Adventures in the Aubergine Foreign Legion

grinds teeth in frustration

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:04:36 GMT

I think my vegetable garden is being eaten by both groundhogs and deer. Despite all my fence work, I was willing to believe it was just groundhogs until a) my 3x3 bed of bush beans, which I'd fenced off separately so they could grow back from being chomped, were chomped again without any apparent disturbance of the three-foot fence; b) the pole bean plants six feet high were also chomped down to bare stems. I refuse to imagine groundhogs climbing a flimsy structure of plastic poles and string and managing to eat at the same time.

So, no beans this year. Parsley is now all gone too, along with nearly all the sunflower seedlings, the kale and Swiss chard, and a good part of the sweet potato vines. Tomatillos chomped down, though the fruit is forming. Squash plants not touched yet; melon plants only bitten lightly on the outside of the tangle, though I am holding my breath: they're doing too well, making lots of lovely fruit, and I'm sure either squash borers will kill them or the deer will get hungrier. Tomatoes not eaten yet, though I have no hopes for the fruit once it ripens. Peppers okay so far. Asparagus ferns not appetizing for some reason. Cardoons doing beautifully, but since I have no plans to eat them that's small comfort. Lots of onions; potatoes will probably survive although someone did take bites out of the plants.

I'll have to put up a real deer fence over the winter. And even so I may grow beans and chard and so forth up on the deck.

I'm going to be a pig about the demo garden harvest. Hopefully we'll have no major crop failures there, or I will end up feeling cursed and even more incompetent. Why cannot I manage to at least feed my family, instead of the families of neighborhood wildlife? Gardening sucks, and so do I.

Note to self in lieu of informative update

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:29:13 GMT

Have ordered both fall garlic (from Territorial Seed) and fall-flowering crocuses (from McClure & Zimmerman). Self, do not forget you have done this.

By the way, these all turn out to be the same company:

* Jung Seed
* Totally Tomato
* Vermont Bean
* McClure & Zimmerman
* R.H. Shumway's
* Roots & Rhizomes
* Seymour's Seeds
* HPS Horticultural

As a point of interest. They don't make a thing out of it, but neither do they exactly hide it. I assume they all started out as individual small companies and got bought out.

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:49:08 GMT

Part of my ongoing effort to be Queen of Recyclers: tomato plants went into the bed where the pipe hoops for the winter tunnel were still standing. They are now too big for the little stakes I started them with, so I've bound the hoops together into a support structure with old soaker hose that's too holey and kinked to use. It looks wacko, but I think it'll work. I've been using the "plant ladder" things from Gardener's Supply for tomatoes, but they are not really wide enough for full-size tomato plants, and are being used for melons this year.

The soaker hose replacement (i.e. the irrigation system) is mostly in now; I did the "north-side" T-junction section yesterday and just have to put in a few extension bits for peppers in pots, and maybe a piece for the onions, potatoes and one tomato outside the fence, though I'd need more half-inch tubing for that. If I order a timer as well, I don't have to get anyone to water while we're away in August, though that does mean the water running every day even if it rains. But it hardly ever rains in August (except thunderstorms, and I always end up watering before thunderstorms anyway).

Still have to plant some squash and sunflowers. (Same at the demo garden, where we weeded ourselves silly yesterday. But it looks much better!)

It's not the... oh, wait, it IS the heat

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:37:36 GMT

Noon and 90 degrees, heat index of 98, which is not typical for June even in this new overheated world we're creating. Where did our nice cool spring go?

Air conditioning has been getting a workout since Thursday; at least we've had power for it, unlike some who had it knocked out in the big storm Wednesday and didn't get it back for days afterwards. I've only been able to spend short work periods outside. Ideally I'd be out at 6 a.m., which only works if I don't have to be everyone else's alarm clock. What with the heat and the rain everything is growing like crazy, including the weeds, but I see major growth on summer vegetables as well, that had been sitting around complaining about the cold up till last week. I've basically lost all the spring crops, either to heat or groundhog - really I should just give up and grow them in the fall.

After the kale and the peas got chomped, I was sure the critter was climbing over the fence, and determined to build it higher, slowed down only by the steambath that the garden had become. Got the stakes and fencing yesterday, and got halfway around before I found the hole under the fence. Just about where I'd stopped reinforcing the underground barrier this winter when the weather got too bad. Oops. Can't finish the job properly now, as it would involve digging up black raspberry plants that are currently producing and would certainly die if their roots were exposed, but I laid rabbit wire down on the surface and up the fence and weighed it down with stones (one of which had been pushed away this morning). I'll also finish the climbing barrier when it cools down a little. Am just praying that the beans survive.

Went by the demo garden with the family this weekend - we will have MAJOR weeding to do this week. At least it's supposed to be only in the 80s. I still have to plant summer squash both here and there. Perhaps I can justify the delay as an attempt to miss squash borer laying cycles.

