Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Summer Harvest

Although the summer solstice is sometimes referred to as Midsummer, this term only makes sense if you think of summer as the six months between the spring and fall equinoxes. The real midpoint of summer falls right around now, at the beginning of August. It's a time when the garden is normally at its peak, cranking out a huge variety of veggies. But sadly, this year's weird weather (including a week of blistering heat followed by pounding rain) doesn't seem to have agreed with our plants. In the past week, we've harvested only:

• 5 cucumbers (one of our old Boston Pickling cukes and four South Winds, our new variety)
• 4 Premio tomatoes, 4 San Marzano tomatoes, and 14 Sun Gold cherry tomatoes
• 7 ounces of bush cherries 
• 1 zucchini 

That's not bad, but it's a lot less than we got last year or the year before. The cucumbers are doing all right, but the tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini have all been a bit sluggish. Worst of all, the plums, which according to their normal two-year cycle should be producing a bumper crop right now, have yielded hardly anything. The Golden Gage plums haven't ripened yet, so there's still a chance of a decent harvest there, but Brian has already picked the Opal tree clean and collected only 9.5 pounds in total—less than one-third of our 2023 harvest and one-fifth of what we got in 2021. And the Mount Royal has done even worse, producing not a single plum that survived to full ripeness. 

More worrying still, the tree itself is looking rather peaky. Its branches, even after two years of diligent pruning, are still heavily infected with black knot, and its leaves have come in small, thin, and riddled with tiny holes. The most likely culprit, apparently, is a fungal infection called shot hole disease. To deal with it, sources recommend removing and destroying every bit of infected foliage, then giving it a dose of fungicide in late fall. Unfortunately, there's pretty much no part of the tree that isn't affected, and the other two trees seem to have it to some extent as well. So to follow this advice properly, we'd have to strip all three trees bare, which is hardly practical. Probably the best we can do is rake up and burn all the leaves in the fall, spray all the trees with our usual copper fungicide, and cross our fingers.

However, there are some plants in our yard that are absolutely loving this weather: the weeds. Between personal travel, business travel, and hazardous weather conditions, Brian and I haven't been able to spend much time in the garden over the past few weeks, and the crabgrass and mugwort took advantage of the lull to invade every planting bed in the yard—flowers, herbs, asparagus—while growing to nearly waist height in the open areas. Brian spent most of yesterday out there with the mower and the string trimmer just beating them back, then we both spent some time on the ground carefully hand-weeding the areas that couldn't be mowed. Brian even put up a new barrier around the flowerbed, using some big pieces of 4-by-four lumber he had sitting out back, to make it harder for the weeds to retake the territory in future. (The phone line insulators that previously marked out the boundaries of the bed went on top.)

So, on the one hand, we don't have much of a harvest to celebrate for this particular Gardeners' Holiday. But we can at least celebrate a temporary victory over the weeds. We can't claim to have defeated them, but at least they're not at risk of eating the house, and that's more than we could say two days ago.

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Spring Planting

May the Fourth be with you! This month is only a few days old, but it's already shaping up to be a busy one. We've been running around so much the past few days that we barely managed to squeeze in an hour for our big spring planting. In fact, so far this month, we've spent more time working on someone else's garden than our own. To explain why, let me start by giving you a bit of background.

My parents have an arbor in their back yard made of white plastic. It used to have grapevines on it, but they died of black rot, and my folks haven't been able to get any other vines to climb up the smooth plastic poles. Seeking a solution for this problem, I did a bit of research and found a source that suggested wrapping the columns in twine to give the vines something to cling to. Based on this advice, I gave them a two-part Hanukkah present: a spool of garden twine and a packet of scarlet runner beans, plus a promise to help them "install" the new setup in the spring. 

Since we already had to be in the area to dance up the sun with our Morris team on May Day morning, we figured that would be a good day to deliver on the second half of our present. So, after our morning dance performances (and a quick trip to the Whole Earth Center, since we seldom get a chance to visit while it's open), we headed up to my folks' house, bringing our gardening gloves and a bag of leaf compost left over from the load we picked up in March at the Belle Mead Co-Op. 

We started by giving the trellis a big of a scrub to remove the layer of organic matter that had formed on it during its years of disuse. Once they were clean enough, we began winding the posts with twine. I tied a loop around the base of each one, spiraled it all the way up, and tied it to the crossbeam. Lastly, we dug a good-sized hole at the base of each of the posts, filled it with a mixture of soil and compost, and planted the beans. We put four in each hole, leaving just five in the packet. Dad offered us the extras, but we left him three as just-in-case backups and took only two for ourselves. (Brian has a notion to plant them next to a traffic sign on our curb and see if we can get them to grow up the post. This may not be quite legal, but it's easier to get forgiveness than permission.) Then we stayed for lunch and a bit of chat with my folks, ran a few more errands, and headed home.

Although there was still plenty of daylight left at that point, Brian and I were both much too tired after a long day of dancing, gardening, and shopping to go back out and work in our own yard. Friday was too busy, as Brian had work in the morning and a platelet donation in the afternoon, and Saturday was mostly taken up with another dance performance. So it wasn't until this morning that we finally had a chance to tackle our own major spring planting. And with rain in the forecast, we only had a narrow window to do it in. So we ran straight out after breakfast and spent the next hour putting in our tomatoes, peppers, green beans, basil, dill, and cucumbers, finishing up as the first drops of rain were coming down.

This year, we made a couple of changes to our usual planting methods. For one, we gave each tomato plant a dose of crushed eggshell to provide calcium in the hopes of fending off blossom end rot. (This didn't leave us with much to use for the same purpose on our zucchini plants, but we can always eat eggs in the next week to produce a bit more.) Also, Brian decided to put in the Thai basil seedlings he'd started a week early. The planting schedule calls for them to go in one week past the last frost date, which I usually assume will fall around the beginning of May. But on account of global warming, our last frost date is probably at least a week earlier now, and the Thai basil seedlings were so big that Brian didn't want to leave them in their pots any longer.

