The Neglected Garden

After a year of mostly neglecting my garden, I finally got back out there about a week ago.  I have a new system that seems to be working fairly well.  I had been cooking and eating my lunch after feeding the toddler and putting him down for his nap.  Now, I'm working really hard to have something prepared for myself so that I can eat with him.  Then, after I put him down, I spend one hour outside in the garden.  It means I have to do a little more of the housework while he's awake, but he's really entertaining himself much better.  In the past, I've been overwhelmed with large projects and ended up not even starting them.  Now, after an hour, I usually want to keep working, but instead I come back inside and do some chores in here where I can hear him when he wakes up.  This leaves me wanting to get back out there the next day.

Mostly, I've just been weeding.  Here's the side garden after I got it a little cleaned up:

 The mboga peppers not only survived being buried in grass, but have really started producing now that the weather's getting a little cooler.  I'm drying the red ones to grind up later, and I've been eating the green ones with my bean burritos (very nice).

The pineapple sage has also started to bloom.  It's definitely worth the wait.

The only other survivors were the basil, the chia volunteers and some bok choy.  Well, plenty of lambsquarters had gone to seed, so I spread those seeds and some bok choy and arugula seeds and all of that is starting to sprout.

The back garden is still in rough shape, but I've spent a few hours out there since this picture was taken and it's looking a little better.

A day to work

So, I haven't really blogged about my garden in a long time.  I'd like to say that I've been too busy gardening, but that's just not the case.  In fact, I've all but abandoned the garden.  Fortunately, it hasn't abandoned me.

Here's a picture of the first ripe tomato we got back in late June:

This was one of the new Chadwick Cherries I grew this year.  I was very impressed.  They were tasty and very large for cherries.  Unfortunately, we didn't get more than a few after that one.  We've been having some trouble with squirrels taking our tomatoes and I've had to pick them before they were ripe.  This year, they started taking them while they were still green.  I'm going to have to figure something out next year.  Maybe I'll offer an alternative food source or maybe I'll just shoot them.  After the figs started to ripen earlier this month, the squirrels lost their interest in the green tomatoes and I was able to pick some and fry them:

We also made a super tasty frittata with garden greens:

Besides the greens and the figs, we've gotten little else out of the garden this year: only one zucchini before the heat wave, one acorn squash volunteer, two little eggplants that went into some ratatouille and some chili peppers:

These are all cayenne, which have produced fairly well in spite of staying tiny.  The mboga peppers are also starting to ripen and the plants themselves are very nice-looking.  I did a taste test to compare the cayenne and the mboga (which look very similar) to see if I want to grow both next year.  They were about the same level of spicy and had a very similar taste.  The mboga seemed to hit my stomach a lot harder, but it may have been because it was the second one I ate.  I really do like the plant, though, but the cayenne has produced better.  I think I will keep them both.  

I didn't get a single jalapeno out of the garden this year.  They were too small when the heat hit.  I never even got the Piri Piri in the ground.  They have such a long season and I was too late starting.  We've been blessed by generous gardeners this year, though.  That ratatouille I mentioned had tomatoes from a friend's garden.  Another friend has given us lots of okra and bunch of jalapenos:

 

This is probably my most disappointing season in the ten years I've been gardening.  The garden has slipped to be maybe my seventh priority after caring for my toddler, keeping up with housework, buying and preparing food, my job, training for my first marathon and keeping the yard looking almost presentable.  

My wife has taken this week off from work to spend time with some visiting family and that has given me a chance to get some stuff done.  On Monday, we spent the morning with my parents and I spent the afternoon catching up on some social networking sites I'd been avoiding because of potential Olympics spoilers.  Yesterday, I ran 8 miles in the morning and then had to drive to the next town over to mow the yard at our rental property, since we're between tenants.  Today, my wife took our son and her visiting relatives to see her aunt that lives nearby and that gave me a chance to spend some time cleaning up the yard.  Tomorrow, I'm planning to run 13 miles in the morning and then see what I can do in the garden.  Friday, I'll have to rest and (hopefully) sleep since I'm working that night.

I didn't get everything done that I wanted, but I did get to work on a part of the yard that has been bugging me for a while.  It actually got so bad that one of my neighbors came over and did a little cutting on it the other day.  She didn't cut much, but she did make me realize that I had to get it done:

Full disclosure: the red car wasn't there in the before picture.