Nick (now a high school graduate) started on the invasive species removal project this morning, and got a fair amount done before deciding heat prostration was imminent. I'm looking forward to a whole new landscape back there.

Daylilies starting to bloom; lilies very soon. Bonica roses doing splendidly this year, and the teas are relatively free of blackspot, but obviously I will have to spray them as soon as I remember to get out there early enough in the day. Lobelia, cosmos and zinnias grown from seed are blooming; petunias not yet. Gorgeous new coral lilies all done now. Not sure what else is going on since I haven't been out there enough! Feel disconnected.

Am reading another book on science and gardening (written in the UK, so stuff on native species is relevant only in theory, but technically otherwise fine); now up to genetic engineering. Husband helpfully brought home book from library called 1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die which is rather depressing, not as he thought because the gardens were so perfect (I am a realist about hired help), but because I'm halfway through my life and have only seen 16 of them, so what chance do I have? Though I think 101 is a more reasonable goal, considering the worldwide distribution and the obscene cost of travel these days.

Well, this is ridiculous

Fri, 23 May 2008 22:05:21 GMT

I do feel I should update, though I can't possibly list everything I've been doing in the last month, and right now I am sitting on the couch with ice on my hip because it can only take so much weeding. But in compartments:

All my own seedlings are either in the ground (here or at the demo garden) or out on the deck waiting their turn. Nothing under lights (though I will resurrect those in late August and start fall seedlings indoors. I will). As usual I have too many plants, at least in the vegetable department; have just tucked two extra tomatoes and four homeless tomatillos into what space I could find, and I brought home three unwanted hot peppers from the demo garden yesterday, because I am weak and cannot throw out plants. I'll put the habaneros in the front flower bed (with the new acquisitions of butterfly weed and swamp milkweed, the gorgeous coral lilies, and all that other stuff) because they are pretty and I do not eat them. If passing strangers wish to relieve me of them, that's perfectly fine.

I've been to two native plant sales in the last month, and along with the above milkweeds acquired some cardinal flower, a spicebush, a red buckeye, a witch hazel, two pawpaws, a sourwood tree, and a bayberry. I think that's it. Not buying anything else, not with all the stuff I grew and the free plants I occasionally come home with from MG activities.

Am still not done with the neighbors' project, because it has been raining so much, which is good for drought relief but always inconveniently timed for me. This is going to be an issue, not having a sheltered spot to cut and treat wood, but one I can't think about at the moment.

Demo vegetable garden going really well; we have a wonderful group of interns this year who are working hard, and it's really looking like a garden, and there's little to do until we start harvesting, but I'm off the next two weeks anyway (training day followed by family here for Nick's graduation). Then I can get back to friendly bickering with David over use of space. I bet he'll sneak tomato plants in while I'm not looking. And I will counter with clever use of winter squash seeds. Ha ha.

I finally had my landscape BayWise certified, and am trying to help with other people's, but we have all been busy on different schedules.

That's enough for now; I'll try to keep up and say something interesting...

LOLTransplantation

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:59:34 GMT

So I brought this plant home from the demo garden yesterday (it was in the way and had obviously seeded itself from a parent nearby). I wasn't, embarrassingly, actually quite sure what it was, except that it was in the mint family, but it was pretty and I knew I could stick it somewhere where its prolific tendencies wouldn't matter. Put it in a plastic bag, stuck it on the deck when I arrived home, let the cat out. Went out again a minute later and he had his head buried in the bag, chewing happily. Identification ho!

Removed the cat and confined him forcibly inside to wander about forlornly meowing I CAN HAZ CATNIP? PLEAZZ? while I quickly relocated the plant to the back forty (well, the back half of the half acre, under the neighbors' huge maple tree) and tucked it nicely into the ground (getting rid of about thirty garlic mustards in the process, a small fraction of what's on that knoll). I let Gobi out again a bit later, but he didn't find the escapee.

So just now I was pulling up more garlic mustard (SCOURGE!!) and I looked over and there he was, head buried and munching. I missed the happy scene of reunification ("MAH DRUGS!!!" "oh no") but I had to stop it from continuing for hours and ending with a dead plant, so I removed him (with a sprig to keep him busy) and gave the plant its much-needed water. It's a substantial and well-branched herb, unlike the grown-from-seed one he killed in five minutes two years ago, but I'm still not sure it'll survive him.

He smells of catnip; I smell of linseed oil (am anointing boards for neighbor's vegetable beds) and am pleasantly exhausted. I CAN HAZ PIZZA? Y/Y/Y/Y!!

Dirt under my fingernails

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:09:41 GMT

I have transplanted 140 seedling plants in the last several days. Whee!

