The "farm," she grows!

My brilliant idea this year was to move the tomatoes and green beans out of my three (little) raised beds and into containers. They've been growing like crazy on the driveway, which I have renamed the "toma-patio." The green beans are very happy in their big storage bin, and they are also not climbing all over my other plants. A big win all around!

There's an amazing number of blossoms on my cucumbers, melon, and winters squash plants. I have high hopes.

This year is the first I've grown garlic, and that has been fun, since it's so enthusiastic and the first thing out of the ground when it gets a little warmer. I'm also growing malabar spinach, which is neither a malabar nor a spinach, and I am mildly frightened of it, as it found its trellis all by itself, even being several inches away. My daughter (four years old today; how time flies!) likes pulling leaves off and making a "leaf sandwich" and chomping it down while meandering through the yard.

Potatoes are new for me, as well. I built a couple of potato towers. Unfortunately, I ran out of compost and straw before I ran out of room in the cylinders of fencing, but I have high hopes that I will at least get a few potatoes out of them.

My grape vines are growing wildly, and I need to prune them. I need to read up on how the heck to prune them, first. I don't think I'll get grapes from the red table grape, as that died all the way down to the ground this winter, but maybe more than one tiny bunch of concord grapes will develop.

I wish I could say I've been eating all sorts of greens from my garden for awhile, but I think greens hate me. I had ONE spinach plant, total. There's some bolt-resistant Romaine growing well, but I think that the heat we're having now might lower its resistance and bolting is imminent. I had horrible germination with beets (two are growing), carrots (five), and chard (two). The happiest plants, as always, seem to be beans and anything I have nothing to do with starting the seeds of.

"Dandylion" cordial using child labor

You see weeds; I see liquor.

My daughter is entranced by "dandylions." She's been providing me with a steady stream of bouquets, which are being plunked into mason jars and placed on the dinner table. It's a good thing, because our beautiful suburban lawn is inhabited by as many plants in the weed category as those in the grass category (though, between you and me and everyone else, my heart is with the LessLawn folks so it doesn't bother me one bit). Dandelions keep this little girl occupied for a very long time.

My helper's always
near-at-hand bucket.

Today I decided to take advantage of the combination of her love of dandelions and her love of helping after seeing a recipe for dandelion cordial. I had a whole (two) lawn(s) full of blooms and half of an enormous bottle of the very same Prairie vodka; it must be fate. My helper grabbed her bucket and tore heads off of dandelions like she'd been doing it all her life. I helped in between taking pictures and calling to the dog to get her to stay in the yard, and the bucket quickly filled with the smell of spring.

Free-range booze.

The blogger who posted the recipe suggests drinking dandelion cordial with tonic water and lemon. I'll let you know in six weeks if this is a good idea, or if I am very upset at sacrificing my lovely vodka for this little adventure.

In other news...

The garden was partly planted with lettuce, spinach, rainbow chard, beets, carrots, and snap peas several weeks ago, and the seedlings are finally, gradually emerging from the ground. I am very eager to get everything else in, and also for Minnesota to decide it would like to get warm and stay warm (and sunny, too, please). I already have a farmer tan going on, at least.

A time to sow, a time to reap.

A time to yank out your stupid sweet corn and plant something else! Yeah!

I'm pondering fall crops. I don't want to waste my time with something that won't give a decent yield, so I'm considering planting garlic and spinach, and maybe nothing else. As usual, the Minnesota Extension office has good information on fall crops that are suitable for Minnesota.

The last paragraph intrigues me. Would it be awesome or folly or awesome folly to plant something like winter wheat? This site seems to suggest that I might have enough time to do it. I wonder if I'd actually get any wheat out of it. I could totally go all Laura Ingalls Wilder and get myself a coffee grinder and hole up in my father's store and spend my days of the long winter grinding wheat and braiding straw for the fire. (Hopefully just the wheat-grinding bit.)

I'm not so sure I'm good at gardening.

This year I told myself, "You will learn about soil composition."

Yeah, that didn't happen.

I think I overplant like whoa. The square-foot gardening doesn't help, because it is just so tempting to fill every last square. This year I was "generous" and gave my tomatoes more than one square; they are supposed to have nine. I only managed to provide a teepee for one set of beans; the rest are climbing on the tomato cages, trellises, other plants, or reaching over to the chain-link fence and hanging out with the grapes and morning glories.