Lastly, we put in nearly twice as many pepper plants as usual. Brian always starts extra tomato and pepper seedlings, but usually we only plant the healthiest ones and set the rest aside. This year, he decided to double them up in the two-by-two-foot squares we'd set aside for them. I've always set aside four square feet for each pepper plant based on the advice in one of my gardening books, but they've never come close to filling the space, and most sources—including my dad—seem to think one square foot per pepper is plenty. So we've put in all seven of our pepper seedlings (the extra Banana seedling didn't survive), and if they do well, we may squeeze in even more next year. 

So, that's the bulk of our 2025 garden crops in the ground. All we have left to do next weekend is the zucchini and winter squash. And, thanks to the rain, we didn't even have to water anything.

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: First Sowing

Most years, all we do in the garden to mark the spring equinox is put our snap peas into the ground. And we did do that yesterday, but only after putting in a bit of work in an area that we don't usually mess with this early in the spring: the asparagus bed.

Over the past several years, our asparagus crop has dropped off to almost nothing. We never got more than a few pounds a year, but for the past few years we've been lucky to manage half a pound. Last year we picked up a few extra asparagus crowns as an impulse buy at Lidl and tucked them into some bare spots in the bed, but as we'd tried that before without much success, I wasn't optimistic. I was convinced that our fifteen-year-old plants had simply come to the end of their productive life, and we'd have to start fresh this year by digging up the whole bed and planting new ones. To that end, we invested $8 in a set of ten "Jersey Knight" asparagus crowns on our last trip to the Co-Op.

But by the time the weather was warm enough to put them in, it had already become apparent that our existing plants were not quite kaput after all. In a handful of spots around the bed, little purple shoots were already poking their heads up—and shoots of reasonable thickness, too, not like the skinny little spears we've been seeing for most of the past few years. Brian wasn't willing to dig up these obviously healthy plants, but he also didn't want to rely on them as our sole source of asparagus.

 

So he came up with a new plan. We dug out a U-shaped trench along the edges of the bed, leaving the healthy plants in the middle. We transferred the topsoil, including the layer of leaf compost we'd added, to a plastic trash barrel, and when we dug deep enough to hit clay, we put that into a separate bucket. He spread out the new asparagus crowns in this trench, covered them up with a layer of the saved topsoil, and watered them thoroughly. We covered the barrel of soil and left it out in the yard so that we can easily get more to cover up the new asparagus shoots as they start to emerge. We'll keep the new plants well watered over the next couple of years and see how many of them survive.

Once that was done, we were able to move into the garden proper to put down the peas. Brian reminded me that in recent years, the majority of the peas we've planted haven't come up, so he suggested planting two seeds for every plant we hoped to get. I agreed to this on the condition that he'd agree to thin the plants if the seeds did all come up, rather than trying to spare them all and ending up with too many vines to fit on the trellis. However, when I tried to space the holes I was poking in the soil closer together, I couldn't manage it; I would have had to collapse the existing holes before I'd gotten any seeds into them. So instead, I kept the holes two inches apart and dropped two peas in each one.

I then covered them up and watered them all well with a can of water I drew off from our freshly uncovered rain barrel. After that, I covered the entire row with the modified Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder in hopes of protecting the peas from squirrels and birds long enough to give them a chance to sprout.

Meanwhile, Brian was busying himself planting another crop that doesn't usually go in this early: the parsley. For the past couple of years, we've been seeding this directly in the garden in early April, as recommended on the packet. But Brian thought it was taking too long to grow productive plants that way, so this year he went back to starting it indoors. And as it turns out, this variety of parsley (Flat Leaf) grows really fast in our seed-starting setup. The seedlings, which weren't due to go out in the garden for another few weeks, were already so big that Brian thought he'd better get them into the ground before they outgrew their tubes. So in they all went—enough to fill four square feet and, with luck, provide heaps of parsley for making falafel this summer.

This spring planting binge yielded one unexpected bonus. Although March is too early to harvest any of our actual garden crops, some of the wild plants in the yard are already coming up, including the big tufts of wild garlic. I pulled up one particularly large clump that was intruding on the slope where our honeyberries are and discovered that, instead of the tiny little bulbils it usually has on its roots, it had actually produced a few decent-sized cloves. So we may get to enjoy a meal with at least a little bit of produce from our yard even earlier in the year than usual.

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Seedfest

Our gardening year starts with a Gardeners' Holiday I've referred to by a variety of names: Festival of Seeds, Pruning Day, Seed-Starting Day, Indoor Growing Day, or simply Renewal. The specific focus varies from year to year, but it's basically about getting ready for the gardening season to come. It's too early to harvest, too early to plant, but not too early to plan and prepare. And this year, our preparations are focusing on a crop that's not usually on the schedule: pawpaws.

We first learned about pawpaws from a landscaper we hired in 2012 who recommended them as an easy fruit tree to grow in clay soil. At the time, we were hesitant to follow up on this advice because neither of us had ever tasted pawpaw and we didn't know if we'd like it. That changed in 2018, when Brian learned of a pawpaw patch near his workplace and started scavenging some fallen fruit there. (Since it's on private land, he scrupulously avoids picking fruit off the trees, but he assumes the fallen ones are unwanted and therefore fair game.) He found them appealing enough to save the seeds and start a few seedlings, which he planted in a back corner of the garden the following spring. Six years later, two of those seedlings have grown into small but sturdy saplings that, according to Fruit Tree Hub, could start producing fruit as soon as this year. 

Technically, two pawpaw trees is enough for fruit set, but Brian has decided he would like to have a couple more if possible—even he has to wait another 5 to 7 years for them to grow up. He saved the seeds from some pawpaws he gleaned last September, and last month he started saving soymilk cartons to plant them in. Yesterday he went out and dug a big chunk of still-frozen soil out of the garden, distributed it among nine of the cartons, and dropped one seed in each. He's still got three more cartons that he plans to fill and plant as well.

Now, if you're doing the math, you'll realize that if all of these seeds come up, that will make 12 new pawpaw seedlings. And if you're looking at the picture above of the corner where our two pawpaws are now, it will probably occur to you, as it did to me, that we do not have room for nearly that many new ones. However, there's no guarantee the seeds will sprout, so Brian's plan is to start plenty in hopes of getting two seedlings healthy enough to plant. If he ends up with extras, he'll try giving them away to friends, coworkers, or strangers on the local Buy Nothing group. But he's not counting his pawpaws before they're hatched.

