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.

Taming the hell strip

Ever since we bought this house, Brian and I have been trying to reduce the amount of grass on the property—particularly in the little boxed-in front yard. We added the three plum trees, each with its own little island of mulch. We created a bed of day lilies along the cinder block wall. We made several attempts to get a ground cover established in the other portions of the yard, with varying degrees of success. And last month, Brian announced that he'd like to remove the grass from an area I'd never really thought about before: the narrow slice of turf between the sidewalk and street, which is apparently even more of a nuisance to keep mowed than the rest of the yard.

He wasn't quite sure what he wanted on this little sliver of land, aside from "not grass," so I offered to do a little research. I learned, first of all, that this narrow plot is commonly known as the "hell strip," and second, that it's a tricky area to landscape. Plants need to be narrow enough that they won't impinge on the sidewalk and tough enough to survive with very little soil underfoot. And in our yard, they face the additional challenges of heavy clay soil, full afternoon sun, and hungry deer and groundhogs. After consulting several sources online to see what could stand up to this environment, I proposed a mixture of salvia and rudbeckia (Black-Eyed Susans), with maybe a few little thyme plants to fill in the gaps. We already had salvia seeds from our planter project, so we bought a packet of rudbeckia seeds (as well as one of English lavender, which happened to catch Brian's eye), and I figured we'd plant them in the spring.

But this weekend, Brian decided he didn't want to wait that long. With an extra free day from the holiday weekend, he wanted to tackle a project he could see through from start to finish. He started sketching out some plans on Friday, and on Saturday morning he was out there turfing out the sod from the hell strip. He didn't do the whole thing, just a 12-foot section starting at the edge of the driveway. Then he disappeared into the shop and emerged with a small, odd-shaped bracket he'd built out of some pressure-treated 2-by-4 lumber he had leftover from the planter project. This little lopsided trapezoid was just the right size to fill in the angle formed by the driveway apron, turning the rest of the hellstrip into an even rectangle.

Next to that, he began laying out a small paved area that would serve as a landing pad for our trash and recycling bins. We didn't have any groundcloth to keep weeds out, but we had some heavy paper leaf bags that had proved equally effective at weed suppression in our garden paths. Laid flat, the bag was exactly wide enough to fill in the strip. Brian then began covering it with the last of the pavers leftover from our patio project, which had spent the last several years stashed in the shed. After filling in the cracks with fine sand (from a bag we acquired so long ago we've forgotten what it was originally for, he boxed in the remainder of the strip with more lengths of 2-by-4 and filled it up with topsoil. (He didn't nail these pieces together, so whenever he wants to expand the hellstrip planting, he can simply remove the end piece and add more boards to extend the frame.)

By the end of Saturday, he had the entire strip neatly laid out and already looking much better than it had before. However, we knew that if we simply left it like this, it wouldn't stay nice-looking for long. The "grass" (which in our yard really means a mixture of crabgrass and other lawn weeds) would re-colonize the nicely-laid-out bed in short order if we didn't get something else in there. We didn't have time to start a bunch of salvia, lavender, and Black-Eyed Susans indoors, and if we sowed the seeds directly in the midsummer heat, they might not survive. So we decided to stop by the same nursery where we'd bought the plants for our large planters last spring and grab a few deer-tolerant plants to serve as place holders for the rest of the season.

Unfortunately, the nursery was closed, presumably on account of the holiday weekend. We tried the nearby Home Depot, but the only suitable plants we found there were a few salvias, which we already had at home. So we switched to Plan B: digging up and transplanting some of the salvia from our planters, along with any other plants we could scavenge from our flowerbeds. We found one large echinacea that had somehow seeded itself in our herb bed, as well as several smaller ones scattered closer to their parent plants. We also divided off several sections from our largest yarrow plant, since multiple sources had recommended yarrow as a suitable plant for hellstrips. However, the plant was so huge and floppy that we quickly realized the pieces extracted from it would never manage to stand upright on their own. Brian planted a couple of them next to the street sign at one end of the strip with a wire cage around them for support, hoping that once they're in full sun they'll eventually take on a more upright posture. The rest of the bed got filled in with a mixture of salvia and echnicacea and covered with a layer of wood-chip mulch. (We got this free from a neighbor of ours who got a large delivery of wood chips from a tree service and generously offered up the leftovers on Freecycle.)

This newly planted area doesn't exactly look polished, but between the paved area and the layer of mulch, it's fairly neat. Come next spring, we'll start a bunch of echnicea, salvia, and maybe lavender and plant the area more fully. But for now, it's a decided improvement on the "grass" we had there before.

