Planning a Lazy Garden

Outside, the snow is coming down fast and heavy, but inside, I'm basking in the glow of seed catalogs. Oh, yes, it's that time of year. Bear-like, I've come out of hibernation to start planning my garden. And that begins with reflecting on last year's garden.

Overambitious is the phrase that immediately springs to mind. We planted thickly and with wild abandon, and we were socked with too much food and overcrowded beds. The other word that comes to mind is disease. We had mosaic virus, early blight, and some fungal infection on the squash. So while we were swimming in tomatillos, ground cherries, and basil, we lost most of our summer and winter squash and had some mighty unhappy tomato plants.

Many of our experiments were dismal failures: the potato boxes fared very poorly, yielding less potatoes than when we planted in rows. The edamame interplanted with corn was wildly successful, but it shaded out the corn. (Pause. Think about that phrase for just a second. Edamame is a bush bean, not a climbing bean. It shaded out the corn by growing faster than the corn seedlings could.) The garlic rotted in the ground, and the onions barely produced at all. Overall, it was a lot of work for disappointing results.

This year, my plan is to be lazy.

I want to plant the simplest, easiest garden I can and concentrate only on the foods we eat most or foods we can't get elsewhere. That means no corn (takes up too much space for too little yield), no potatoes (low yield), no onions or leeks (I'm terrible at growing them anyway).

Garden Plan 2014 - Click to embiggen.

Our focus this year is going to be on the basics: beans, peas, carrots, kale, broccoli, cucumbers, and tomatoes. We'll use arugula and lettuce for weed cover and for those shady spots where it's hard to grow much of anything. Our asparagus should be ready for harvest this year, too, and we're hoping the New Zealand spinach we planted last year comes back. And of course, we have our strawberries and raspberries ready to produce under all that snow.

Of course, I can't resist a little experimentation. This year, I'm cultivating a wild plant called yerba del manzo in New Mexico, yerba mansa in California, and lizard's tail in Appalachia. Yerba del manzo has been used for centuries as a medicinal plant to treat the common cold, skin disorders, and even cancer. It likes swampy soil, so I'm putting it in the soggy southern corners of the garden. It's also a perennial, so if I can get it established this year, I don't have to worry about it again.

I'm going to try for another crop of Mexican oregano, which completely failed last year, along with celery, cumin, and stevia. I firmly resisted anything more complicated, like celeriac and sweet potatoes (given my terrible track record with root crops).

Given the terrible blight we had last year, I'm also going to try out some new tomato varieties. High on my list:

• Red House Free Standing from Seeds of Change – a rare determinate variety that requires no staking. Takes a while to mature, though (80-90 days)
• Legend from Territorial Seeds/Seeds of Change – Early maturing (60-70 days) and incredibly disease resistant. "Staking is optional." Really? We shall see.
• Abraham Lincoln from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange - “Highly recommended where foliage disease is a problem”
• Amy Apricot from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange – An open-pollinated alternative to SunGold. “Many tasters preferred Amy's Apricot to Sungold.”
• Peron from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange - “Called sprayless because the vigorous vines need no treatment.”

I'll give a complete seed rundown in my next post.

2013 Midseason Report

Well, it's midseason, and this has been a disappointing year for a number of reasons. Overall, it's been a cool, rather wet summer. Today's high was 74 degF, in the middle of August when we normally have blistering heat. Also, our yard is shadier this year than last year. Our neighbor's Norway maples are just that much bigger, and more of the garden is in shade. In another few years, I may have to revert a good chunk of garden to lawn, or possibly just grow a lot more strawberries. And finally, rather mysteriously, my earthworms seem to have all vanished. This worries me more than everything else combined. Well, whatever the reason, it's been a tough year so far.

The potatoes keep not being ready. They should have been ready by the end of June. I think I made a mistake in placement. When we realized that our drip irrigation system would be blocked by our potato boxes, I reasonably moved the boxes to the ends of the rows. But there were two problems I hadn't considered. First, that's the shady end of the garden. Second, we discovered that the water pressure isn't high enough to push water up the drip tape into the tops of the boxes. Poor sunlight and less water equals poor production.

The squashes are having a tough time with fungal infections in all this rain. Five out of six of my zucchini plants' stems rotted out. Only one robust plant remains, the source of the impressive 16-inch zukes. (I am definitely saving that seed!) Similarly, the spaghetti squash, kabocha squash, and pumpkins are struggling, and the patty pans have yet to produce a single fruit.

The cucumbers are dying back two weeks early due to unseasonably cool weather. This has a pleasant counterbalance: the broccoli is still producing happily in the middle of August. This weekend, I'll be planting fall peas in their place, and I have more broccoli and cauliflower starting in the greenhouse.