More spring things

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:28:01 GMT

I really should update, because the Master Gardener season is in full swing again, and we had a lovely first workday at the Demo Garden today - lovely weather, with actual sun and heat (I got a little burned, in fact; with all the clouds we've had lately I'd forgotten that was possible), and a whole bunch of lovely new workers. Funny being the Voice of Experience only a year after my own intern days.

Most of the seedling report has to do with trying desperately to keep up with transplanting - got some tomatoes and the Demo Garden marigolds in four-inch pots today - and then figuring out where to put them. Today's transplants are out in the mini greenhouse, because it'll be warm tonight, but next week we're supposed to have nights in the 30s again, and so I guess I'll be carrying flats in and out. And by then I will have lots more plants in larger pots. I also started some seeds - kale and cauliflower and stuff like that, I'm not going to bother looking - that will need transplanting pretty soon because they're only in bits of starting mix tucked into egg-carton cups, instead of the Jiffy-starts I was using before, which have cohesion and breathe. I've also used a bunch of peat pots this year, which are good except when the plant grows too fast, like the marigolds which had roots sticking out the sides of their pots. Their current planting is in layers - Jiffy-starts inside of peat pots inside of plastic pots. Silly, really.

I also have to start a bunch more seeds for DG plants - melons, cucumbers, etc. - but not till next week, because this is getting ridiculous.

Orange Emperor tulips are blooming; hopefully not all the petals will fall off before it gets cold again. Grape hyacinths are out, and various little bulbs that I always have to look the names of up, and the magnolia is in full glory, preparing to clash violently with the Orange Tulips That Will Not Die in the front bed. (I like orange, but not with purply-pink.)

Note to self: must plant some hyacinths somewhere where I don't have to bend all the way over to smell them. The smelling season is beginning, anyway: daffodils, when brought inside; the Pieris japonica perfuming the front yard with honey; the cilantro I transplanted today at the DG. Viburnum and lilac not out yet, but it won't be too long.

Easter Sunday update

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:07:48 GMT

Spring is really in full swing here: daffodils well started, maple flowers out (sneeze), Kaufmanniana tulips blooming, and almost clusianas, and the later sort of crocus. Miniature iris have hung on longer than usual, because it's still cold... though now warm enough to plant onions out, if I had the bed finished. Possibly tomorrow, before we leave for SC (where it is real spring, lovely gardens ahoy, and a tea plantation). The boxelder I'm monitoring for Project BudBurst isn't leafing yet, but the buds are swelling; probably it will hit that first event while I'm gone, oh well.

My two plant-light areas are bursting with seedlings, including quite a few I transplanted into pots over the last few days. Yes, including several tomatoes that were growing two to a plug and I just had to save instead of snipping off. I am incorrigible when it comes to saving tomatoes. Well, I can always give them away! Except for the two Giant Tree cultivars that grow to ten feet high. At least I can plant those outside the garden because the groundhogs won't be able to reach the fruit.

I think there will be enough room for everything without adding another light on the top of the stand somehow, but I can do that if I have to. Need to buy another timer though. I did plant some more seeds yesterday, gem marigolds I'd hand-gathered last year, because one sort of the bought seeds didn't do well (most never came up, which might have been lack of light (covered the seeds when I shouldn't have) but then some did sprout but look really tiny and pitiful. The other variety is doing great) - all those are for the demo garden, so I have to have a reasonable number. More seeds to be sown when I get back, but the weather ought to be OK then for moving plants outdoors if they are in the mini-greenhouse or the plastic tunnel. No luck on peas under the tunnel, by the way, at least not yet, and only tiny sprouts of lettuce etc. Perhaps not enough water; soil dries out fast under there with the added heat. I've pulled it off for the interim. A learning experience, you know. (Am quite enjoying reading Sylvia Thompson's The Kitchen Garden in large part because she's the sort of garden writer who admits to her mistakes. I think I'll have to acquire a copy that's not the library's. Also enjoying William Woys Weaver on heirloom vegetables, but his book is out of print and scarily expensive used.)

There are always some seedlings in the bunch that are more enchanting than the rest, and this time it's the roses - which will be miniature when they're mature, but are more so now (two inches high) yet distinctively rose-like; even the proto-thorns are visible. And I'm quite fond of the little sage plants, too, with tiny leaves already full of their characteristic scent.

Dead bug walking

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:51:51 GMT

I'm looking up information about control of harlequin bugs, which are a really destructive pest on brassica crops and sometimes others - they totally ate our broccoli and brussels sprouts in the demo garden last year, and since I'm in charge this year I have to have a Plan - and came across this bit of vague language in a garden forum:

I kill them by hand but it does not deter them.

I know what the poster means, but it brings up disturbing pictures of Zombie Harlequin Bugs roaming the garden by night.

Update on seeds etc.