As for the rest of our 2025 garden plans, they're progressing at a more leisurely pace. We've received our seed order from Fedco (all except the new Pirat lettuce, which is on back order), and Brian has started soaking some parsley seeds so he can put them into seed-starting tubes tomorrow. I've already laid out the plan for next year's beds in my garden spreadsheet, which only took about 15 minutes with my simplified rotate-and-flip method. We still need to prune our plum trees, as well as buying and applying a load of leaf compost to amend the compacted soil in the garden beds (and fill up the gap Brian left by digging out so much soil for the pawpaws). But those jobs can wait until the weather warms up, or at least peeks its head above the freezing point. So we've got another week or so of snuggled-in-for-winter mode before it comes time to start diving into the gardening season in earnest.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: The Changing of the Garden

Happy solstice, everyone! Or just past the solstice, at any rate. I'm a little late posting this week because we spent all day in the car yesterday, driving out to Indiana to spend Christmas with Brian's family. As per our usual practice, we spent part of that trip selecting seeds for next year's garden—and, in a surprise turn of events, the catalog we chose them from was our former favorite, Fedco Seeds. 

You may recall that we decided to break with Fedco in 2022 because it had become increasingly unreliable, sending us some seeds that were duds and others that weren't what we'd ordered. In 2023 we tried Botanical Interests. It introduced us to some new varieties we really liked, particularly Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce, which lived up to its name by being very productive throughout the whole growing season. But Botanical Interests didn't have the Carmen peppers we've come to rely on, so in 2024 we switched to True Leaf Market. It, too, proved less than satisfactory. Several of the seed varieties it sent us were unimpressive; some were clearly not what we'd ordered; and one, the Thai basil, had literally no flavor whatsoever. 

At this point, Brian suggested that maybe, rather than trying yet a third new supplier, we should just go back to Fedco. Yes, it wasn't 100 percent reliable, but neither were the others we'd tried, and it was cheaper and had most of our favorite varieties. So that's how we ended up sitting in the car yesterday, picking out the following crops:

• Arugula. The "slow bolt" arugula we bought from True Leaf this year was pretty patchy, so we're replacing it with a variety called Ice-Bred. Fedco bills it as "one tough cookie": quick to mature, yet slow to bolt, and capable of surviving under the snow all winter to yield a fresh crop in spring.
• Thai basil. After last year's disappointment with True Leaf's "holy basil," we steered clear of the so-called "sacred basil" and went with Flowering Thai Basil. It promises "voluminous," bushy plants with both strong flavor and ample production.
• Cucumbers. We had a particularly bad year for cucumbers. The Boston Pickling cucumbers we got from True Leaf yielded only one medium-sized cuke, and our usually trusty Marketmores never came up at all. (We bought some Straight Eight plants to replace them, but they only produced five itty-bitty cukes.) We're going to give the Boston Pickling variety one more try, but as a hedge, we're also getting some of Fedco's South Wind variety, a slicing cucumber with "strong vigorous productive plants" highly resistant to powdery mildew.
  
• Green beans. We're replenishing our supply of our favorite Provider variety. As per the name, it generally produces well except when the young plants get chomped, so we'll have to make it a priority to protect them somehow. Possibly a job for the Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder.
• Lettuce. Sadly, Fedco does not have the Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce (also known by its French name, Merveille des Quatre Saisons) that we've become so attached to in the past two years. But it does have a variety called Pirat that it says is "Descended from Merveille des Quatre Saisons and is much more bolt resistant." So we'll take a flier at that and see if it's as good as its ancestor. If it is, we'll probably ditch our summer lettuce blend altogether and grow this variety year-round.
• Peppers. We're restocking our trusty Carmen peppers and also trying a new variety, Aconcagua. It supposedly produces huge plants (up to 3 feet) with huge fruits (up to 10 inches) that are "very sweet, crunchy and fruity."
• Scallions. The Flagpole variety we tried from True Leaf was another disappointment, so we're going back to Evergreen Bunching White, which has served us well in the past.
• Snap peas. Next to the Thai basil, the supposed Cascadia snap peas we ordered from True Leaf were the biggest disappointment. The variety it sent us was clearly not Cascadia, nor any other snap pea; it was a snow pea that's meant to be eaten while it's small and tender. Unfortunately, we didn't realize this, so we let the peas grow to full size, at which point they were tough and near-inedible. We're hoping the Cascadia peas we get from Fedco next year will be the real thing.
• Tomatoes. We're restocking our trusty Premio and Sun Gold tomatoes, which always work for us. We have enough of our other two favorites, Pineapple and San Marzano, to get us through this season, but next year we'll need to find another source for the San Marzano, which Fedco doesn't have.

So that's next year's seed order sorted. We've already taken care of our other winter gardening tasks: draining the rain barrel and covering the garden paths with a thick layer of leaves, most of them swiped from off the curb in front of our neighbor's house. (I felt a bit bad about this, but as Brian pointed out, our neighbor didn't want them, and the borough, which was going to pick them up, was probably providing that service only to keep them from piling up in the street.) So our garden is now well settled in for its long winter's nap. All we have to do now is place our seed order and snuggle in ourselves until seed-starting season rolls around.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: (Belated) Late Harvest

This week's post is not going to be about the election. All I'm going to say about that right now is that it's not game over for the climate, because the clean energy transition is too far along for any one man to stop. Instead, this post is going to be the one I should have written last week instead of letting myself get distracted by heat pump shenanigans: my late-fall Gardener's Holiday. 

At this point, nearly all of our 2024 crops have been gathered in. We still have a few green tomatoes on the vines that we're hoping will start to blush before the frost hits; any that are still green at that point will go into a box to ripen indoors. (Our success rate with this is only about 50 percent, but it costs nothing to try.) Also, we missed our window for harvesting the Climbing French green beans before the seeds turned starchy, so all the remaining pods are staying on the vine to dry so we can save the seeds. There's a little square of lettuce that will remain in the garden to overwinter. And as always, the rhubarb can be expected to soldier bravely on until the first freeze. But for the most part, whatever we're going to pick this year has been picked already.