The corn has been... odd. Only half of the blue corn came up at all. I started some more in the greenhouse and planted it, but it has yet to put out pollen, and I'm concerned the ears on the older stalks won't pollinate properly. Meanwhile, the sweet corn came up fine, but no one warned me that edamame grows four feet tall! It's overgrowing and stunting the corn, so I'm not looking at a great crop there either.

Several attempts to reseed carrots have simply failed, and I'm not sure why.

But we do have some nice successes. The tomatoes, despite quite a bit of early blight, are going gangbusters now. This weekend, I'm hoping to make tomato jelly. The New Zealand spinach was a huge success and very tasty. The eggplants and peppers are starting to come in, the beets have been growing like mad, and the beans and kale are as prolific as ever. And the basil! Big bushy beautiful basil! We have quite a few cantaloupes on the vine but not many watermelons. I have no idea if they'll make it to ripeness in this cool weather. In fact, even with the disappointments, we are hard pressed to keep up with harvesting, though that may have more to do with me going back to work.

So perhaps it's just as well that we're not inundated with food. Still, I can't help feeling disappointed. I grand plans for canning, and thus far, I've put up only three quarts of bread-and-butter pickles and two quarts of raspberry preserves, plus two gallon bags of frozen beans. Well, it's only midseason. We'll see what the fall brings.

Squashes of Unusual Size -or- You Should Absolutely Eat Things Bigger Than Your Head

My zucchini plants have been assaulted by ants, which have burrowed right into the stems, hollowing them out from the inside until they finally snap. I've been so concerned with the bed infested with ants that I entirely forgot about my other zucchini bed. When I finally remembered to check that bed, I stumbled across a Squash of Unusual Size:

Bigger than her head!

It was sixteen inches long. I tried to weigh it, but my bathroom scale first informed me that it is low on battery and then proceeded to tell me I weigh 331.4 lbs, so I decided it wasn't the most reliable of instruments. I think I exercised great restraint in not throwing it out the bathroom window.

So, what do you do with a zucchini of such prodigious girth? Really, there's just one thing to do: Stuff it. Stuffed zucchini is a great family tradition and an excellent use for such a tough customer. Here's the basic recipe, followed with a blow-by-blow account of cooking this beast.

Stuffed Zucchini

Extra virgin olive oil, lots
2 small fresh yellow onions, diced
2 shallots, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped (I should have used more. Bump it up to 6-8 cloves.)
1 lb. organic free-range ground beef  (Vegetarians, this is optional. Use more pine nuts.)
8 broad beans, cut in 1-inch pieces
8 oz. oyster mushrooms, cut in 1/2-inch pieces
1 cup fresh basil leaves and blossoms
2 stems fresh rosemary
2 stems fresh parsley
2 stems fresh oregano
2 stems fresh thyme
sea salt and freshly ground pepper
1/2 cup pine nuts
1/4 cup dry sherry
1 gargantuan 16-in. zucchini
16 small tomatoes + 1 small plum tomato, diced
8 leaves Russian and Winterbor kale, coarsely chopped
1 cup gluten-free breadcrumbs
(should also have added 1/2 cup parmesan cheese )
2 cups shredded mozzerella cheese

First, I preheated the oven to 375 degF. I heated about 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil in a braiser pan, my go-to saute pan for big jobs. In this I browned the ground beef over medium heat along with the onions, shallots, garlic, and mushrooms. The mushrooms absorbed quite a bit of the oil, so I added another tablespoon or two. When the beef was about half-cooked, I added the broad beans. I chopped the basil coarsely and threw it in, then stripped the leaves of all the herbs from their stems, chopped them up together, and threw them in as well. I seasoned the whole lot with salt and pepper, and as the beef finished cooking, I moved the mixture from the pan into a bowl with a slotted spoon.

At this point, I turned off the heat, realizing that hollowing out the zucchini was going to take some time.  I used a vegetable knife to cut the zucchini in half, then made a slice 1/2 inch from the edge all around the inside of each half, without slicing through the skin below. I used a serving spoon to scoop out the inside. This is an inelegant process, but it doesn't have to look good. I hollowed out each half to a 1/2-inch thickness all around. I set the hollowed halves on an 18-inch baking sheet, then diced the zucchini into 1/2-inch pieces.

Zucchini shells. Yes, that's an 18-inch baking pan.

All the insides out.