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:18:21 GMT

Too much going on and no time to post. Short summary, and then seed update. Am going to neighbors' this afternoon to assess installation of a couple of vegetable beds; I'll do it at cost as practice while I'm getting organized about the rest. Master Gardener meeting; passed out seeds to the other two who are growing under lights (one guy starts all our tomatoes and peppers, and will also do the tomatillos and later the eggplants (we're starting those late to try to circumvent flea beetles), yay); nice talk from an enthusiast and expert at growing tropical plants outdoors, very inspiring. Finished the light stand - it looks bloody awful but it stands up and I've already got plants on it.

Seeds newly sown: portulaca, coleus, zinnia, lady's mantle, valerian, leeks; went ahead with the peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos and basil, a bit early but I want them up and growing before I go away at the end of the month (my neighbor will water). For the demo garden: marigolds, tithonia and amaranth. Sprouted: asclepias, which I just took out of the fridge a few days ago; alpine strawberries, angelica, one more rose and a few other things I already had sprouts of. Nothing on the hand-gathered pink dianthus, which I suspect needed a cooling period or at least cooler germination temperatures. Three of the six geranium cuttings I'm trying to root are still alive after a couple of weeks, which is a good sign. Also under the lights: Patrick's science experiment, which has to do with growing algae in water with varying amounts of fertilizer added. I am not quite out of space yet, thanks to the new stand, but I'm not sure what will happen when the seedlings need transplanting into bigger pots. I do have the mini-greenhouse if it's warm enough, and also a new hoop tunnel with plastic over one of the vegetable beds. So barring a very cold spring I should be okay.

More on the unwelcome onions

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:35:12 GMT

I'm feeling slightly annoyed at Pinetree - as I ETA'd, got both a phone message and an e-mail today recommending that I pot up the onions so they can keep growing, which I've done (and it's not a small amount of space they take up, either), and also saying that the Texas grower routinely ships in this week to my zip code, based on average yearly temperatures, and that this can't be changed due to the anomalies in one year. I thanked the sender nicely, but also hinted that I thought the average temperature thing was bosh - which I do, for two reasons.

First of all, "average temperature" means nothing. It was in my childhood New England that I first heard the phrase "if you don't like the weather around here, wait five minutes" but it's just as true of the Mid-Atlantic. Week before last we had a day of 70 degree temps, followed two days later by an ice storm. Where's the average temperature there? Precisely where you'd want to plant onions, except that it never actually hit that temp, and if I'd jumped in and planted them because it was warm, they'd have had a nice coating of frozen rain soon after. And most of the real blizzards we've had have come in March. Not that established onion plants can't deal with snow and freezes, but if there's no time for them to get established, they're going to die.

Secondly, even if you believe in average temperatures, they're not warm enough here at the end of February. I don't know where the grower gets his data, but I suspect it's out of his account books - much easier and cheaper to grow and ship a continuous stream of onions than ship to the South and then stop for a while until the more northern growers are ready, then send a whole bunch at once. I checked my records; last year I ordered onion plants from Park's (in South Carolina, though they also ship direct from a grower), and they shipped them April 9. Look at those dates, now: February 25, April 9. Slight difference. Frankly I think one could go a little earlier than April, but February is just wacko. And the growers are presumably in the same region, and pick the dates, so it's not explicable as South Carolina thinking Maryland is the frigid north and Maine thinking we're subtropical.

Anyway, I have a big planter full of onion seedlings sitting in my mudroom, and will for a while yet. If they die I am so asking for my money back.

Carpentry hahahaha

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:23:26 GMT

Spent more time yesterday on the seed-starting shelf. It is to laugh, really; I've done everything a bit wrong. But this is practice, and I hope to get better. I used to handle tools a lot more, back in the day, but I've let my competent spouse take over (division of labor, you know), and have lost most of what I'd learned.

So here's what I've screwed up on (ha ha pun) so far. I didn't want to spend a lot on the project, so I bought cheap lumber (as it goes), pine 2x2s that were nearly all warped. Which doesn't make measurement or straight cuts easy, and I'm not used to handling the circular saw (I think it may have been set a little off true), so the ends of the pieces are slightly angled. Which, together with the warping, made fitting them together a challenge. I did figure out how to glue the shelves together (the structure of each is two 30" pieces parallel, with two 9" pieces set a little in at right angles, holding in a 25" piece parallel to the longer ones, in the middle), and ended up with some crude shapes that resembled what they were supposed to be. Then I screwed them together, with deck screws that I grabbed off the Lowe's shelf that have a square grip in the top and come with their own drill bit for sinking. Mistake: if you don't have much confidence and power on the drill, as I don't, the square strips quickly into a circle and is no longer drivable. So some of the screws don't go all the way in.