The biggest winner in this fall's garden is the butternut squash. After several years of getting disappointing harvests from a mix of Waltham plants and smaller varieties like Little Dipper and Honeynut, this year we decided to plant only the larger Walthams—and that strategy paid off big time. We harvested a total of 13 squash, totaling a whopping 42 pounds. It's probably our best butternut crop of all time—even better than the year a rogue vine took over our side yard and produced 11 totally unplanned squash.

One of the smallest squash went into last month's Recipe of the Month, a medley of roasted stuff that we've dubbed, appropriately enough, Roasted Stuff. And most of a second one went into a curry that will feature as this month's Recipe of the Month, which you'll hear more about next week. But we still have 11 large squash left to see us through the winter, which means we'll have plenty of chances to enjoy old favorites like butternut squash lasagna, butternut pizza with sage, butternut squash souffle, and butternut squash pasta with vegan brown butter. We might even be able to spare one to take the place of pumpkin in our Thanksgiving pie, so that both our pies (pumpkin and rhubarb) will feature home-grown produce.

But the squash is not the only crop from our garden featuring in this week's meals. Last night's dinner was fish tacos with cabbage-and-tomato slaw that included some of the last dregs of our tomato harvest. Tonight's is a mushroom tourtière made from store-bought mushrooms and onions, but enhanced with sage and thyme from our herb bed. And earlier in the week, we partook of a Pad Thai that used up the last of our home-grown green onions. So, even as fall winds down toward winter, we can continue to enjoy what remains of last summer's bounty. (And that's not even counting the dozen jars of jam that Brian put up from last summer's plums and raspberries.)

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: Harvest Home

Usually, the crop we're most excited about in September is the tomatoes. And they are doing pretty well this year; to date, we've harvested 9 big Pineapples, 61 Premios, 66 San Marzanos, and 490 little Sun Golds. But all summer rolled into fall, we found ourselves focusing more on a new crop: the potatoes Brian planted this spring in our old rain barrel. The plants, which were green and healthy at midsummer, began turning yellow and dry in August, and Brian figured he'd harvest them once the foliage was completely gone. But a little quick research showed that they're actually ready to harvest a couple of weeks after they start yellowing. In short, they were now as ready as they were going to get, and we might as well go for it.

After scooping all the mulch off the top of the plant and setting it aside, Brian began digging into the dirt itself, transferring it into an empty trash can as he went. And just a few inches in, he saw the first little tuber peeping out of the dirt. Unfortunately, it was green on top, meaning it probably wouldn't be safe to eat. (The green itself comes from chlorophyll, but it's a sign that the spud may also contain high levels of solanine, which is poisonous.) But we took it as a sign that there was probably plenty more where that came from.

Sadly, this was not the case. As he kept digging deeper and deeper into the barrel, he found almost no further spuds. Brian burrowed right down to the layer of rocks he'd put in the bottom of the barrel for drainage and unearthed only a scanty handful of potatoes—far less than we'd harvested from our 5-gallon buckets in 2020. The total weight of spuds we produced was probably less than that of the seed potatoes we put in.

So what had we done wrong? Why had such lush, healthy green potato vines produced so few usable tubers? We put this question to the Internet, which told us that the most likely culprit was over-fertilization—particularly the over-application of nitrogen at the time the potato vines were in flower. But that didn't make sense, since the only fertilizer we'd added to the potato barrel was a single bag of aged manure that we mixed in at planting time. Other possible explanations—poor soil, insufficient sunlight, too little water—also didn't fit the data. The plants had gone into rich, crumbly soil; we'd given them plenty of water; and their patio location provided a good 6 to 8 hours of daily sunlight. And the plants themselves looked healthy and vigorous, with no signs of disease or pest infestation.

But after a few dead ends like this, I hit on a site called Growing Produce. The author said her neighbor had a situation exactly like ours: his potato plants "looked great all summer, with vigorous and healthy tops," but produced "only a few small tubers." She immediately diagnosed the problem: His spuds were grown in containers, which "can yield poor results when high daytime temperatures warm the soil." The high temperatures "promote leaf growth at the expense of tubers," resulting in lush plants that are scarce o' tatties. According to the article, "The optimal temperature for tuber growth is said to be about 59°F, while for leaf it’s about 75°F." And according to my home energy use spreadsheet (yes, of course I track our home energy use on a spreadsheet. Are you really surprised?), the average daily temperature throughout June, July, and August of this year was consistently over 75—much more conducive to healthy leaves than abundant spuds.

In short, this potato-barrel experiment was probably doomed from the start. We might conceivably have better results growing potatoes in the ground where the soil would stay cooler, perhaps in the sloped part of the yard where they'd have a big thermal mass to protect them. But we'd have to plant them early, and there's still a chance that too much heat or too much rain would ruin the crop. We might give it one more try just for the hell of it, but we won't be getting our hopes up.

Fortunately, we have other crops in the garden that definitely won't be letting us down. Along with our trusty tomatoes, there are plenty of green beans, peppers, and, surprisingly, zucchini. Normally these summer plants are entirely played out by the time fall comes around, but this year they're still growing, spilling over the edges of the beds and into the paths, and producing healthy squash. And if we still want potatoes, our new local supermarket (which just opened this weekend, about 18 months after the old one shut down) has them on sale for just 30 cents a pound.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: Summer Harvest

This past week has been brutally hot. Daytime highs have been consistently in the nineties, with soaking East Coast humidity on top of that. From Wednesday through Friday, we were under a heat advisory, warned to stay inside as much as possible as the heat index climbed into triple digits. By this afternoon, it was back down to a mere 98, but it still wasn't weather you'd want to spend any more time in than you had to.

Unless, of course, you're a plant. The ones in our garden are apparently just loving all this heat, yielding up a veritable cornucopia of veggies. On the first day of August, Brian braved the heat long enough to pick one largish zucchini, two cucumbers, one Carmen pepper, one Banana pepper, one Premio tomato, one San Marzano paste tomato, and 52 little Sun Gold tomatoes—and that's just one day's harvest.

