we’ve finished preparing a meal, going through the trouble of washing, slicing, de-seeding, chopping up, and stirring a couple of these tiny food items into my portion loses out to simply sprinkling on some Tabasco or Texas Pete.
Steph and I got enough pole beans that the two of us could both have a generous side-portion about every two weeks, which I can’t complain about. Green beans, in my opinion, are infinitely better when they’re fresh, so they’re on the list for the next go ’round. Next time however, as soon as they emerge from the soil as fragile little sprouts, I’m going to build them a more solid trellis, preferably a heavy-duty type of structure that will still be around after the nuclear holocaust.
The bell peppers from our garden were much smaller than what you see in the grocery store, but they have a milder, “fresher” flavor, which I think is nice. They got a late start producing, but they’re still at it, so they are part of the 25% we left. We’ll do ’em again.
The summer squash was plenty productive through July. It’s huge leaves hogged a lot of sun, but the bi-product was worth it. We’ll do these again as well.
Probably because we only grew two small rows of it and reduced its ability to pollinate, our sweet corn didn’t yield like it could have, but what we did get was phenomenally good and it was fun to watch little seedlings transform into for-real giant stalks of corn in midsummer.
Producing tomatoes was a life-changing experience for me. Most people say it’s not worth trying to direct-seed tomatoes, so, at the beginning of May, I went to the state farmer’s market and got some starters. All the vendors seemed to be selling was the ubiquitous, probably commercially-patented variety known as “Better Boys.” That’s what I got. Later that month, Steph’s mom offered to give us some heirloom tomato starters to put in as well. I didn’t exactly see the need, as we already had 12 tomato sprouts in the ground, thriving, but enough people suggested we try them that I tucked them into one of our rows. In July, we began harvesting both species and my eyes were opened. We did a taste-test, cutting a slice of each and sprinkling them with salt and pepper, and once I bit into one of these “Italian Sweets” (as this heirloom is known) I knew I had never really tasted a tomato before. It had more flavor, a fuller texture, and was less watery and far less acidic than any of these fruits that I had consumed in the past. As they have been propagated this way for ages, one of the neat things to do with heirlooms is sacrifice a better specimen and put it through a process to save its seeds. You can then use those to make a whole crop of them the next year, then save the seeds again, make a crop the next year, and so on. I’m studying up on tomato-seed-saving now and its more involved than it sounds, but from where I’m sitting I would very much like it if Italian Sweets were the only tomato I grew for the rest of my life, ever. And since (of course) the original plants came from some little old lady in the mountains of Virginia that Steph’s family is not sure if they’ll ever cross paths with again, properly preserving these seeds has become a priority. (I’m coming to the realization that acquiring more unusual, interesting vegetables for your garden is sort of like scoring good dope. You can’t just order it from a catalog. You’ve got to know a guy who knows a guy who’ll meet you behind a Dairy Queen. That kind of thing.)
So Steph and I are now giving fall gardening a shot, attempting some cooler weather stuff like: carrots, radishes, cilantro, mustard greens, leaf lettuce, and kale. All highly desirable food items, in theory. If things are going well by the time the frost sets in (around November 1st) we may even really geek out and get season-extending covers. We’ll just have to see what autumn holds….
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May 13th, 2009
Sow Far Sow Good
It’s been an exciting three weeks, garden-wise.
For my birthday, back in April, Kate and Kevin designed and constructed some modular fencing panels that could surround my garden. These will keep out the rabbits, sure, though there’s a certain other potential garden pest that I was far more concerned about.
So I brought the fence to my house and installed it. Then the seeds I ordered finally came trickling in — some from certified-organic-only vendor Seeds of Change and some from the “emergency order” I put in with Gurney’s, avid gardener/Steph’s brother James’ preferred source.
We got the precious pellets in the ground two Sundays ago, following the packet directions for spacing and planting depth as closely as possible in the context of a garden plot that was plenty big enough for our plans but magically shrank with every indention we made in the dirt . (I’m sure, in true beginner fashion, we did some things exactly according to the package when we could have fudged and gotten more into a bed, and likewise, I’m sure we got creative with the placement when we should have gone by the book. The way we planted the corn, for example, is now causing me to wake up in the cold sweats in the middle of the night. More than anything else we put in, I want the corn to work out. Corn, of course, is delicious. But also, it’s a real rarity among home-growers — I don’t know anyone who even attempts it. I believe we can make it happen. We’ve got a spacious yard. We’ve got the direct sun. Where we may have screwed it all up is only putting in two rows of it. In the directions it states “plant at least four rows to ensure wind pollination.” But the corn seeds were the last we planted and there was only enough cultivated soil left to squeeze two in. So I guess we invented something of a problem for ourselves there, though I could probably spend upwards of 40 hours dancing around my corn with a box fan and consider it all time well spent.)
The main reason things got so tight in the beds is they are running all kinds of deals on starter plants at the farmer’s market. We went with intention of picking up six tomato plants, six green pepper plants, and six jalapeño plants, precisely. At the booth we settled on, however, you could get a whole tray, which holds twice as many plants, for like a dollar more than the cost of three six packs! I was helpless before the mighty power of this bargain. I was in awe, even as we were making runs to Target, scrounging the aisles for mixing bowls or sand castle buckets or anything you could fill with dirt and stick a plant in. (Ever try finding nine terra cotta flower pots smack-dab in the middle of spring? Good luck with that.) Yes, we ended up with twice the number of tomatoes and peppers we had originally desired. About half of the extra plants will be living in makeshift pots, long-term, the rest we just had to put in the garden.
Second gardening lesson learned the hard way? It’s easy to get carried away.
Oh, and nearly every seed we put in the ground is now sprouting. The pole beans and lima beans have been the real champions, coming up fast and strong, while all but one of the the cucumber plants simply refuse to show. The corn and squash are somewhere in the middle; they’re up, but each is just a tiny sprig. Pictures!
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