But three of the shelves are finished, such as they are; on the fourth the cross-pieces were placed a bit off, or the middle piece is too short. In either case I'll have to break a glue joint somehow and reset. And then I'll decide whether the whole unit gets screwed or bolted together, and construct something that will hopefully stand up and support plant trays, which is really all I ask of it. Next year I will build a better one. Raised beds next! When it's warm enough outside, that is. Brr.

Mini-rant and more seeds

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:53:03 GMT

E-mail I just sent to generally reliable Pinetree Garden Seeds:

I need to report that I just received my shipment of onion plants - which look beautiful - on February 28. Outdoor temperature 23 degrees F. Snow forecast tomorrow. I realize you don't ship these directly, but I live in Maryland, which is hardly far enough south to expect reliable spring before late March. I'm sticking them in the fridge until it's warm enough to plant (let alone prepare the bed), and hoping they are still in such fantastic shape at that time.

Is shipment this early the regular policy of your grower, or was this a goof? I suppose I should have specified a shipment date, but I really didn't think anyone would consider shipping to Maryland when winter weather could still be expected.

Thanks from a regular customer,
(me)

I mean, onions are tough, but not that tough. And neither am I. And I haven't got the foggiest where I'm going to plant them.

Seed update: yesterday took alpine strawberries and santolina out of the fridge (cold treatment) and planted. Have sprouts of sage and thyme, a couple of Stokes aster, and one little rose sprout, yay. Trouble again with dry spots in the wicking cloth in the APS system; rats, because it works so well otherwise. Am making good use of various take-out and salad containers - if everything has to come in plastic, might as well reuse as much of it as possible.

ETA: Heard back from Pinetree; yup, this is when that grower ships (he's in Texas. What does he know about cold?), and they suggest potting up the plants and letting them grow indoors until I'm ready to plant outside. So I will do that, hoping the cat doesn't develop a taste for green onions.

A different sort of post

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:21:18 GMT

I was just reading a bunch of posts on metafandom about race in fandom, and then I got the mail, which included my new Charley's Greenhouse catalog, and somehow ended up paging through a random sample of garden catalogs I have lying around, and noting how incredibly white they are. The people, that is - the sort of garden catalogs that sell plants tend to have pictures of... plants, and multi-ethnic plants (in the sense of the people whose cultures they are part of; the plants couldn't give a damn) are all the rage. So I had to look at the ones that sell equipment, and frankly I don't look at the people much in those as a general rule, because they are just there to hold the tools.

But I did this time. It's not like I hadn't noticed it before, but I'd tied it in my mind to certain purveyors: i.e. Gurney's, all those cute Caucasian infants biting into sweet corn, but the same infants populate the other catalogs as well, along with their parents. With the sole exception of Seeds of Change (southwestern focus, emphasis on diversity of culture, involvement in community gardening, and lots of people of different colors showing up on the pages), there is perhaps one non-white person in each catalog, and usually not that. I understand why; most of these companies are based in pretty white areas, and they don't hire models like clothing catalogs do. I'm sure the people in the pictures (sometimes it's just an arm) are for the most part staff members or family members, or the pictures come from the manufacturers of the tools and get reused for the catalogs. And the audience is mostly white as well... but not entirely. Gardeners Supply, for example, publishes little vignettes about customers, and one was about a black woman who'd established a mini community garden on the roof of her building, and she was the only person of color in the whole catalog. You'd think if they wanted more customers like her... yes, it's the quality of the merchandise that counts, but perhaps it also makes a difference whose hands are shown wearing the gloves or wielding the trowel?

I think the bias is less pronounced in gardening magazines, though it's still there. And I suspect if I did gender analysis of the catalogs I'd find men using the heavy equipment and women planting flowers, but that's for another day.

Project BudBurst and other signs of spring

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 23:01:02 GMT

I've signed up to help with Project BudBurst, which collects data on phenological events (leafing, flowering etc.) for various native and common exotic plants: another way to observe climate change. I'll be watching a boxelder tree in my back yard. Anyone can sign up; data collection is focused on the US but they have members in other countries as well.

No boxelder activity as yet, but spring is approaching alarmingly fast (not that I'm not tired of cold, but I have too much to do). Bulbs are up all over; only snowdrops are blooming so far, but I've seen leaves of crocuses, daffodils, and even early tulips. Time for a blizzard, no doubt.

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:51:22 GMT

There's a nice article in the New Yorker here about carbon footprints and how complicated they really are, especially when it comes to food; local does not always equal low carbon, since transportation costs are often balanced by a lower environmental impact in growing the food. However, to add further complications, one does need to factor in maintenance of diversity in the plants being grown (only certain varieties are good for shipping, so those are grown to the exclusion of others by the companies that supply globally) and support of local businesses.

Speaking of which, I finally have the energy to get moving again on planning mine; I have read one whole book on what to do, and have glanced through the yellow pages as step one in assessing competition (ostensibly none, though I'm sure some of the bazillion landscaping companies in our area will put in a vegetable garden if someone asks). And I'm getting started on the carpentry projects. Measure twice, cut once.