To celebrate all this bounty, Brian made our favorite quinoa salad. This dish started out as the Couscous Salad from The Clueless Vegetarian, then morphed into kasha salad, and finally reached its pinnacle with chewy, protein-rich quinoa as the base. We eat this quite often, as it makes a useful catch-all for any leftover vegetables in the fridge that need to get used up before they go mushy. But this time, nearly all the veggies in it—cucumber, scallions, zucchini, parsley, two kinds of peppers, and two kinds of tomatoes—came from our own garden. The only exceptions were the garlic, which we have so far failed to produce a decent crop of, and the chick peas, which we've never attempted to grow.

Sadly, the one crop in our yard that isn't thriving in the summer heat is the plums. As far as we can tell, our plum trees tend to operate on a two-year cycle, giving us a bumper crop one year and essentially nothing the next. We have managed to harvest a handful of fruits off the Golden Gage tree, but only one off the Mount Royal and nothing at all from the Opal. And, to Brian's intense annoyance, we didn't even get to keep all of the fairly meager crop for ourselves. 

You see, last year, when our trees were simply loaded with fruit, some of our neighbors got into the habit of helping themselves right off the tree. We usually let this slide, but when one woman started not only eating them on the spot but filling up a bag, Brian went out and asked her to please stop it. She promptly apologized and insisted on paying for what she'd taken, so fair enough. 

But apparently she considered that by doing so, she had established her right to harvest our plums as long as she paid for them. So yesterday, he found the same woman outside, pocketing our Golden Gages and commenting on how meager the crop was. She gave us five bucks for what she'd picked, but frankly, we'd much rather have kept the plums for ourselves. It's one thing to share with our neighbors when the fruit is plentiful, but when the entire crop is maybe a few pounds' worth, we feel like we really should be entitled to first dibs.

Happily, there is a bright side on the fruit front. Our raspberry canes, having finished with their spring season, are already showing signs of gearing up for their fall crop. The canes toward the front of the bed are covered in little green berries, and one of them has even produced a couple of precocious fully ripe ones. So it won't be too long before we have fresh fruit available for the picking—and since the canes are as full of prickers as they are of fruit, we probably won't have to compete with any scavengers for the harvest.

And there's more good news: As I write this, a rainstorm is rolling in, bringing with it a much-needed respite from the heat. The climate being what is is, there will no doubt be further heat waves before summer is over, and most likely further setbacks in the garden too. But for now, between the crops in the garden, the crops on the horizon, and the welcome cool breezes blowing in through our windows, I'd say we have more cause for satisfaction with our outdoor lot than for disappointment.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: First Fruits

Summer has only just officially begun, but we're not easing into it gradually. New Jersey, like most parts of the country, has been baking under a heat dome for the past six days, with highs in the upper nineties and heavy humidity to boot. Mind you, we've gotten off easy compared to places like Las Vegas, Palm Springs, and Washington, where daytime highs have been in the triple digits. Brian had to drive to work a couple of times rather than riding his bike in the heat, but otherwise, we've been getting along fine without even needing the A/C. But we haven't been in much of a mood to go out and work in the garden. 

Fortunately, we've only had to venture out for a few minutes each day to harvest fresh veggies and fruit. Our honeyberries are about done producing, but we're still getting a few strawberries and plenty of raspberries. Our spring lettuce is also living up to its name (Marvel of Four Seasons) by continuing to provide ample fodder for salads, showing no signs of bolting in spite of the extreme heat. And just this week, Brian harvested the first handful or two of our basil crop. (We were planning to use it in a grilled veggie recipe I dug up online, but we changed plans when the sky started to look ominous. So instead it went into a pesto dish that I'll cover next week as our Recipe of the Month for June.)

Sadly, not all our summer crops are doing so well. In particular, our cucumber vines, which would normally be just starting to produce right about now, appear to be a complete write-off. We planted two varieties: a couple of Marketmores, using seed left over from our last Fedco order in 2022, and two of a new variety called Boston Pickling that we ordered last winter from a new seed supplier. And of those, not a single plant has actually come up. But at least our dill is producing, so Brian was able to use some of our garden produce in the season's first batch of pickles even if the cucumber itself had to be store-bought.

As I write this, the heat wave appears to be breaking at last. The expected storm hasn't hit here yet, but it has brought gusts of cooler air, which we're pulling into the house as fast as possible with every window fan at our disposal. Tonight it's supposed to dip below 75 degrees for the first time all week, and it should continue to do so every night for the next week to come. Granted, daytime highs will still be in the upper 80s and low 90s, but after the week we've just been through, that level of heat will feel positively mild.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: Mulching Day

April and May are insanely busy for us this year. What with our eclipse trip to Indianapolis at the beginning of the month, Passover this week, meetings and other events with Citizens' Climate Lobby, and dance gigs with Millstone River Morris, we don't have a single free weekend on our calendar between Easter and Memorial Day. 

Unfortunately, all this is happening during a busy part of the gardening year. We've managed to keep up with the absolutely essential chores, like planting squares of lettuce and spraying the plum trees. But less urgent jobs, like weeding and mulching, have languished on the to-do list for weeks. As a result, the weeds have been running more or less rampant over all our permanent planting areas—the flower and herb beds, the rhubarb and asparagus patches, and the areas under all our fruit trees and bushes. 

This morning, we finally decided we couldn't afford to put these tasks off any longer. Even if we couldn't do the entire job today, we could at least pick up a load of bulk mulch so we'd be able to get it started. So, right after lunch, we made the trek out to the Belle Mead Co-Op and bought half a yard of mulch, which we loaded into our usual assortment of containers (two trash barrels and a pile of empty birdseed bags). We also bought a package of seed potatoes to plant in our old rain barrel. (We'll probably have to buy soil in bags to plant them in; although the Co-Op also sells bulk topsoil, we can't currently use an entire half-yard of it, and we can't buy less than that.)

Once we got the mulch home, we spent the next couple of hours getting some of it into place. After first clearing away as many weeds as we could with our trusty stirrup hoe, we used up one of the big barrels on the spaces under the plum trees and the other in the asparagus bed. Then we hauled the remaining bags of mulch—which, though lighter than the barrels, were still quite heavy—down to the shed and hauled our panting, sweating selves inside for a couple of much-needed showers.

