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All tomatoes are planted – only 18 plants this year, less than half of the previous year – but with a little extra care and diligence I could end up reaping the same harvest. We shall see. I lost one tomato to a cutworm, another to a raccoon. To fend off more cutworms, I decided [...]
It’s been an amazing week for gardening, weather wise. On Monday, I sowed cilantro, green pole beans, yellow bush beans and shelling peas. I also finally transplanted my ailing onions and leeks, and my stellar parsley; they should have been put in the ground ages ago. Wednesday, I sowed more beets and carrots; also chard, corn [...]
I like manual labour. I like to see immediate results of my efforts. Weeding dandelions is a perfect example. I’ve been pulling them almost daily. It’s very satisfying work. I already have a fridge full of leaves, so today’s harvest went straight to the compost pile. My first planting of beets did not germinate. Have to [...]
My records indicate that the earliest I’ve ever planted is April 2. That was in 2004. This year, I beat it by one day. On April 1st, I sowed the following: Lolla Rossa Lettuce Red Oakleaf Lettuce Tatsoi Mustard Sylvetta Golden Detroit Beet Early Wonder Beet Easter Egg Radish Sparkler Radish In the two [...]
How does one ”EAT Green”? It’s a popular topic, and everyone has an opinion. Here is my answer: 1. Eat something green every day And I don’t mean green and fuzzy with an odd smell to it. ”Greens”, as defined by most people, refer to leafy vegetables – kale, chard, collards, spinach, mustard, lettuces and the like. [...]
I have spinach in my garden! The one bed that was to have been my “winter greens” experiment (but was ultimately destroyed when my hoop house collapsed under a foot of snow) is waking up and producing green, baby! In celebration of the discovery, each of us sampled a perfect tiny little leaf, then went and [...]
Herb gardens, salad gardens, cutting gardens, butterfly gardens, knot gardens, rock gardens, water gardens, rose gardens, wildlife gardens, potagers. What about a juicing garden? I’ve reorganized and replotted my garden four times already. The latest version includes a juicing garden, designed to ease my transition to an 80% raw foods diet. Some of the best juicing [...]
I’ve spent the last several days going through my old seeds and deciding what to use and what to toss. I generally have no trouble germinating seeds that are three or four years old. I don’t even store them under particularly ‘seed-friendly’ conditions, and yet many of them still produce. Now, that’s fine, of course, [...]
Three weeks into the year and I’ve already received all of my seed catalogues. I’ve spent the last few days laying out my garden plan on the computer. Already the list of jobs to do (outside of planting, seeding, etc) is a mile long. We usually begin with whatever jobs weren’t finished last year. Makes [...]
It is usually a struggle to get a decent rink made in time for Christmas. We bought a rink kit a few years ago, but without the right kind of weather, it still won’t work. Some years, winter arrives early with a huge dumping of snow in late November, but it’s often just a lot of [...]
I was worried that my beautiful greens might take a wee bit of a hit tonight (-2 predicted), so we rigged a temporary mini hoophouse over the garden bed. It was a very last minute decision – made at about 4pm – and I think we did well. We happened to have several yards of [...]
With all of the tomatoes ripening on the counter, it was no surprise to find a few fruit flies flitting around. I detest them. So, in a mild panic, I decided to get every scrap of food off the counter and into the fridge, and I put the kitchen compost outside on the …
I harvested potatoes and onions today. The onions are perfect, round and uniform – I’m quite pleased. The only bummer is that I didn’t plant enough of them. The potatoes are from my second planting, which I did in the experimental stacked bins. Russet Burbanks in all three. RBs are …
Something’s feasting on my winter spinach. I can recognize rabbit damage when I see it, so I’ve started a nightly cayenne ritual. I grew the pretty pepper plants two years ago to defend my garden against small critters. They were gorgeous plants, very bushy, just dripping with bright red finger-sized peppers. I …
It was a strange day of intermittent sunshowers. Capricious weather. Mercurial. Jeckyll-and-Hyde. The clouds would part, the sun would burst through, then the rain would come. It’s a lovely time to be outside, actually. The sunlight flashes off the dripping plants and leaves you too dazzled to do any …
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