In addition to mowing, I also got to cut the ivy off of the front porch:

I'll be satisfied if I can only get the weeds a little under control in the garden tomorrow, but if the work goes fast, I might even get some cool-weather crops planted.  I'm thinking spinach and maybe bok choy or winter squash!

All about Apiaceae

Wild apiaceae on the banks of North Buffalo Creek

For me, an interest in gardening is turning into an interest in botany.  I've become fascinated by the way that different plants are related to each other and what that means in terms of their growing together.  This interest has led me to a desire to write a series of posts about the major families that I plant in my garden.

Dill flower

An important part of organic gardening is companion planting or poly-culture.  Certain plants have been shown to help each other when grown in close proximity.  Other plants can be grown successfully together because they do not compete for resources (for instance, if their roots extract nutrients at different levels).  Still other plants have a more generalized beneficial effect, either by repelling different types of pests or by attracting beneficial insects.

Carrot flower

It's for this last reason that every garden should have at least one member of the apiaceae (or umbelliferae) family.  The shape of their flowers is perfect for attracting ladybugs, parasitic wasps and predatory flies into your garden.  All of these insects will then feed on various insect pests in between snacking on your flowers.  Many members of this family are very pungent herbs and, when used in a poly-culture setting, can confuse pests that are looking for your other plants.  The reason that I've picked this family to start with is that several are flowering in my garden right now.  I've also noticed what I would bet is a wild relative growing on the banks of a creek near my house.

 My wife says that this is Queen Anne's Lace.  A quick internet search confirmed that as a possibility.  Some other options would be wild carrot, cow parsley, fool's parsley and poison hemlock.  You can tell by the foliage that it is very similar to the carrot. 

You can also see that it does its job of insect attraction.

Probably the member of this family that is most commonly cultivated in home vegetable gardens is the carrot.  Carrots are an excellent source of beta-carotene, fiber and antioxidants.  The tops are supposedly edible (and nutritious) but they can be quite bitter and might even be toxic in large enough quantities.  In heavier soils, with a higher clay content, the best carrots to use are the shorter, wider varieties instead of the long thin types.  Right now I have several of the "scarlet keeper" variety that I've left all winter in an attempt to save some seed.  Like some other members of this family, carrots are biennial and will only go to flower in the second year.  Mine are now flowering to almost four feet tall and are very pretty.  I'm not sure how obvious the seeds will be when they develop and if they will be easy to collect or not.  I do think that they will probably reseed to a certain extent.  Carrots can be grown surprisingly close together, but do need to be thinned to a few inches between them in order to develop properly.

Carrot with rosemary and salvia

Another member of this family that is grown as a vegetable is the parsnip.  I have not tried to grow parsnips yet, but hope to try them in the future.  According to Grow Biointensive, parsnips produce the most calories per square foot of garden space, so they are a must for anyone making a serious attempt to grow all of their own food.  They achieve this by being both very dense in calories compared to other vegetables and by the fact that they can be grown very close together, like their cousins the carrots.  Their tops, however, are toxic and should only be handled with gloves.  The other vegetable member of the apiaceae family is the Hamburg root parsley, a type of parsley that is grown in Europe and used in stews.  I probably will not be trying this one, since I would be worried that it would cross-pollinate with my parsley.

Parsley flower

Most of the rest of the apiaceae that are cultivated are used as herbs or spices.  Parsley may be the most common of these and is the most abundant in my garden right now.  Like carrots, parsley is biennial and it reseeds readily in the second year.  Our winters have not been heavy recently, but the parsley has survived well.  Most of the top will die off, but it comes back strong and early in the spring.  Even when I have thought it to be dead, when I pulled it up, the roots were extensive and healthy so I left some in the ground and they've done very well.  This year, parsley may win the re-seeder of the year award (although the lambsquarters are coming on strong) and I have over 40 plants that have come up as volunteers this spring.  Parsley is extremely nutritious.  It is a good source of protein and an excellent source of fiber and a lot of different vitamins and minerals.  Just one cup gives you all the vitamins A, C and K that you need and about a quarter of your iron and folate.  It is the main ingredient in tabouleh, which is my favorite salad, an essential part of falafel, kofta and other meat balls and a big part of my meat loaf!