Next, more olive oil, in which I toasted the pine nuts until lightly brown. These I removed to another bowl with the slotted spoon. I deglazed the pan with the sherry, and when it had reduced by about half, I tossed in the zucchini, tomatoes, and kale. When the zucchini started to become tender and the skins began to come off the tomatoes, I drained out as much of the liquid in the pan as I could without spilling veggies everywhwere. I added about half the breadcrumbs (this is when I should have added the parmesan cheese), then returned the ground beef and pine nuts to the pan. Mixing everything together (adding the rest of the breadcrumbs in, too), I left the stuffing to simmer.

Using the slotted spoon, I stuffed the zucchini. With the liquid cooked out of the veggies, and with a little careful mounding, all of the stuffing fit in quite nicely. I then topped the stuffed zucchini halves with the mozzerella cheese. Alas, I discovered the perils of topping an unstable squash. So I propped that half up using toothpicks and returned the cheese to the top where it belonged.

Zucchini shells filled with yummy goodness.

Oops! Cheese everywhere.

Wobbly zucchini propped up with toothpicks.

I put this in the oven and roasted it for about 30-35 minutes, until the cheese was nicely browned and the zucchini shells yielded easily to a fork but hadn't yet gone mushy.

Finished stuffed zucchini

This I served with fresh garden cucumbers and sungold tomatoes and angel hair pasta tossed with butter. Unsurprisingly, the kids at the table refused to touch the zucchini, which is why the pasta was there. So I may as well have used regular breadcrumbs instead of gluten free. Ah well. Between us, my husband and I ate half of one stuffed shell, and it was the skinny half. I am now thoroughly stuffed, just like the zuke. I am guessing that this could easily serve 8-10 people, more with additional courses (appetizers, a tossed salad or antipasto, a more serious pasta course).

VARIATIONS:

I used ground beef in this, but other meats work well, including ground turkey, ground pork, and italian sausage. However, meat is entirely unnecessary for this dish, and this actually makes a great and rather dramatic vegetarian entree. In that case, I would double the amount of pine nuts and increase the amount of mushrooms. If you can't find oyster mushrooms, portobellos will do. If you want to get fancy, try hen of the woods or chicken mushrooms, but only if you have eaten them before, as some people can have a reaction. And if you use such wild-harvested mushrooms, omit the sherry, as mixing wild mushrooms with alcohol can have dire results.

Speaking of sherry, you can use any dry white wine in this, or you can omit it entirely.

As for cheese, I forgot the parmesan cheese and sorely missed it. I highly recommend parmesan in and atop the stuffing. Romano works well, too. For the topping, you can also use fresh mozzerella, or you can go for a stronger flavor with asagio.

As for vegetables, the great thing about stuffed zucchini is that you can really throw just about anything you want into it. Broad beans aren't usually in this dish, but I had some, so I tossed them in. In the past, I've added eggplant and broccoli. Shredded carrots would probably be good, too. I suspect that fennel could be really delicious in this, although I've never tried it, and I'd use it sparingly to avoid overwhelming the wonderful basil. And fresh basil is really what makes this dish. Greens aren't required, but they are yummy. If you don't have or like kale, try spinach, chard, or beet greens.

A note about the tomatoes. I have to check my garden chart, but I'm pretty sure what I used were Grandma's Pick, an heirloom variety I'm trying for the first time this year. They're lovely little tomatoes, about two inches in diameter, as prolific as cherry toms, and have a nice firm texture and light tomato flavor. It's an excellent salad tomato, but I'm not sure it's robust enough for sauces. The one drawback I've found is that they don't seem very disease resistent. Nearly every tomato plant in my garden has early blight, but most of the plants are fighting it well. One Grandma's Pick, on the other hand, has lost most of its lower leaves entirely, although its top leaves and stems continue to grow and thrive. I think it may be time to spray with copper, though I'm also curious to see how well it does on its own. Well, maybe I'll spray one plant and leave the other to fend for itself.

The plum tomato I used was an Amish Paste. They're smaller than I expected and slow to ripen, but they are quite tasty. Thus far, they are also the least affected by the blight.

One of the very satisfying things about this dish was how much of it I grew myself. It's actually easier to list what didn't come out of my garden: olive oil, ground beef, salt, pepper, mushrooms (I do grow oyster, shiitake, and king stropharia mushrooms, but none of them are flushing just now), pine nuts, breadcrumbs, and cheese. Which means the total cost of this meal was about twelve dollars. Not bad.

Mulch Madness

It's the middle of May, and I'm already thoroughly sick of weeding. I weed, they come back. Weed, grow, weed, grow. So on Tuesday, I vowed to weed smarter, not harder. And that means mulch.