While putting down the mulch, we had a decent opportunity to observe the various areas of the garden and see how our crops are shaping up for the summer. The answer: It's kind of a mixed bag. The plum trees have finished blossoming and are starting to develop little fruitlings where the blossoms used to be, so there's at least a chance we'll get some plums this summer (though we're not counting on it, since we seem to alternate between bumper crops like last year's and complete duds). The cherry bushes have also shed all their blossoms, but not only is there no fruit to be seen on the branches, there are hardly any leaves. We don't know whether the bushes are just stressed or actually dying, but we're already thinking ahead to what we might replace them with in case they don't recover. (It looks like the best bet for our heavy clay soil might be aronia, also known as chokeberries.)

In the garden itself, our scallions and parsley are looking reasonably healthy, and our arugula and spring lettuce are just starting to come up. However, our snap peas are a big disappointment. We're used to getting only about half as many pea vines as we plant, but this year only 9 of the 32 plants I put in have come up—less than one in three. The seeds were brand new, so the problem wasn't their age, and we soaked them overnight before planting them, so it wasn't lack of water. Based on a guide at Tiny Garden Habit, the likeliest explanation seems to be that birds or other critters have been eating the peas before they can take root. Next year we may have to try covering the seeds with a cage for a couple of weeks, or maybe even starting them indoors. 

Another thing we've had a chance to observe early results on is the leaf cover we put down on the garden paths last winter. As you can see in the picture above, it appears to be somewhat effective, but far from perfect. There are quite a few dandelions and a few stray strands of mugwort poking their heads through the leaves, but the paths aren't completely overrun with them. I guess we'll try adding more leaves to the paths this winter and see if we can eventually build up a thick enough carpet to keep the paths weed-free. Even if it doesn't work, a carpet of leaves with a few weeds poking through is a lot better than a carpet of weeds tangling around our ankles every time we enter the garden.

So, all in all, our garden appears to be off to a bumpy start for this year. It's not clear how much of a harvest we have to look forward to, and it will probably be a while before we're able to harvest anything at all.  But considering how little time we'll have to spend in the garden over the next month, maybe that's just as well.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: First Sowing

Spring is officially here, which means it's about time to get our first crop, the snap peas, into the ground. I figured I could easily handle this on my own while Brian was out for a bike ride, but it turned out to be more difficult than I expected. The problem wasn't planting the seeds; it was finding them.

We keep all our seeds and seed-starting supplies in a big box labeled "seed starting," which is on one of the lower shelves in our overcrowded storage room. When I hauled out this box, the first place I looked for the seeds was in the wooden crate that Brian refers to as our "seed library," which contains all our seed packets from the current year and previous years, sorted by category. There was a section at the front labeled "This year," so I supposed that was where this year's seeds would be. However, a quick search plainly revealed that it was not. I then went through all the other sections and, while I did find some packets of snap peas, none was more recent than 2018. Clearly these weren't the seeds I was looking for.

Then I spotted a little box from Botanical Interests, our 2023 seed supplier, which was labeled "The good stuff (2024)." Ah, presumably the current seeds would be in here. And when I rummaged through, I did indeed find a packet of snap peas from last year's order—but there were only about 15 seeds left in it. That was less than half the number we would need to plant a full row of peas. Surely we would have ordered more if that was all we had left, wouldn't we? When I consulted my garden chart, it said that yes, we had ordered more from True Leaf Market this year. But where were they? And where, for that matter, were all the rest of the seeds from this year's order, which hadn't been in either of the two boxes I'd checked?

I went back to the big box and eventually found, tucked in near the front, a large brown-paper envelope, well camouflaged against the brown cardboard of the box itself. This was the package in which our seeds had been delivered, which Brian had apparently stuck into the box with all the seeds still in it. So I retrieved that, fished out the seeds, and planted them in the right rear garden bed, which we'd already cleared of weeds the week before. (Side note: we discovered in the process that our "Marvel of Four Seasons" lettuce truly lives up to its name. There's a head growing in that same bed that apparently overwintered from last fall's planting and is already large enough to start harvesting.) 

But my work was not done. Given that it had taken me about five times as long to find the seeds as it had to plant them, I was convinced we needed a better organizational scheme for our seed collection. We had saved far too many packets of seeds, some of them clearly far too old to germinate at this point, and they had turned into a haystack in which the seeds we actually needed were hard-to-find needles. So as soon as Brian got home, we brought up all the seeds and started going through them, removing the unusable ones and filing the current ones. We discarded anything that was over 5 years old—including a few packets that were over 15 years old—and anything that had been a spectacular failure, such as the Apple pepper seeds that completely failed to germinate.

By the time we were done, we had a huge pile of empty seed envelopes and two bowls of expired seeds, one for flowers and one for veggies. Keeping them separate was Brian's idea. He plans to scatter the expired flower seeds in some neglected corner of the yard and see if anything comes up. We're still figuring out what to do with the vegetable seeds. If we toss them in the compost bin, there's a danger that some of them could defy the odds and sprout, creating unidentifiable rogue plants that take over our side yard. (Brian tried to argue that this could be "an adventure," but I vetoed the idea. Gardening with plants you can put a name to is enough of an adventure as it is.) 

My idea was that maybe we could scatter all the vegetable seeds in a shallow dish, set it out in the yard, and see if the birds and squirrels would eat them. However, many of them were beans, and it turns out that uncooked beans are unsafe for birds to eat. So for now, we've just poured them all into a jar, where we'll keep them until we either think of a use for them or give up and toss them in the trash. In the meantime, they make a rather fetching little decoration. Too bad I don't have an Instagram account to post them on.

After clearing out all the old and useless seeds, we had plenty of room in the seed library to file all the usable ones. In the process, we discovered that there weren't quite as many of them as we thought we had. Even though we'd gone through the entire collection before placing our seed order for this year, we somehow overlooked the fact that we didn't have enough of either our Provider green beans or our Marketmore cucumbers to fill all the squares we'd allocated for them. More startling still, we'd failed to notice that we didn't have any usable scallion seeds at all. I had to place a hasty second seed order with True Market—one packet of Provider beans, one new cucumber variety called Boston Pickling Cucumber, and a new scallion variety called Flagpole—to rectify the situation.