Sumer is icumen in

It's been an unusually cold spring here in New Jersey. During a stream cleanup we did in early April, it was actually snowing. Last weekend, we were guests at an outdoor wedding, and I kept my coat on pretty much the entire time. And just last night, we opted to skip the local outdoor film series because the temperature was already down in the 50s by showtime.

But as soon as the calendar page flipped over to June, the weather seemed to get the memo that it's supposed to be summertime. The temperature forecast for this week is heading steadily upward, from a high of around 70F today up to 92F by Thursday. And our garden is likewise getting with the program, swinging into full production mode. Yesterday, Brian gathered a big bunch of lettuce and arugula for a salad and a pound of rhubarb for a strawberry-rhubarb compote; today, we went out and filled up two pint containers with our honeyberries and alpine strawberries. And, in a preview of things to come, we gathered six snap pea pods and our first raspberry of the season.

To celebrate all this bounty, Brian fired up the grill and cooked a batch of his mushroom seitan burgers. To accompany them, he also grilled a batch of zucchini spears, some onion and potato slices, and a couple of ears of corn in their husks. He upped the veggie content of the meal with a salad of home-grown lettuce and arugula, livened up with a few white strawberries, snap peas, and chopped walnuts (the only component we didn't grow ourselves). 

By many folks' standards, this is a pretty humble home-cooked meal. There's no meat, and the ingredients—including the store-bought buns and a batch of our favorite balsamic vinaigrette dressing—cost us less than $12 for at least two or three meals' worth of food. But as I admired the spread laid out on our table, I exclaimed to Brian, "We're so rich!" and meant it. A satisfying supper featuring fresh-picked organic produce, a beautiful June day to cook it on, and my favorite person to eat it with: if that's not wealth, what is?

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.

Small successes

We were away all last weekend visiting friends, so you're only getting a short, belated blog post this week. It's going to be a quick roundup of a few recent successes we've had in our frugal life over the past week or so—kind of like my ecofrugal episodes posts, only this time, it's all hits and no misses.

Small success #1: Pawpaw potential

Back in February, I mentioned that Brian was trying to start some more pawpaw seeds and give our two tiny pawpaw trees a few friends. Well, when the trees started leafing out this spring, he discovered that they already had one. In between the two little saplings, there's one tiny pawpaw seedling that must have survived from a previous planting, just putting out its first little leaves. I tried to get a photo of it, but it's so small you can't see it very well.

I did, however, get a picture of the other surprise the pawpaws gave us this year. One of the older trees, which he put in about six years ago, has just produced two blossoms. Unfortunately, since they're both on the same tree, there's no way they can pollinate each other. So Brian is planning to go back to the pawpaw patch near his workplace—the same spot where he originally gleaned this tree's parent fruit—and gather a little pollen on a Q-tip from one of those trees so he can attempt to pollinate the blossoms himself. After six years of tending these little trees, if there's any chance of getting just one or two pieces of fruit off them, he doesn't want to miss out.

Small success #2: Pea plants

Most years, we don't have a lot of luck growing peas in our garden. It always seems like half the seeds either fail to germinate or get mowed down in their infancy. (To add insult to injury, it's not even deer or woodchucks eating the plants; it's usually idiotic birds that mistake them for worms and pull them up by the roots.) So, this year, we planted twice as many peas and, as an extra layer of precaution, covered them up with Brian's Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder to protect them while they sprouted.

This strategy seems to have worked. For the first time we can remember, we have an entire row of healthy pea plants all along the back trellis. (In fact, so many of the peas sprouted successfully that we got more seedlings than the trellis could hold and Brian had to thin them. But we ate the extra pea shoots in a salad, so they didn't go to waste.) Brian finally removed the SQ-X from the plants today because they'd grown too tall for it. The plants aren't quite able to reach out and grab the bottom row of the trellis yet, but we're hoping they're tall enough that even the dimmest wildlife can't mistake them for anything but plants.

Small success #3: Thrift shop haul

As I mentioned, we spent the weekend visiting some friends down in the D.C. area. On Sunday, their teenage daughter decided she was going to go visit a nearby Goodwill store. Needless to say, my ears pricked up at this. In my experience, the best thrift stores tend to be in or near big cities, and if they're in upscale areas, so much the better. A Goodwill in a tony D.C. suburb sounded like prime hunting ground. So I tagged along on the trip, thinking I might score a nice sweater or maybe a dressy skirt to wear to an upcoming event.