Fortunately, when I was at Kane's Flower World in Danvers to pick up compost last weekend, I noticed that they had salt marsh hay available. Salt marsh hay makes wonderful mulch because it germinates in salt water, not in your garden. I picked up a bale, knowing it would be a good investment. Later that day, I spent a good hour weeding a single strawberry bed, so on Tuesday, I broke open that bale and mulched those strawberries down. And then I mulched the bush beans, pole beans, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, winter squash, and half the peas.

Among the garlic and shallots, which weren't actually all that weedy, I seeded a living mulch of arugula and radicchio. Along the asparagus, I planted pak choi. Beside the winter squash, New Zealand spinach. I didn't mulch down the edamame because it was just barely sprouting, and I was worried I'd cover some by accident. Once it has fully leafed out, I'll weed out that bed again and mulch it down with the last of the salt marsh hay.

On whichever beds remained unplanted, with the exception of the corn bed and the beds alongside the potato towers (where I have mounds of earth that will need to be shoveled later), I weeded and cultivated laid down black weed barrier. This will both warm up the soil nicely and prevent weeds from taking over while the beds await planting with the warm-weather crops: basil, eggplants, ground cherries, melons, peppers, tomatoes, and tomatillos.

At this point, the garden is pretty well planted and just awaiting a little heat. The peas are climbing their trellises happily. The garlic should set scapes in a couple of weeks or so. The onions, which had been struggling, seem to be perking up after all the rain last week. Two out of three potato varieties have sprouted (Bintje and Norkotah), so I have high hopes that we'll have new potatoes by midsummer. The strawberries seem intent on fruiting by then, too, judging from the profusion of blossoms.

All the beans are up now, even the straggling edamame, the asparagus is ferning out nicely, and the kale is growing like mad. We have swaths of volunteer lettuce and mustard greens and quite a few wandering raspberries that will need new homes. Last year's flowerbed is carpeted in green, and that's either an amazing amount of reseeding or the best crop of lamb's quarters ever. I can't quite tell. The beets and carrots we seeded are looking ready to thin, and there's space for more seeding (succession planting).

Inside the greenhouse, the snow peas are producing like mad, although the lone snap pea that actually sprouted does not seem to be setting any fruit. The some of the tomatoes and tomatillos are already blooming and keep outgrowing their pots. I'm hard pressed to keep them happy. Yesterday, I finished repotting all the cucumbers, zucchini, and patty pans. The melons, sunflowers, and nasturtiums have all sprouted nicely, and the marigolds, cilantro, and parsley really need to be planted outside. I have some insect damage on a single Highlander chile pepper plant, but I have extras for just this purpose.

The one thing I keep forgetting to do is seed the spinach. I need to soak the seeds in water for 24 hours first, and I just never remember to do it. Spinach, like onions, is one of those crops I have a very hard time growing, so I think I just keep putting off the inevitable failure. But who knows? Maybe this will be the year when I finally figure it out. I hope so because I really, really love spinach.

 Regardless, they'll have to wait. I'm currently sitting in O'Hare International Airport on my way to Moline, IL to visit my sister and attend her PhD graduation. Go Karissa! I am so proud of you. I'll be back on Sunday, and in the meantime, my husband and daughters are in charge of the garden. I'm sure they'll do a splendid job.

Time to Start Planting

Last night, a fellow parent asked me if it was warm enough to start planting outside. Answer: YES! You can begin planting as early as March 15th, depending on what you're planting. Here's a simple chart describing when and where to plant. Note that these dates and recommendations are for zone 6. You can find your plant hardiness zone here. Adjust by two weeks per zone (Zone 5 would plant two weeks later, Zone 7 two weeks earlier, and reverse that in June.)

Date	Start Inside	Direct Seed Outside	Plant Outside
Feb. 15th	Leeks
March 15th	Basil, Ground Cherries, Kale, Peppers, Tomatillos	Peas - assuming ground is not thoroughly frozen
April 1st	Broccoli, Cauliflower, Tomatoes, Herbs
April 15th	Nasturtiums, Potatoes (chitting)	Leeks, Carrots*, Beets*, Onions, Lettuce, Spinach**, Dill, Cilantro, Marigolds, Sunflowers	Leeks, Kale, Strawberries
May 1	Cucumbers, Melons, Squash (summer and winter)	Beans	Broccoli, Cauliflower, Potatoes, Nasturtiums
May: soil temp. is 70 deg		Corn***	Basil, Ground Cherries, Melons, Peppers, Tomatoes, Tomatillos, Squash (summer and winter), herbs
Early June	Broccoli, Cauliflower		Cucumbers
Mid-July		Lettuce, Peas	Broccoli, Cauliflower
Sept./Oct.		Garlic, Shallots

*To ensure a continuous harvest of beets and carrots, seed every two weeks starting April 15th.
**Soak your spinach seeds in water for 24 hours before planting to improve germination.
***If you're considering planting corn, remember that you must have enough space to plant 36 plants (6x6) to ensure proper pollination.
I hope this is helpful. If there's a vegetable you don't see here, look for similar vegetables and plant at the same time, e.g., brussels sprouts, cabbage, and collards should be planted the same time as broccoli.