It all looks very pretty and wild, but it's not good from a production perspective. I'm getting a handful of beans every day, two ripe Amish paste tomatoes, lettuce that I didn't bother to harvest because the CSA box made me feel as if I was drowning in lettuce, and some teeny-tiny squash (like the potimarron in the photo) and watermelons and corn. When I was planting in rows, way back in the day, I got a lot more of a yield.

I think I may be pulling up the yellow beans and a few other things that just aren't performing well, to give the rest some breathing room. And next year I'll get the soil tested, I promise.

Volunteers

Last year my garden was full of sunflowers that planted themselves, and this year is no different. One square of the garden is sunflowers - my daughter calls them the "sunflower family" - and then there are random sunflowers scattered about that I can't bear to yank out.

Sunflowers are some of my favorites. One of my favorite times of the year is when the sunflowers that line the highways in the metro area are blooming. How's that for blooming where you're planted?

I've also got at least one volunteer tomato plant in the garden. I suspect they are pear tomatoes, but I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Yards to Gardens

Yesterday I glanced at the newspaper and saw an article about Yards to Gardens. This website makes me very happy. It connects people with yards to people who need yards to garden. It also lists community garden spaces and provides a venue for sharing tools and expertise.

Read the article in the Star Tribune or visit the website (since the embedded map is giving me script errors) to see what's available in your area.

I has a baby pea! (garden progress as of June 5)

The peas are making little pea babies. The first one was discovered on Saturday. And then there was another yesterday. How adorable!

Here are some pictures of the garden boxes. Let's pretend I did a much better job weeding before taking these photos.





Box #1 is chugging along. The spinach seems pretty happy, and the beans are REALLY happy. The cucumbers, likely victims of the dog, will be replaced with a couple of seedlings from Malmborg's. You will notice that all of the garden boxes now have a fence, which should prevent future dog-related tragedies.

Box #2, home to melons that are actually sprouting (here's to hoping for fruit, for once), some sad-looking corn, a volunteer tomato plant, and not much else. I managed to get a zucchini to sprout. The tomato seedlings that went kaput will be replaced with Amish Paste and Cherokee Purple (my favorite tomato). Please remind me next year that I am horrible at starting seeds and kill them more often than not so, please, just buy them.

Box #3 houses the "sunflower family," as my daughter calls it, along with pumpkins that are doing simply smashingly, more sad corn, and some other stuff, including brussels sprouts. I only had room for three brussels sprouts in my boxes so the other three seedlings are stuck by the also-sad rhubarb.

After a couple of very nice rainy days, the garden is about twice the size of these pictures, less than a week later.

The garden is in. I repeat: The garden is in.

This is the earliest I've gotten my garden planted in... ever. Most years, I'm waiting and waiting and waiting for all of the parts to come together: a free day, prepared beds, cooperative weather, an assembly of plants and seeds. We've been having absolutely gorgeous weather (if you ignore that cold, rainy stretch) for quite awhile, which meant that I even started cold-weather crops while it was still "cold," and Sunday was the day I tucked everything else in its dirt bed.

A shout out to my neighbor, who held the baby (who is anti-playpen when it's outside, and pro-playpen when it's inside; go figure) during half the planting.

And, for posterity, I present to you... the map of the garden.







*Parris Island Romaine, Slobolt, Yugoslavian Red... I think.

As you may notice, I do the square foot garden thing, though I can't say I do it properly. Who wants to fill nine squares with a tomato plant? I compromised from last year and allotted two. I will kick myself for this later, but chances are the tomatoes are the only thing that'll go crazy, as happens every year.

The tomatoes were started from seed and I managed to not kill them before they were placed into the ground. There's also a Reisentraube tomato in a pot on our stoop, and the remaining tomato plants (as I am not doing a community garden plot after all) will be potted if they can survive long enough. We go through lots of tomatoes. I loved the Hillbilly Potato Leaf tomato last year.

Of those things planted April 19, the peas are the most vigorous. The spinach comes in second, and broccoli third. The lettuce is protesting, so most of it was reseeded on Sunday. I'm not entirely sure it was worth the effort to put in an early planting, since it took forever for everything to come up, and there hasn't been much progress overall.

Most of the seeds I purchased two years ago from Seed Savers Exchange, but they're still germinating well. This year marks the end of the Charantais and Blacktail Mountain melon seeds; maybe this year I'll actually get one. And maybe this year I'll manage to post more than one progress photo.

I have high hopes for the vigor of my plants this year, as I topped off each bed with a nice heap of homemade compost, fresh out of the compost tumbler.