Well, I didn't get either of those things, but I picked up something that's an even rarer find for me: a nice pair of ankle boots that actually meets my specifications. They're not a perfect fit, as a women's size 6 1/2 wide would be rare indeed, but they're a size 7 that I can get my feet into comfortably with only a tiny bit of extra space in the toes. They're leather-free, which isn't an absolute requirement for me if the shoes are secondhand but isn't a downside. They're reasonably sturdy and decent-looking. And their price tag was a mere $11.99. (Actually, the label inside the shoe said $17.99, but they must have been marked down.) They're the first footwear I've owned in quite some time that has a heel, so that will take a bit of getting used to, but they're not so high that I feel wobbly in them. And at my height, being an inch or so taller certainly isn't a downside. I was so pleased with my bargain that I dropped an extra $2.99 on a pair of cute socks to go with them.

Mind you, my haul wasn't the most interesting one from our trip. There was another family visiting our D.C. friends at the same time Brian and I were, and their younger kid also joined in the Goodwill excursion and came back with four matching sombreros—one for each member of the family. The hats were only $2 each, but even spending $8 on something that was just a joke would have seemed a bit extravagant to me at that age (or, to be honest, even at my age). But their parents seemed to appreciate it, so I guess it was worth the cost.

The planter project, part 2

Ever since Brian started working on his planter project, I've been doing research on my own trying to figure out what sort of plants to put into it. I definitely wanted to use perennials rather than annuals if possible—partly to save money and partly to save ourselves the work of having to replant every year, but mostly because perennials get a head start. When you grow annuals, you can't do your spring planting until the soil is thoroughly thawed and the stores have spring plants available, but perennials can start to poke their heads up out of the soil as soon as they think it's warm enough. 

So I did a search for something like "best perennials year round container garden," read through the first several articles that popped up, and compiled a list of the plants that earned the most recommendations. Top picks included heuchera (coral bells), boxwood, bergenia, sedum, yucca, creeping Jenny, coreopsis, salvia, asters, camellias, Japanese andromeda (Pieris japonica), and some varieties of juniper. Unfortunately, by the time both planters were ready, most of these plants—in fact, most plants of all sorts—were no longer available at local nurseries. We were able to find some coral bells and a few salvias, and we filled up the rest of the planters with filler plants—some English ivy and a couple of begonias—just to provide a bit of color. We figured we'd see which of those survived until spring and fill in around them.

For a while, it looked like the answer to that was going to be "none of them." By this week, it was apparent that the coral bells had survived, but we weren't confident anything else had. So we set out yesterday for the nursery planning to get at least four new plants for each planter—enough to replace all the ones we knew or suspected were dead. This time around, we had much better luck finding what we wanted. We got a couple of dwarf boxwood shrubs, some asters, and one bee balm. (This wasn't on my original list, but we knew it was deer-resistant—a key feature in our heavily deer-ridden landscape—and we already had another one of them in the back yard that Brian could dig up and transfer it to the other planter). We spent about $75 on that lot, and Brian planned to fill in the rest of the space with some salvias he'd been growing from seed.

But when we got the plants home, there turned out to be another wrinkle. On closer examination, it became apparent that the ivy plants at the ends of both planters were still alive, with a few tiny, yellowish leaves sprouting from each plant. In light of this development, we reworked our original layout. We put the boxwood shrubs at the other end of each planter, opposite the end with the ivy, and placed the aster and bee balm plants in between those two evergreens and the heucheras in the middle. Then Brian poked in four of the tiny salvia plants in a square around each central heuchera as filler. Assuming all these survive, they should give us a mixture of spring, summer, and fall blooms, plus some evergreens to provide winter interest.

While we were at the nursery, we also grabbed one extra plant: a small pot of "elfin" creeping thyme. We've made a couple of attempts in the past to use creeping thyme as a ground cover in our hard-to-mow front yard with mixed results. One of the plants didn't survive; the other is still pretty green and healthy, but it hasn't succeeded it keeping down the grass and weeds the way we hoped it would. But the elfin thyme looked extremely dense and thick, and I recalled having seen it described as an excellent choice for ground cover. So we picked up a little pot of it for $4 and planted it in a bare patch in the front yard. (This was the spot where our cherry tree used to be; removing it had left a hollow in the ground that we eventually decided was too hazardous and filled in with dirt, but the grass never covered it properly.) If this spreads out nicely to fill in the bare spot, perhaps we'll invest in some more and deploy them elsewhere around the yard—particularly the space in between the two stakes that are supporting our plum tree, which is even harder to mow than the rest of the yard. I've tried to establish some barren strawberry in there, but they didn't grow well enough to keep down the grass. Perhaps the thyme will do the trick.