Parsley with garlic and mint

The other herb members of the family apiaceae that I have experience growing are dill and coriander.  Dill leaves are excellent with fish and vegetables and, after it flowers, the seeds can be used as a spice for cooking and for pickling.  The leaves of the coriander plant are called cilantro and are used extensively in Mexican and Asian cooking.  Chopped up with onions and tomatoes it is good eaten with either nacho chips or chapati.  I've never gotten a lot of chance to harvest the greens as it bolts to seed very quickly.  The seeds, called coriander, are an excellent spice that is used heavily in Indian food.  Both dill and coriander reseed very well, but have not done as well for me as parsley.  Compared to the 40 parsley volunteers, I think I got 6 or 7 dills and only one coriander.

Herb seedlings

Many other members of the apiaceae family are used as herbs and spices, including fennel, cumin, chervil, angelica, asafoetida, cicely, anise and lovage.  Celery is also a member of this family.  My wife has been encouraging me to grow fennel, but I have read that it can impair the growth of other plants in the garden.  Maybe I can find some out of the way place to try it.  I'm trying cumin this year, with no luck so far.  There are some sprouts which I believe to be dill or coriander that may yet turn out to be cumin.  I use it probably even more than coriander, since I put it in chilli and other bean dishes as well as in curries.  It's very good in hummus.

So, if you don't have any of the apiaceae family in your garden, you should try some this year!  Pick a nutritious veggie, a delicious herb or just plant one for the insect attracting benefits.

Better Late than Never

So, I'm a few weeks behind, but I finally got my original garden area (mostly) planted.  I've left some space for the piri piri peppers when they're big enough and I'm sure there'll be some other little spaces to fill in as I go.  I've left some wilderness over on the right side, where I'm planning to put some beans and squash soon.  All of the poles and cages indicate tomato locations (about 30 so far).  I've also put out 7 cayenne seedlings.  Amongst all of these veggies I've sown a mix of salads and herbs.  So far, I'm definitely seeing plenty of bok choy, arugula, borage, dill and lambsquarters come up.  I'm also seeing some cilantro and something that may or may not be cumin.  No calendula or nigella yet, but they're still going strong in my side yard.

Now that most of the planting is done out back, I have lots of weeding and thinning ahead of me.  I've also broken ground in the side yard.  As I mentioned, there are some flowers left that either survived the winter or have reseeded, but I'm looking to put quite a few veggies in there.  I have more pepper and tomato seedlings in my flat that need to go out soon.  I'm also going to be planting okra, squash, sunflowers and amaranth.

Wordless Wednesday

God makes it grow

I know a lot of people who think that gardening is too hard, or just something that they can't do well.  There is a lot of hard work involved in gardening.  You have to prepare the soil by digging, tilling, turning, adding compost, etc.  You have to plant your seeds.  When they come up, you have to thin them and keep all of the weeds from choking them out.  You have to make sure they get enough water and nutrients.  You may have to prune them.  All of this work may take months before you ever see a harvest.  When you do get fruit, there is more work in harvesting, cleaning, preparing and storing!  With all of this work that is involved in gardening, there is one thing that gardeners can't do: we can't make anything grow.  We can make the conditions more favorable.  We can eliminate or reduce competition.  We can't make it grow.  Inherent in every seed is the potential for growth. 

The plant pictured above is a great lesson to me.  I never tilled this area.  I never planted a single seed there.  I didn't do any thinning or any weeding (as you can tell).  In spite of my complete lack of work, this arugula plant has grown and thrived.  It must have come up as a volunteer in the fall and survived our extremely mild winter.  This spring, it got positively huge (that's a four-foot fence).  In fact, it's bigger and healthier than any of the arugula that I tended last year.  This picture was taken a few weeks ago.  Now, it has completely gone to seed and I'll be harvesting them soon.  Most of the arugula I grow later this year and early next year will come from this one plant that grew with no help from me!

Edible wilderness

So, Friday night my wife called my garden an "edible wilderness."  She wasn't insulting it.  She was actually excited because going out to pick something felt more like going to the woods than gardening.  Whatever she meant, I took it as a sign that I needed to get some stuff done out there.  I have been favoring hardy perennials and annuals that reseed themselves easily, going for more of a natural look than you might see in some gardens.  I've also been allowing some beneficial weeds to go to seed.  Above, that's the rosemary that dominates the place.  You can see carrots in the foreground, spearmint gone wild to the left, thistle in the background and a giant arugula against the fence.  The carrots and arugula are gone to seed and so has a bunch of bok choy.  I've got parsley and dill that reseeded themselves and some red onions that were overlooked last year.  One cilantro volunteer came up, but we ate it a few weeks ago.  I've also planted garlic that I harvested last year.