Excuse my absence. I've been creating life.

Little garden plots kind of pale in comparison to cultivating entire human beings within one's body and then pushing out said human being(s) on your living room rug. The last couple of months of pregnancy really sapped my life force, and I have - I think, understandably - been a little preoccupied with the care and feeding of a new little man, so I haven't had much time for gardening, canning, cooking, etc. More accurately, I haven't had much time for blogging about it.

We welcomed a little man into the world on August 14 after two whole hours of labor and four minutes of pushing. Yes, I am impressed with myself. It was an incredible experience, and after having a hospital birth and a home birth I cannot comprehend ever setting foot in a hospital to give birth ever again, unless life-saving procedures are necessary. The best part was being able to sleep in my own bed afterward, without any nurses coming in to poke or prod. I highly recommend the experience.

I meant to post regular pictures of my garden and harvests, truly I did. But I only have these meager few. My harvests were meager, as well, partly due to my half-hearted weeding and packing way too much into my square footage. I'm also not good at feeding and watering the soil, and it always bites me on the butt. Next year I need to concentrate on making really nice soil and feeding it when necessary. Our lack of heat didn't help things, but I can't blame all of my garden's failings on that!

I might be the only person in the world who had two zucchini plants and about five zucchini total.


The first harvest - the wax beans actually grew like crazy and I ended up with about three pounds of beans, eventually.


My tiny lettuce crop. It was turned into a salad with boiled beets and feta cheese in a lemony vinaigrette. My daughter gobbled it up!

And here are my three square-foot gardening boxes, packed to the brim. Next year I might actually listen to the square foot gardening dude when he says that tomato plants that aren't trellised need NINE spaces:







The yellow pear tomato was crazy productive, and the roma tomato was close behind. The yellow pears pretty much ended up going straight down my daughter's gullet, and the romas were mostly dried in the oven - just sliced in half and dried overnight at 200, no seasoning or oil. I think we got a lot of hillbilly potato leaf fruits, though I'll be darned if I knew which plant was planted where. I lost my "map" to my seedlings and then my map to the garden. Maybe next year I'll be organized. (Yeah, right.)

And since we're getting frost around these parts, I guess it's the end of tomato season unless we've got some farmers with row covers. A short and sweet season it was.

Neglectful me

I could offer excuses, but I have no good ones! I keep meaning to post pictures of my garden, but I need to take them first. We've had quite a stretch of rainy days, followed by some hot and humid days, which means things are really taking off.

Some things have not popped up. Either my chanterais melon or watermelon (I can't remember what went where) didn't come up, and most of the lettuce didn't, either. I know it's late for lettuce, but I had to give it a try. I am probably going to stop by a greenhouse and pick up half-price something-or-others to fill those gaps, and I'll plant another round of bush beans as well. Or, I suppose I could leave things bare and try to remember to plant some spinach or broccoli or the like when the weather cools down again. But I am trying to forget that someday it'll be cold and the snow will come, etc.

The big excitement recently has been my first day at the farmers market. My husband and I set up promptly at after-seven-thirty (we were supposed to be set up before then - oops) at the New Hope Community Farmers Market and we're proud to report that Robin's Dale Handmade Soap actually sold some product. I suspect we'll sell more as time goes on, if only because I'll be adding more sellable scents. As much as I like all-natural, herbal soap, the general public likes the fruity/floral sort. I will eventually have a proper website set up, with online ordering, and will likely throw some goods up on Etsy as well. I smell like freesia today, and you could, too!

Victory gardens then and now

By way of Fiona at the Minneapolis Metblog:

Victory Gardens: Join the Garden Revolution
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 9:00 - 11:00 a.m.

Join Rose Hayden-Smith, IATP Food and Society Fellow, national Victory Garden expert from University of California for an in-depth workshop about Victory Gardens and what history can show us in how government can better support community gardening. Rose will review historical case studies and current national policies, and work with participants to articulate public policies for today. The workshop is sponsored by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Gardening Matters.

Where:
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
2104 Stevens Avenue South, Minneapolis

Registration: $10; Scholarships available upon request.Please RSVP by June 18 to Anne Walters at awalters@iatp.org or 612-870-3408.

Breakfast refreshments will be provided.

AND

How about adding your garden to the One Million Gardens website? According to the site, "The One Million Garden campaign is designed to identify, encourage, and document the creation of 1,000,000 food gardens throughout the United States by the end of 2009." I'm there as One-Quarter Acres, of course.