For focus and peace of mind as well as practicalities, I need to come up with a name soon, and that all-important one line of text that goes on the business cards, which shouldn't be a tricky thing but probably is, based on some I see around. Or maybe I'm just too analytical: a van went by the other day that said "[business name]: The Plumber You Deserve" and I immediately thought, golly, what a bummer for those with low self-esteem. But names: would it be just too granola/seventeenth-century poetry geeky to call it Vegetable Love? I suppose people who recognize it might get the wrong impression and think I want something, either the business or their tomatoes, to "grow vaster than empires and more slow" which isn't exactly the point.

Anyway, I'll think about it tomorrow, as Scarlett says, though she was only peering through inexplicable fog and not "wintry mix." Right now, while it's still brilliantly sunny, I'm going to walk around and consider being snarky about winter interest.

More seed-starting notes

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:06:45 GMT

Yesterday sowed (Jiffy-Starts in egg cartons, fairly efficient method) hand-gathered seeds from last year, dianthus, sage and angelica; we'll see how that goes. I am not sure whether the dianthus is a hybrid; if so, it'll be interesting to see how the plants develop, since they may look like either parent or revert to something else. Also planted some thyme seeds (bought, last year's) for more ground cover. They work well around paving stones.

Nearly all the previously-sown sets have at least a few sprouts, except for Stokes's aster, which I remember as being slow, the roses, which are a gamble anyway (but who can resist trying to grow miniature roses from seed?), and the sheep's fescue, which was old seed. All tiny little sprouts, except for the cardoons, which are of course huge, and I knew that and still put them in the same flat as the others. Will have to move them to separate pots in another week or two.

Made little maps of the demo vegetable garden, as a whole and in sections, scanned to PDF and sent to the garden leaders. Had to ink over the pencil drawings for scanning to work; must remember this. Did little drawings of some of the plants on the map, although only the cardoons looked anything like the actual plant because I cannot draw but they impress and scare me. I need to learn to draw. I should be able to manage cartoon okra at least.

We had the one springlike day on Monday - only up to 70, at least, not up to 80 as sometimes happens in February - and then back to more seasonal temperatures, as they say; some snow yesterday but it cleared out in time for the lunar eclipse, hurray, and more snow, sleet and general yuck expected tonight and tomorrow. I suppose I am never going to get that plastic tunnel built in the vegetable garden for winter lettuce.

Green Thoughts

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:08:09 GMT

Having decided that I might as well use this fallow period to catch up on reading other than fiction - well, somehow when I'm really sick I never want to read about gardening or about anything practical; it makes me feel that I will never be able to leave my bed and do those things ever again, or ever at all if I haven't done them yet, which is profoundly depressing. But when I feel a little better I can do it, so it is now that time, and I am making my way enjoyably through Eleanor Perényi's Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden. It is from 1981, so a little out of date here and there as regards trends and advice (yes, ivy does sometimes kill trees; no, actually you do want to leave clippings on the lawn), but since it's mostly opinionated and entertaining commentary that doesn't matter. I was particularly taken by her essay on dahlias, which manages to combine practical wisdom with a nice takedown of prejudiced historians, but I'm afraid in a manner too long to quote. I have the same problem with Henry Mitchell.

Speaking of Mitchell, I am also desultorily reading Gertrude Jekyll, and have discovered that he owes a great deal to her prose style and opinions, although certainly he's got his own take on the topics addressed that is of his time and place - no room for great borders in his little Washington garden. Both Mitchell and Perényi are excellent on the specifics of the American garden and its hard-fought cultural emergence from the British model developed in a different climate. American gardens, I should say, since they acknowledged that their experiences in DC and Connecticut respectively were regionally distinct and not transferable to other parts of the country. Interesting that we on the East Coast don't sit down and pore over the works of whoever the garden guru is in New Mexico or North Dakota, because it's bound to be futile taking their advice, but we do still read the British experts for more than their gentle good humor, which is about all that's of use to us.

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:41:35 GMT

Note to self: do not leave celeriac in ground through half the winter. Gets woody or otherwise decrepit. Leeks, however, are doing fine, even if the leaves are no longer green.

Reading Robbing the Bees by Holley Bishop, and feeling that fascination again with a society so freakily different and yet familiar... no, not the beekeepers, them I understand (and plan to be one someday), but the bees. Many other insects make a sort of mammalian sense to me, being individualists who spend their short lives eating, either as predators or herbivores, and then reproducing, but the communal sacrifice of bees is alien, the way they are so interdependent, so focused on little jobs; a worker bee in summer lives six weeks, half of which is spent foraging (she does jobs in the hive first), and she'll contribute enough nectar to make a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey, and perhaps a lump of pollen the size of a grain of rice, and will not do anything that any other bee couldn't do just as well. On the other hand, it's not a bad metaphor for most of our lives, looked at from a broad perspective.