The main focus of my work yesterday was to turn my compost pile for the first time this year.  It mostly looked like a brush pile overrun with weeds:

 

There was a lot of good, mature compost underneath:

This plant came up along my neighbor's fence:

I thought I had found the prettiest weed ever, but she told me that it's called the "money plant" and that it's spread from her yard.  It apparently reseeds very easily.  She keeps her yard under tight control, though, so I actually have more of it than she does.



The spearmint is out of control:

It seems to be mounting an assault on the rosemary.  Part of me is interested to see who would win that battle, but I'm going to intervene so that they both can survive.  Both need to be pruned severely, so if you're local and you want some, let me know.



You may be able to see it above, but the romaine lettuce has also reseeded:

Here is some of the dill that reseeded.  You can see a red onion and some parsley behind it:

The kitchen sage is blooming and the other salvias are starting to open up, too:

I did find a beautiful weed in the garden, though:

It's actually a type of grass.  The rest of the grass in my yard has green flowers when it goes to seed.  This one has a purple flower.



Today, I got out there to do a little more work and planted my first summer crops of the year.  I had started some tomatoes and peppers in a greenhouse flat and I transplanted six tomatoes out to the circle that had bee balm last year.  The seeds seem to have migrated when I watered the flat, so I can't be sure which variety they are, but I think it's two of the Peron Sprayless slicers and four of the Chadwick Cherry.  I also put out two basil seedlings that I bought at the grocery store.  This circle already contained two red onions, a romaine lettuce, a couple of dill and a parsley.  I'm not sure if the bee balm is going to be coming back.  It was beautiful last year and it might still be a late-starter, but there are no signs of life so far.  Around these seedlings and survivors, I sowed a bunch of seeds.  I mixed together bok choy, arugula, beetberry, lambsquarters, borage, marigold, calendula, cumin, cilantro and dill.  The plan is to eat the thinnings as they grow and leave a few to grow to maturity, at least one each of the non-greens.  Here's what the tomatoes looked like in the greenhouse before I transplanted them:

The year so far...

Fortunately, it's been easier to get out and work in the garden than it has been to blog about it.  I haven't done much yet, but I have gotten out there a few days so far.  I dug a plot and planted probably most of my peas, saving some for the fall.  They sprouted a few weeks ago and are coming along nicely now. 

I had to prune the rosemary.  It had grown completely over the thyme and two of the ornamental salvia.  Now, they're getting plenty of sun and should be thinking about blooming soon.  The rosemary has been in bloom all "winter" long. 

Probably the biggest project I've worked on so far has been putting the greenhouse back together and building a flat to start my tomatoes and peppers in.  I'm no carpenter, so it was a daunting task.  It's probably the most complicated thing I've made since I built my mom a jewelry box over 20 years ago.  I've been worried that it's not going to work.  This is the first time I've tried to start my seedlings in the greenhouse versus in the closet.  I hope it will make for a more smooth transition.  They've taken forever to sprout, but the first one came up yesterday and a second one today, so hopefully the rest will be following soon. 

Besides that, I've gotten to tackle a couple of other projects.  I've been bummed for a couple of years now about this dogwood that died just outside our fence.  It's been overgrown with ivy and some sort of thorny vine.  There was also a small bush growing up around it that's a type of weed I see a lot in this area.  It will quickly grow into a tree if you let it.  Anyway, I chopped down most of that dead tree with my machete last weekend.  I left about four feet of stump.  I discovered that there was a heavenly bamboo growing next to it, and I left that. 