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.

Tending to organic matters

Last spring, while planting seeds in the garden, I discovered that the soil in our raised beds had become quite hard and compacted. This was very frustrating and confusing, because the beds hadn't been walked on for 15 years and had received regular infusions of compost every spring. But after doing a bit of research, I found that the amount we'd been adding—maybe one bucketful per bed—was far less than the one to two inches gardening experts recommend. Since our little home compost bin couldn't produce nearly that amount, and since bagged compost is costly and requires testing to make sure it isn't tainted with herbicides, we decided our best bet was to pick up half a yard of leaf compost every year from the Belle Mead Co-Op. This stuff isn't as rich in nutrients as homemade compost or manure, but it's still useful for improving the soil texture.

Unfortunately, we never got a good opportunity to do this last fall. As this year's spring planting drew nearer, we kept a nervous eye on the calendar, looking for a weekend that was both free and tolerably warm for outdoor work. Yesterday, we finally got our opportunity. I had to make a trip out to Somerville that afternoon for my Citizens' Climate Lobby meeting, so we combined that trip with a jaunt to Hillsborough—not directly on the way, but not that far out of it—to visit the Co-Op. We brought along a carload of trash barrels and empty birdseed bags and loaded them all up as far as we could while still being able to lift them. (In some cases, in fact, we couldn't lift them and ended up having to remove some. We forgot that that leaf compost was much finer than the bulk mulch we usually buy at the Co-Op, and consequently the volumes we're used to weighed a good deal more.) While there, we also dropped $8 on a new set of asparagus crowns, as the plants we have are now over 15 years old and their productivity has dwindled to almost nothing.

After my meeting and a little hanging out in Somerville, we decided it was too late to bother unloading all the compost from the car. We waited until this morning to suit up in our grubby gardening clothes and start hauling those extremely heavy bags and barrels out to the back 40 (square yards). First, though, we had to go through all the beds and remove the detritus from last year's garden—another chore we hadn't gotten around to tackling in the fall. Brian used both tools and bare hands to dig out the roots of last year's bean and basil plants, while I went along the trellises breaking up and extricating the tangled remains of the squash and tomato vines.

Then Brian, who could manhandle the loaded barrels a lot more easily than I could, began dumping heaps of compost out into the beds. I raked each pile out into an even layer covering the whole bed, and we added extra scoops to fill in any thin areas. By the time we were done, we'd used up the contents of both large barrels and two full bags, and all the beds were filled with dark organic matter to the very brim. 

Since we still had lots of compost left, we used up another bag supplementing the soil in our new outdoor planters. These aren't looking too good after this bitterly cold winter; of all the starter plants we put into them at the end of the summer, the only ones that look like they might still be alive are the heucheras (coral bells) and English ivy, and I wouldn't give heavy odds on either of them. But those plants were more or less just place holders anyway, the odds and ends that we were able to pick up at the Co-Op's end-of-season plant sale. Soon enough, we'll have our pick of a fresh, new batch of nursery plants to choose from, and we should be able to find some that have a better chance of lasting out the year. And when we do, they'll have a nice, new layer of fluffy leaf compost to dig into.

By this time, we were pretty tired, but we found the strength to haul one more bag down into the side yard and spread it on the asparagus bed, preparing it to receive its new batch of crowns next weekend. We stowed about half the remaining bags in the shed and shoved the rest under the planters, where they'll be ready to hand for use on any plants in the front yard that need a little topping up. (In theory, there's nothing to stop an enterprising thief from grabbing one and walking away with it, but we think their sheer weight will be enough of a deterrent.) Then we put away our tools and dragged ourselves inside for a couple of well-deserved showers.

After putting in all this work, I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high about the results. I realize that just one load of organic matter probably won't be enough to make a noticeable difference in the quality of our garden soil, and it will take another few years at least before we see real results. But having the compost layer on top of the beds should make at least part of this year's planting earlier. We'll still have to dig down into the hard-packed soil for transplanting, but most seeds should be able to go directly into the soft, fluffy compost. It won't provide much nutrition for them, but their roots won't have to probe too far to get to the richer, denser soil below.

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.)

