Gardening hits and misses

As I've observed before, sometimes our ecofrugal life seems like a series of little ups and downs. For each thing that goes unexpectedly wrong due to some combination of bad luck and bad planning, another goes unexpectedly right. So, instead of sharing one big story this week, I decided to talk about a bunch of these little hits and misses — the warp and weft of the ecofrugal life. And, as luck would have it, all of them involve plants.

Miss: A vegetable do-over

We'll start with our biggest miss this week. Remember all those seedlings we put in last weekend? Well, for some reason that we still aren't quite sure of, they didn't fare well at all. Brian had done his best to harden them off (expose them to outdoor light and temperature) over the week or so before planting them, but once they were actually in the ground, their leaves started to turn pale and dry — a sure sign of sunscald. Our seedlings have experienced a touch of this in past years, but never to such a degree. Brian could only guess that the problem was that the weather before planting was mostly cloudy, while the week after was particularly sunny. On top of this, we had a couple of unseasonably cold nights (though no actual frost) that probably didn't do our tender pepper plants any good.

Fortunately, Brian always starts twice as many seeds of each type as we actually need so that we'll have backup plants for situations like this. So we spent a big chunk of yesterday morning replacing all the pepper plants, as well as one of the new Opalka tomatoes, with their backups. The other plants, though not as healthy as usual, looked stronger than the seedlings that had been confined to little tubes all week, so we left them in place. Brian added little cages of chicken wire over the new peppers to protect them from critters (since one of the four lost plants had been bitten off rather than merely wilted) and to filter the sunlight that reaches them until they're a little bigger.

Meanwhile, Brian is holding on to all the remaining extra seedlings, rather than giving them away as we usually do (which would be a challenge anyway on account of social distancing). That way, if the new Opalka tomato doesn't make it either, we can still replace it with a different variety. He's dug out a new bed for them all next to the house, which he's calling "the burn ward."

Hit: Potato plants 

However, there's one crop in the garden that's looking incredibly robust: our new potato plants. The buckets are now full to the very top, with a layer of mulch on top of the dirt, and the plants are spilling out in a burst of exuberantly green foliage. I don't know whether the health of the plants is any indicator of how many actual potatoes we can hope to get off them, but it's quite encouraging to look at.

Hit: Asparagus

Another crop that's producing well is the asparagus. After a late start, it's now producing in abundance. We've already eaten about a pound and a half of it, and we've harvested this much more just in the past week. We've had so many meals featuring asparagus that Brian actually asked me if I could find some new asparagus recipes, since we were already getting a little tired of the ones we had. So I obligingly dug out an asparagus and mushroom pasta recipe that had been sitting for years in our recipe file, which you'll most likely be seeing later as our Recipe of the Month for May.

Miss: An ill-fated plant

In order to start the seeds for my new flower bed this year, we had to clear a larger space for seedlings than usual in our south-facing guest room window. Thus, the houseplant that normally lives there, a cat-friendly aluminum plant, had to be moved to a downstairs window for the duration. I was sorry to displace it, because the plant itself was so handsome and healthy-looking, and it was also in a really neat-looking pot from Ten Thousand Villages: vaguely dodecahedral in shape and made of unglazed terra cotta.

But well before the seedlings were ready to plant, it became clear that neither the plant nor its pot was doing at all well in its new home. Not only was its foliage drooping, no matter how much water it got, but the outer surface of the clay pot was starting to come off in big flakes. Once we had room for it again, I brought the pot back upstairs, but the plant's condition didn't seem to improve. Large clumps of it were simply dead, and when I tried to remove those clumps, pieces of the little healthy foliage remaining came off with them. Plus, the pot was still a mess, and we feared that eventually it would fall apart altogether.

So, yesterday while on a walk, I popped into the Rite Aid and picked up a new pot for the aluminum plant (marked down to $5, as spring is nearly over). But when Brian tried to transfer what was left of the plant to the new pot, he got a nasty shock: None of the healthy-looking foliage that was left on the plant was actually connected to the soil at all. No wonder it wasn't looking well.

We pulled off what pieces of the plant we could salvage and put them in water to see if we can get any of them to take root, but we aren't pinning our hopes on it. The good news is that, after a little bit of work, Brian was able to remove most of the damaged parts of the clay pot and found that the structure of it was still intact — so, for the time being, he's planted two leftover Johnny Jump-Up seedlings from our flowerbed in it. Sources list these as only "mildly toxic" to cats, and our cats have never been in the habit of nibbling on the aluminum plant when we had it in the guest room, so we're hoping if we put the violas in the same place, they and the cats will be able to coexist.

Hit: Rose is arose

Although we're currently down one houseplant, we're certainly not lacking for fresh flowers. Our rosebush, after weeks of teasing us with buds that looked almost ready to bloom, has finally burst into full, riotous blossom. Just look at these beauties! We've got one in our cat-safe vase now, and if these keeps up, we may soon be harvesting whole bunches of them to display in all our rooms.

Our aluminum plant may not survive, and perhaps this year's tomato crop won't be everything we'd hoped for. But between this abundance of beautiful blooms and the ten pounds of flour we were fortunate enough to find at the supermarket yesterday (despite shortages), we'll have both bread and roses — everything you really need for a fulfilling ecofrugal life.