More later; must get in the car and pick up a child, which tends to make me feel like part of a hive-mind as well...

Record-keeping

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:06:59 GMT

Have not been getting much done due to nasty virus and nasty weather, but I did manage to get some seeds started. Rather late off the mark for some of these (especially the alpine strawberries I had to stick in the fridge for two weeks) but for the record (so I can check germination dates etc.):

2/12 (cold germinators): blue dianthus, monarda, rose (miniature), verbascum, sheep's fescue, cardoon, Stokes aster, catmint, golden-eye grass

2/13 (warm germinators): white echinacea, sedum, lobelia, heliotrope, chaenorrhinum, delosperma, petunias

More later; I need to get my head together and empty of snot.

So this is what I want to do

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:23:12 GMT

For a living, at some time in the near future. Article here, excerpt under the cut:

Many of the passionately locavoracious who have followed this trend find that it leads inevitably to their back yards. What could be more local than your own vegetable garden, berry patch or orchard? Once these are established, the time spent tending them is often no more than that spent scouring the county for arugula or probing a produce manager about where she gets her mache.

For others, planting a garden is too daunting a step. "I would love to have one," a would-be yardavore will lament, "but I have a full-time job." Or kids. Or arthritis. So here's a solution: Hire somebody to install one for you and return weekly to tend it. If you're a busy person, you may already employ a cleaning service, lawn service or a landscaper. Why not a foodscaper? It's another expense, but one that pays for itself at least in part by putting food on the table, and the freshest possible food at that.

Landscapers are often asked to put in food gardens for customers. I used to do this once upon a time, and I found that instant veggie plots and apple trees brought their owners more pleasure than they got from yew hedges and junipers. In fact, if I were to nominate the job opportunity of 2008, it would be a specialty in implementing home food gardens. Call it foodscaping if you like, but I guarantee that if the practice takes hold, the apt word will emerge.
(Barbara Damrosch, Washington Post 1/17/08)

What I have to figure out is how I get there. First steps: making sure I can handle the carpentry (someone else would have to do fences, but I would want to do raised beds, and I'd love a sideline of teaching seed-starting, which means some sort of light-shelf device), which does mean waiting on my sore back and the outdoor temperature; and the business plan and financial stuff, for which I probably need a book or two.

In other vegetable-related news, met with the demo garden leaders yesterday and am making plans for what we're going to grow this year (I am in charge of the vegetable section!). We'll go with an ethnic/geographic division again; I know for one thing I want "Mediterranean" to mean all the way around the Med, and not just "Italian."

Solanaceae continued: petunias

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:25:24 GMT

I first began to think about petunias during my early days on the LordPeter mailing list (1999, that would have been? I expect we were gearing up for the Literary Contest, which, dammit, appears to no longer exist online. ETA: swooop informs me that it still exists here), discussing Have His Carcase, in which during Chapter 3 one of the Resplendent's professional dancers appears wearing "an exaggerated gown of petunia satin with an enormous bustle and a train." And someone on the list asked "So what color is petunia?" (Or, possibly, "colour," as it is a decidedly transatlantic list.)

I looked into it, using the resource I had available, which was the most recent Select Seeds catalog (in those days, hand-drawn illustrations on off-white paper; now photographs), because it focused on old-fashioned varieties. And, well, petunias come in lots of colors and always have (as long as they've been cultivated, that is). But as far as older varieties (like Balcony and Old-Fashioned Climbing) went, we were looking at white and shades of pink and purple. Nowadays you get hybrids in everything from red to blue to yellow to scary magenta that takes over your entire yard. Plus stripes and pinwheels. But even in great-grandma's day, there wasn't just one color.

Cultivated varieties come from somewhere, of course, and in this case it's South America, where the original petunia species grew. Nearly all the varieties we grow in gardens today are hybrids, probably originating in a cross between Petunia axillaris and Petunia integrifolia. P. axillaris is white, which doesn't make one think "petunia-colored." P. integrifolia, however, is a chirpy shade of pink with a black throat; that's my choice for "petunia" as in 1930s gowns. But it might just as well have been some sort of purple.

Purple petunias - really lovely dark shades of them - are my favorites, and I think they smell the best, too, but that may be influenced by a few knock-out experiences of walking by windowboxes. The newer hybrids are certainly tough and grow fast and don't need deadheading as much, but as so often happens they have lost a lot of their scent, which is a shame. Bees sometimes collapse from the ecstasy of gathering nectar from those old ones. The structure of the flower, by the way, is a good illustration of how insects have to almost burrow into a blossom to get the nectar, and get covered with pollen in the process, making the transfer to another plant easy. And the shape is pretty much the same as all those other Solanaceae flowers.