If at first you don't succeed, try something else

In the words of my favorite wizard, Harry Dresden, if you have one problem, all you have is a problem. But if you have two problems, you may also have an opportunity, because one problem can sometimes provide a solution to the other. A case in point: two failed crops in our garden.

I've already told you about how our attempt to grow potatoes in our old rain barrel was an abject failure, producing only a literal handful of potatoes. But that wasn't the only crop that gave us a very disappointing harvest this year. Of the 30 cloves of garlic we put in the ground last fall, only six grew into garlic heads—and pretty small ones at that, with only four to five good-sized cloves each. As with the potatoes, the total weight of the harvest was probably less than the amount we planted.

Frustrated by this failure, I checked out an article in Mother Earth News on garlic growing, looking for some pointers that might improve our results next year. And the one piece of advice that jumped out at me was, "Plant in crumbly, light soil that drains well and that is high in organic matter." Our rich, heavy clay soil does not, by any stretch of the imagination, fit that definition—which might explain why even in a good year, our garlic harvest comes to only around 25 small heads. 

However. we did happen to have some soil sitting around that fit the description perfectly: the mix of bagged topsoil and aged manure in which we'd attempted to grow the potatoes. Brian had originally intended to dump this out into the garden beds to add more organic matter to the soil, which has grown compacted over the years. But after reading the Mother Earth News article, we thought, well, why not try repurposing the potato barrel as a garlic barrel? Growing garlic in a container would also prevent groundhogs romping through the crop and crushing all the scapes, so it could remedy two problems at once.

The Mother Earth News article recommended planting garlic cloves 2 to 4 inches deep, 4 to 6 inches apart, in rows 12 inches apart. Trying to figure out how to adapt this spacing to a round barrel about two feet in diameter, I looked up "grow garlic in containers" and found an article in The Spruce that said putting them "at least 3 inches apart" would be sufficient. Working my way around the edge of the barrel and spiraling into the middle, I was able to fit in a total of 20 cloves. Since the soil was so light, I didn't bother digging holes for them; I just pushed them in with my fingers until they were about 2 inches deep.

The Mother Earth News article recommended mulching the garlic with "several inches of leaves or straw" to protect it from the winter cold. We don't have enough leaves in our yard yet to cover it that deep, but I added one layer, and I'll continue adding more as fall progresses. I left the lid off the barrel to let rain in; if we don't get much rain, I'll water by hand to "keep the soil moist but not soggy," as The Spruce recommends. In the spring, we'll pull the leaves off and give the barrel an extra top-dressing of compost. And in the fall, we'll see if this container-grown garlic yields a better crop than what we planted in the ground this year. One thing we know for sure: it can't be much worse.

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.

September discoveries

We're only a week into September, but we've already made several interesting discoveries this month—either by design, by happenstance, or by a combination of the two. Here, in order of occurrence, is a summary of our September adventures so far:

Discovery #1: A stealth melon

Most of the time, Brian and I make a point of uprooting any "volunteer" plants that pop up in or near our compost bin. We know from past experience that if we leave them be, they're liable to take over the side yard, making it difficult to navigate. Plus, they're usually the offspring of supermarket tomatoes that don't breed true, so any fruit we get off them won't be particularly tasty.

But this summer, we made an exception. A couple of what appeared to be squash vines sprouted directly out of the bin, which kept them mostly confined. Since they weren't really in the way, and since we would have had to open up the bin to remove them, we let them stay put. And this week, when Brian went to trim the weeds around the compost bin, he uncovered this underneath one of the vines.

As far as we can tell, this is the offspring of a Galia melon (a cantaloupe-honeydew hybrid) that we bought last April to put into a fruit salad for a May Day morning potluck breakfast with our Morris dance team. If that's correct, then we should be able to tell it's ripe when it turns from green to yellow-orange. The closer to orange it gets, the sweeter it's liable to be. Since the Galia melon is a hybrid, I'm not getting my hopes up too much that this fruit will be as sweet and juicy as its parent. But just in case, I've tucked a flowerpot underneath it to get it off the ground so it won't rot from excess moisture.

Discovery #2: A found puppy

After completing his planter project in July, Brian had a lot of little scraps of wood left over. Last Sunday, he came across them in the workshop and thought he really ought to get rid of them. But since they were pressure-treated, he didn't want to burn them the way he usually does with chunks of wood too small to be useful. So, rather than just toss them in the trash, he decided to play with them a little and see if he could make them into anything interesting. He also had a bunch of wood screws we'd saved after dismantling the old patio set we replaced in June, so he grabbed his drill and a screwdriver bit and started piecing them together. And when I came into the shop to ask him a question, I found him putting the finishing touches on this little guy. 