This weekend, I also got to prune the fig tree.  There were a couple of branches that were growing at awkward angles, making it hard to move around it.  I also had to take off some height to keep it growing up into the overhang.  I worked in one of the circles in the garden, too.  It's the circle with the peppermint.  I pruned back the dead growth from it and pulled it up where it was creeping out of its bounds.  This seems to be the main area of parsley reseeding.  I weeded it completely and thinned the parsley seedlings to a good spacing.  Additionally, there are three arugula and a bok choy that have survived the "winter" and are now flowering.  I'm going to harvest the seed and then pull them up and use their space for transplanting tomatoes or peppers later.  Also in this circle are a few carrots that have been in the ground for over a year now.  They are massive!  I'm not planning on eating them, but letting them go to seed to collect for later use.  Even with all that, there was some space left in the circle, and I used that space to plant garlic.  Usually, I plant it in the fall, for a summer harvest, but I never got around to it last year.  I thought we had eaten all of what I had grown, but when I was looking through my seeds recently, I found four small bulbs.  I planted the nineteen biggest cloves.

Seeds!

My seeds arrived yesterday!  Everything seems to be good with the order, except for a minor pea-splosion.  I contained it in a sandwich bag (pictured above).  There were just too many peas for that tiny bag to hold.  I think I'll have enough for spring and fall crops.  Everything that I ordered this year should be relatively easy to save for next year (the tomatoes should be the hardest), so I can buy new things next year.  The most exciting thing about this order was the smell when I opened the bag.  I'm trying to grow cumin for the first time this year and the cumin seeds they sent are powerfully aromatic.  As soon as I opened the package, I felt like I had walked into a spice souq.

Here we go again!

So, the year's just started, but it's time to start thinking ahead and planning this year's garden.

Last year was not as productive as I would have liked.  The demands of taking care of a small child didn't leave me a lot of spare time.  I'm hopeful that this year will be better for a variety of reasons.  A lot of last year was spent learning to be a better housekeeper, grocery shopper, cook and child care provider.  This year I'll be a lot more efficient.  Also, my parents have moved to the area and are willing to help out by watching my son.  Added to that, he's becoming increasingly independent and interactive.  It won't be long until he's big enough to help me weed!

I don't want to be too negative about last year's garden.  The okra did great.  Our little freezer is still almost full.  The bok choy was also very productive, and reseeded itself generously.  The rosemary is larger than it needs to be and is asking for another drastic pruning this year.  We also got a lot of figs.  I started the peppers too late to get much from them and the tomatoes and zucchini did not produce as well as in seasons past.  There was plenty of basil, parsley, carrots and arugula, though, and the oregano and mints are still doing great.

Pictured above are the two books I got for Christmas.  They have me very excited about this coming year.  The one on the left is from the folks at Ecology Action.  It is a very detailed description of the process they have been developing for growing more food in smaller areas.  It's gotten me excited about providing more food for my family.  The other book is about more than gardening.  It provides an overview of all sorts of skills needed for sustainable living, such as canning, raising livestock and even making beer!  It also has a good list of resources to dig deeper on any of the subjects it covers.

Yesterday, I ordered seeds from Horizon Herbs.  I'm going to be trying roman chamomile, cumin and beans for the first time.  I'm also trying different strains of peas, borage, zucchini, tomato, sunflower and chile peppers.  Add these to the 30+ types of seed I currently have saved and I should have quite a diverse garden.  The roman chamomile is the type used to make a chamomile lawn.  My plan is to grow it between and around the two permanent beds I intend to dig in the area I was calling the "cottage garden" last year.  If it becomes well established, I'm not sure if I'll keep it short or let it flower.  Either way, it should be awesome to walk on.  I tried sunflower last year, but never turned the ground I had planned to and they died before I could plant them.  This new variety I'm trying is called "fat mama."  I'm pretty excited about that.  In addition to a different strain of jalapeno than what I've used, I also ordered a type of pepper I've never grown before.  They're calling it "mboga pepper."  Mboga is Kiswahili for "vegetable."  It should be hotter than the jalapeno, but nowhere near a habanero; maybe on par with cayenne.  I also got two new kinds of tomato seeds.  One is called "Amish paste" and I intend to use it primarily for canning.  The other is the "Chadwick cherry" which was developed by Alan Chadwick, upon whose work Ecology Action is founded.  I plan on eating them fresh in salads and learning to sun dry them.

So far, I've been doing a lot of thinking and planning, but the real work will be starting soon.  I need to set my little greenhouse back up and test it to see how warm it stays on these cold mornings.  If it's warm enough to raise seedlings, I'm going to be building some wooden flats that fit on the shelves and use them for starting the seedlings next month.  I also need to do a little more cleaning in the garden and I need to set up the compost pile using the information I've gained from Grow More Vegetables.