I believe my interest in the petunia question (which probably made my fellow list-members think I was comfortably cracked) was exacerbated by my younger son's love affair with Petunia the Silly Goose. She would have to be a white petunia, of course; perhaps one of the slightly frilly ones. And then there is Aunt Petunia; what color is she?

More on this exciting family later: heirloom tomatoes and obscene peppers.

Good fences

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:08:49 GMT

It's raining. Sometimes I say yay! to that, and sometimes I say bugger it. I have managed, during this brief springlike period, to get out for a short time to work on fixing the vegetable garden fence, but that's not going to happen today, nor is it going to happen over the weekend as it gets colder again. We may have snow on Sunday.

But I did do about nine feet (working in sections, fencepost to fencepost, assuming they're about three feet apart). For the record, this is what you do to keep groundhogs out: dig a trench around the outside of the fence about a foot deep (or nine inches, if you're me) and wide. Lay chicken wire (or better, rabbit wire, but I have chicken wire) horizontally in the bottom of the trench, and then vertically up the fence. Wire it to the fence (which is made of wire as well), and fill the trench with soil. Then when the groundhog tries to dig under the fence, he hits a barrier, and unless he starts further out and goes deeper (which he won't if there's anything else around to eat), your veggies are safe. (Unless he goes over the fence. This is another stage of the project.)

I did all this umpteen years ago when I built the fence, but since then the underground wire has rusted away. (It was mostly chicken wire, which doesn't last as long as the thicker rabbit wire.) The reason I'm doing it in sections is that along the outside of the fence are growing both undesirable plants (mostly locust saplings, and elderberry suckers on the side I haven't got to yet) and desirable ones (black raspberries and blackberries). The former have to be removed or sawed off under the soil line; the latter have to be carefully uprooted and hung on the fence while I put the wire in, then replanted, and taking too much time over that means the roots dry out and the plant dies.

I've also got to put wire under the new part of the fence where I didn't do it before because it meant digging through gravel. What all this means is that I'll have some lovely loose soil around the edges, and where there aren't berries growing perhaps I can plant onions, which might scare off the beasties further. (And mint? I don't think they like mint.) Also should work with neighbors on filling the space between my garden and their aging former horse barn now shed-garage with some kind of semi-permanent mulch, so we're not constantly battling weeds there. I'd plant fruit trees or shrubs, but I think it's technically their property, and in any case they do need unimpaired access for the frequent repair the shed requires. (Historic=rotting apart.)

All this and new raised beds. Warm winter, plz?

Solanaceae: Nightshade Family

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:50:20 GMT

The topic's worth a whole book, and I believe some have been written. Plants in this family - accurately described on Wikipedia as "characteristically ethnobotanical" (used by humans) - include potato, tomato, capsicum pepper, tobacco, tomatillo, goji berry, mandrake, petunia... and, oh yeah, eggplant. See the flower in the icon? That's the typical shape of Solanaceae flowers; they just vary in size a lot. You get little bitty yellow tomato flowers, and then you get big whomping Brugmansia and Datura. Which are, by the way, poisonous with tropane alkaloids, one of the several alkaloids to be found in the family; another is nicotine.

Many of the genera in Solanaceae originate in South America, but some are native to other regions. I think most of the European species are toxic to varying degrees (deadly nightshade, for example, which some idiot imported to America so we have it too), so any initial suspicion about the new crops brought over by explorers was justified. But it's now difficult to imagine Ireland without potatoes, Italy without tomatoes... or Thailand without hot peppers, to the degree that they think they invented them. A few hundred years introduce not only a certain degree of possessiveness, but also a whole lot of new varieties: a very adaptable family. I gather goji berry or wolfberry, from China, has gone native in Britain? Mostly that doesn't happen in temperate climates with these species; we have to treat them as annuals even though a lot of them are perennial but not hardy (I did see a cute little pepper tree in Belize: very cool).

Peppers are peppers here; capsicum elsewhere (which avoids the confusion with the other sort of pepper, the name presumably borrowed because of the hotness factor). Eggplant is called that because of an early variety with white egg-shaped fruit; I believe it was imported from India, named by the Brits, exported to North America and elsewhere, and then the French word "aubergine" took over in Britain. (I may be wrong about this, but I think I've seen "eggplant" used in 18th-century British sources.) You can still buy the white-fruited variety; it's often called "Easter egg plant" and sold as an ornamental. Eggplants also come in varying shades of purple as well as green and orange. The plants can be lovely, as can capsicum, in all its color variety. Tomatoes, not so much, though the fruits are handsome. And the color variation stands there as well: rainbow tomato blends are popular in seed catalogs now.

I'm going to post this now and come back later to talk about petunias and whatever else strikes my fancy.