Brian and I both decided, independently, that the most appropriate name for this new addition to our family was Woody. I adorned him with an old collar we'd bought that turned out to be too big for either of our cats, and we set him outside underneath the planters that are sort of his parents. He's close enough to the street that passersby can spot him if they're paying attention, but close enough to the house that he won't be mistaken for trash being discarded. Since he's made out of pressure-treated wood, he should hold up as long as the planters do, provided no one decides to steal him.

Discovery #3: Tofu pepperoni

After his semi-successful attempt at creating a vegan pizza topping from Soy Curls, Brian decided to try the same thing with tofu. He cut half a pound of tofu into thin strips and soaked it in a mixture of canola oil, Dijon mustard, soy sauce, Liquid Smoke, paprika, garlic powder, and ground red pepper and fennel seeds. Then he baked it for about 20 minutes at 350F before adding it to the pie, which he'd already loaded with eggplant, bell peppers, and our vegan mozzarella.  

The resulting concoction looked more similar to pepperoni than his previous attempt, but the flavor and texture were wider of the mark. The tofu didn't soak up the spice mixture as well as the Soy Curls, so it tasted mostly like tofu with a dusting of spice. And despite the pre-baking, it never really browned. The texture remained soft and tofu-like, not meaty and chewy.

So, we probably won't be using this recipe again (which is why I didn't reproduce it in full). But that doesn't make this attempt a failure. It just means that, like Thomas Edison, we have succeeded in finding a method that doesn't work.

Discovery #4: An easier way to milk almonds

A second kitchen experiment was a bit more successful. A few years ago, in an attempt to cut down on packaging waste, we experimented with making our own almond milk. The first version we tried, made from almond butter, was easy but not that milk-like. And the second version, made from whole, blanched almonds, was so much hassle that we decided it wasn't worth the effort. 

But this week, I started reconsidering the issue while reading the comments on a YouTube video titled (rather prematurely, I thought) "The DOWNFALL of Plant-Based Milks." Several comments remarked on how much cheaper it is to make your own, and the thought suddenly popped into my head, "Why not try starting with almond flour?" Almond flour is basically ground blanched almonds, so using it would eliminate two of the steps involved in making it from scratch. 

A quick search revealed that I was not the first to come up with this idea. Most of the recipes I found online called for a ratio of 1 cup of almond flour to 4 cups of water. They generally included dates for sweetening as well, and sometimes vanilla, but I decided not to bother with any of that. I figured if I wanted it sweeter, I could always add sugar after the fact.

So, one morning this week, Brian obligingly loaded half a cup of almond flour and 2 cups of water into our blender and ran it on high for three minutes, the minimum time most recipes recommend. He tried straining it with a fine mesh strainer, but it just ran right through, so he poured it through an old nylon stocking and squeezed out as much liquid as possible. And the result was...okay. The flavor was very almond-forward, much more so than the stuff we'd made from whole almonds, and entirely devoid of sweetness. The texture was watery and, even after straining, faintly gritty—nothing at all like the creamy smoothness of the emulsifier-laden commercial product. And, nutrition-wise, it has nowhere near the protein content of my Lidl soymilk.

So, sadly, this homemade almond milk isn't the cheap, sustainable milk alternative that will finally get those cardboard cartons out of our lives once and for all. But it is less work than the whole-almond method, so we'll keep it in mind as an emergency backup. If we ever run out of soymilk and can't easily make it to the store, this stuff should see us through until our next visit.

Discovery #5: Decorative basil

Several of the new crop varieties we ordered this year from True Leaf Market, our new seed supplier, have been distinctly underwhelming. The biggest disappointment: a Thai basil variety we tried called Red Leaf Holy Basil. The plants were quite healthy, but the leaves were entirely flavorless. This is not an exaggeration. When Brian used the Thai basil in a dish, neither of us could detect it at all. Even when I tried putting a fresh leaf in my mouth and chewing it up, I got nothing. It was indistinguishable from chewing on a blade of plain grass.

So, when I noticed yesterday that the plants had gone to flower, I thought, well, they're not doing any good here in the garden; why not just cut them and put them in vases? Waste not, want not. And while they're useless as food, they work rather well as decoration, so at least we'll get some use out of them. (But certainly not enough to justify devoting any garden space to them next year.)