Tractor Language

This morning was a busy one in the greenhouse and the garden. I repotted tomatoes, started melons, nasturtiums, and sunflowers, and planted edamame and the Bintje potatoes. The Norkotahs are ready to go in the ground, too, but we don't have a tower built. Tomorrow, I may just plant them in the space where they're meant to go and fit the tower around them.

In planting the potatoes, I discovered an annoying mistake. I ordered some of the potatoes from a supplier that shipped them in plastic mesh bags, and I stupidly left them to sprout inside said mesh bags. So of course they sprouted right through the mesh. It took some very dainty work with nail clippers to snip the plastic from around the sprouts without damaging them, and I still lost three sprouts, muttering tractor language as I went.

Wait. What's tractor language, you ask? Didn't I mention this last year? My grandfather, who taught me how to farm, was a wonderful man: hardworking, clever, generous, trustworthy. He could also swear like a soldier (which he had been in WWII) in English, Spanish, and a smattering of Italian. I'd be out in the apple orchard throwing rotten apples at my brother, and I'd hear this stream of invective echoing over the alfalfa. So I'd wade out through that green sea to, most likely, my grandfather's cantankerous tractor and find him laying under it, hands smeared with grease and mouth running at full throttle.

My family used to joke that my grandfather's blue streak was a secret language he'd invented in order to talk to his tractor, and so we always called it tractor language. And tractor language popped up in the most unlikely places. One day, I wandered in from the fields and asked my grandmother for the meaning a particular Spanish idiom my grandfather had just used. She turned beet red, marched out to the tractor, and let loose her own stream of invective upon my poor unsuspecting grandfather. Which is how I found out that Abuela knew tractor language, too.

Today, I stood in the back office of the greenhouse, snipping and swearing, when I heard a buzzing next to me. A carpenter bee had slipped down behind the plastic over the window next to me and was having a devilish time getting out. He'd climb a little ways up, get stuck because the space was too tight for him to use his wings, and slide back down again. Every so often, he'd let loose this little buzz of frustration. And it suddenly hit me: he was using the bee equivalent of tractor language.

I felt a moment of solidarity with the poor bee. I took hold of the plastic and tore it down so that he could escape. Instead, he ran from the nice big gap I'd just made and crawled through a hole under the windowsill. So now I have to replace the plastic. #$@*!

How to Turn Strawberries Into Asparagus (well, sort of)

Last Monday, my Jersey Supreme asparagus crowns arrived from Johnny's Selected Seeds. Excellent! I thought, and ran out to my garden to plant them. Then I read the instructions, which specified working compost into the soil. I'm out of compost; one tumbler keeps almost-but-not-quite being ready. So I sighed, deposited the crowns in the greenhouse, and went back to whatever I was doing.

Meanwhile, my friend Megan offered me some finished compost in exchange for some of the bazillion volunteer strawberries I dug out of the beds and paths last Saturday. On Wednesday, we met up in Burlington and exchanged organic matter.

And then it rained. And rained. And rained some more. I kept spraying the crowns with water to keep them from drying out and praying for a break in the weather. We had a nice break yesterday, but with my husband sick and a crazy work week, I was just too tired to do much of anything. This morning, I woke up and peeked out the curtains at a lovely blue sky.

Aha! Asparagus time! After breakfast, I went outside and weeded out the bed. Then I dumped the compost on it. Bonus: it was chock full of very happy, wriggling worms! I weeded an adjoining bed for a few minutes to give them time to settle down, then I pulled out my cultivator and worked that compost in.

I dug a trench and put down some crowns, but I still had some left. So I dug the trench a bit farther and put down some more crowns, and there were still some left. I just kept going and going and going until I'd dug a 25-foot trench in the long bed at the foot of the garden. It was starting to sprinkle. I had seven crowns left, but I didn't really want to extend the trench further and encroach on other growing spaces. So I took the crowns next door, along with my remaining volunteer strawberries, and deposited them all upon my delighted neighbors. As I covered the crowns, it gently began to rain.

It'll be interesting to see the effect of the compost, since I only worked it into the first half of the trench. Otherwise, it was a pretty perfect morning in the garden. I can't wait to see what comes up.