So in the end, I guess it was a bit of a blessing in disguise that our seed library was such a mess. If it hadn't looked like a disaster that needed to be cleaned up immediately, we might not have discovered that we were missing some seeds we needed until the time came to plant them. Then we'd have had to make do with whatever variety was available at the nearest store or, worse still, leave valuable space in our garden empty. But on the other hand, maybe if it hadn't been such a mess back in December, we would have been able to tell which seeds we needed and avoid the whole problem.

In either case, I think we're best off not letting it get to that level again. Moving forward, we plan to go through all the seeds when we place our order in December or January and remove any that we think we're unlikely to use. Maybe, if we're really on the ball, we can even cull the varieties that we don't want before they expire and donate them to our local seed library. That way they'll have a chance to be of use to someone instead of ending up as decorative objects in a jar.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: Pruning Day

Every year, one of the first jobs on our garden to-do list is pruning our plum trees. I've been dreading this task somewhat, as over the past couple of years our trees had become badly infected with what I assumed was canker, causing knobbly black growths like giant warts around their branches. All three trees had it to some extent, but the Mount Royal in particular hardly seemed to have a single branch that wasn't affected. 

However, when I tried researching tree canker to figure out the best way to tackle this, I began to realize that the growths on our trees didn't look much like the cankers in the pictures. I started searching for info on other problems affecting plum trees and eventually figured out that what ours actually had was a fungal disease aptly named "black knot." Sources on the Web disagree on how serious a problem this is. The province of Alberta warns, "The fungus continues to grow internally and externally, with the branch eventually becoming girdled and dying," while the University of Minnesota Extension says, "Many Prunus trees tolerate black knot. Tolerant trees have many galls throughout the tree with few negative effects on the health of the tree." Minnetonka Orchards takes a middle ground, saying "The tree may suffer from decreased fruit production, structural damage, and ultimately death if the infection is severe," but adding that "Mature trees are more resilient and may survive without any noticeable ill effects."

Based on the extraordinarily productive season we had for plums last year, my guess was that the disease wasn't affecting our trees too badly. I decided we wouldn't try to remove every single branch that was infected (which would probably be impossible anyway), but we'd take off the worst offenders. And, at the same time, we'd also prune out out any branches that were problematic in other ways: overlapping, inward-pointing, or in danger of impinging on the house, driveway, and sidewalk.

Unfortunately, this measured approach proved hard to stick to. We kept finding more and more branches that seemed to fall into the "worst offender" category, especially on the Mount Royal. We definitely violated the rule against cutting off more than one-quarter of the tree's crown, and eventually we just had to force ourselves to stop before we stripped it completely bare. Even now, in its largely denuded state, it still isn't entirely free of galls, but it looks a lot cleaner than it did before. And since our trees seem to operate on a two-year cycle—incredible productivity one year followed by nothing at all the next—it should have over a year to catch up and produce new, healthy growth before our next plum harvest.

Meanwhile, we had to dispose of the huge pile of pruned-off branches. All the sources I consulted emphasize that it's important to destroy branches infected with black knot as soon as possible, as they can otherwise continue to shed spores and spread the fungus. We planned to burn them in our little backyard fire pit, but the wood was too moist to light. Brian ended up having to supplement the fire with sticks from our stock of seasoned wood to get the plum branches dry enough to burn. Eventually he managed to destroy most of the diseased wood this way, leaving a small pile of healthy wood for later use.

There's still more to be done to prepare for the upcoming gardening season—pruning the rosebush, for one, and laying out the beds for the vegetable garden—but with all the cutting, hauling, and burning of branches, I think we've had enough of a yard-workout for one day.

Gardeners' Holidays 2023: The Changing of the Garden

Most years, Brian and I celebrate this Gardeners' Holiday by picking out new seed varieties from a catalog during our drive to Indiana to visit his folks. However, this year, there were a couple of complications. First of all, the new seed company we used this year, Botanical Interests, didn't send us a catalog—and by the time I realized they hadn't, it was too late to order one in time for the trip. But even if we had received one, we might not have chosen to use it, since Botanical Interests doesn't carry our favorite Carmen pepper seeds. That didn't matter so much this year, since we had a few left over from our last Fedco order. But for next year, we'll definitely need some more.

So we decided to give a different seed supplier a try in 2024. I checked the website of True Leaf Market, which was also on our short list last year, and found that they carry the Carmen peppers and everything else we're currently out of. However, trying to browse True Leaf's website on my phone in the car would have been a bit awkward—especially while trying to take notes of our selections on paper at the same time. So, since we had a little free time today, we opted to do our seed selecting at home instead. 

The seeds we plan to either renew or replace are:

• Arugula. True Leaf sells several varieties, most of which were unfamiliar to us. Our first instinct was to go with Rocket, since we've successfully grown it before and know it works in our garden. But the Rocket arugula has one problem: it always bolts as soon as the weather turns hot, leaving us with leggy, bitter plants that aren't really worth harvesting. So when we saw a variety called Slow Bolt, which was actually slightly cheaper than the Rocket and had a 5-star rating from growers, we decided it was worth a try.
• Thai basil. The company touts its Siam Queen variety as an AAS winner, but it's extremely expensive: a minimum of $12.24 per packet, more than three times as much as its other varieties that have better user ratings. We decided to go with the more modestly priced Red Leaf Holy Basil, choosing it over the equally well-reviewed Thai Sweet Large Leaf because its red color will make it easier to distinguish from the regular Italian basil.
• Dill. This is another plant that has a tendency to bolt. Usually, by the time our cucumbers ripen in the summer, there's no dill left in the garden to make dill pickles with. In hopes of mitigating that problem, we chose a variety called Dukat, which allegedly "holds longer at the leaf stage than other dills." One user says it "didn't even bud until July despite unusual heat," which sounds promising.
• Lettuce. The Marvel of Four Seasons variety we bought this year from Botanical Interest performed very well in our garden. It was so bolt-resistant that we were able to keep harvesting it all summer and well into the fall. Initially, we thought True Leaf didn't stock this variety, but it turns out it was just listed under its French name, Merveille de Quatre Saisons. However, the packet it comes in is only 500 milligrams, which might not be enough for six squares' worth of lettuce (especially with a second planting in fall). Rather than buy two packets, we decided to hedge our bets by adding a packet of a blend called Gourmet Mix. Since it includes five different varieties of Bibb, leaf, and romaine lettuces, it maximizes the chances that at least one of them will do well.
• Peppers. The Carmen pepper seeds were the reason we came to this site in the first place, so naturally we're ordering more of those. Their performance this year was actually a bit disappointing—only a dozen peppers off two plants—but we're hoping that's just because the seeds were two years old. We plan to put in two or three of those and fill in with a Banana pepper from our last Fedco shipment, rather than take our chances on a new variety.
• Snap peas. Our trusty Cascadia snap peas did moderately well this year, yielding a total of 26 ounces. That's better than their performance in 2021 (when a deer ate most of the plants) or 2022 (when some of them never germinated), but nowhere near as good as the whopping 79 ounces we got in 2019. Still, this variety has done better overall than any other we've tried, and it gets better ratings for yield at Cornell's Vegetable Variety site than any of True Leaf's other offerings. We're going to stick with it for at least one more year, but if our yields remain lackluster we'll consider a different variety, like the well-reviewed Sugar Ann or Super Sugar Snap.
• Zucchini. The Emerald Delight zucchini seeds we bought from Botanical Interest were a resounding flop. Though described as "extremely productive," they produced only six usable squash off both plants and suffered a bit from blossom end rot. True Leaf doesn't carry the highly productive Green Machine variety that did so well for us in 2021 and 2022, so we're going back to Black Beauty, which we've grown with moderate success in the past.

One other item we'll have to replace in next year's garden is the bird tape we hung up to deter deer. As far as we can tell, it worked—that is, we've suffered no more deer invasions since hanging it (although without a control, we can't be entirely sure if they're only keeping away deer the way balled-up newspaper keeps away elephants). And contrary to our fears, the lines stayed in place pretty well and didn't blow around that much. But this week, Brian discovered that the tape was disintegrating, leaving little scraps of shiny plastic scattered around the garden. So he took them all down, and next year we'll either buy another roll of the stuff or see if we can achieve the same results with something similar, like strips of aluminum foil.

But that's a problem for next year. For now, we've taken care of all the necessary tasks to put our garden to bed for the winter. Our new rain barrel, unlike the old one, has not gone back into the shed; instead we've partially drained it and covered the opening with a trash can lid, weighed down with a brick, so no more water accumulates in it. We've also covered the entire garden with a thick layer of leaves—not just in the beds, but also on the paths. I noticed this year that the back edge of the garden, where leaves naturally tend to accumulate, didn't have weeds popping up all over the place the way the rest of the paths do, so I decided to spread leaves everywhere and see how well they did at keeping the weeds down. We piled a good couple of inches on the paths and more on the beds, and when we plant them in the spring we'll sweep that lot onto the paths as well. Fingers crossed, this may be the solution that finally provides us with a mostly weed-free surface to walk on.

And lastly, we've brought our new rosemary plant—bought to replace the one we unsuccessfully attempted to winterize last year—indoors until spring. Its predecessor didn't survive the winter even tucked inside a plastic bag and piled with leaves, so when we bought this one, we just put it in a large pot that we could carry indoors when the frost hit. And since it was going to spend this month parked in front of a sunny window downstairs, I figured I might as well give it a seasonal makeover.

Happy holidays to all, and best of luck with your gardening efforts in 2024.

Gardeners' Holidays 2023: Late Harvest

The 2023 harvest season isn't quite over yet, but the clock is ticking. According to the weather forecast, the first frost of the year is likely to hit on Wednesday night, so we need to make sure all our tender crops are gathered in by then. That means all the lettuce and arugula (both in the beds and on the paths); all the parsley and basil; all the peppers and tomatoes, both ripe and unripe; all the French beans on their little trellis. We'll also have to pick all the tiny fruits off our new strawberry plants and get them properly bedded down for winter with a layer of leaf mulch. And on top of that, we still need to get next year's garlic crop into the ground.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to get all that done this weekend. Yesterday we had perfect weather for it, sunny and remarkably warm for late October, but we spent the entire day at a Renaissance fair with friends and didn't get home until after dark. Today, by contrast, we were free all day, but the weather was uncooperative: dark, damp, and chilly, with heavy rain for most of the afternoon. Only around dusk did it let up enough for Brian to pop outside and collect a small load of produce: all the beans and lettuce big enough to pick, a handful of arugula, a few Banana peppers, some ripe Sun Gold tomatoes, and a big bunch of rhubarb. But the rest of the gardening chores will have to be squeezed in as best we can over the next two evenings.

Once they're done, the garden won't be completely empty. The dozen or so leeks still in the bed can stand to stay put a little longer, as can the butternut squash. Frankly, though, no matter how much longer we leave those on the vine, it won't be enough to give us an impressive harvest. We've already harvested the four squash of decent size that our Waltham plant has produced, and there are only two smaller ones left that might grow ripe enough to harvest before the first hard freeze. As for the new Honeynut squash that we tried this year as an experiment, the two vines we planted have produced exactly one ripe squash between them, probably less than four ounces in weight. Granted, all of that is edible (you don't even have to peel it), but it's still not much to show for the four square feet of our precious garden space we devoted to this crop. Next year we'll most likely drop it and plant two extra Walthams instead.

But even if our squash harvest isn't much to celebrate, we can still take satisfaction in what we have. We'll saute the beans tonight to accompany our mushroom tourtière. We'll combine the lettuce, arugula, and Sun Golds tomorrow in what will probably be our last homegrown salad of the season. We'll use the rhubarb on Wednesday to make chicken in rhubarb sauce for some friends coming to dinner. With each bite, we'll savor the last of summer's bounty, even as we prepare ourselves for the winter to come.