Zucchini mystery

Twice last week I went out to my garden in the morning to find that huge and healthy zucchini plants had toppled over during the night. There were no signs of forced entry through my garden fence anywhere at all. Thorough autopsies revealed no insect infestations and no sudden fungal attacks. What happened?

I went to bed one night with the squash looking like this:

. . . only to find this the next morning:

The first time this happened, I thought I might have unwittingly knocked it over myself the night before, because the toppled plant was on the outside end of its row, nearest the garden path. The second time this happened, two plants were down, one on each end of the row. And I knew that I had been nowhere near the zucchini plant nearest the fence the night before.

At this rate, I knew I had to take action if I wanted to have any zucchini to harvest before summer’s end. A search of the Internet revealed that I am hardly alone with this problem. And, after asking my more veteran gardener sister, it looks as if this runs in the family as well. Summer squash vines can get so heavy that they just snap from their own weight.

So what do you do to prevent further damage? The consensus is to put additional dirt over the vulnerable place on the stem where the others have broken off. One gardener said that if the break is not clean, a plant may be salvaged if the plant puts new roots down around the stem.

So I’m giving that a try. The broken vine nearest the path could not be salvaged because it was on this plant that I conducted my hasty post mortems But the broken zucchini plant near the fence had a fighting chance, so I did indeed cover the broken spot with more soil. I also strategically put a stake in the ground between a leaf stem and the vine to help stabilize the plant. This was several days ago. Today it looks as if my zucchini vine may recover:

A couple of the leaves look as if they may die, but the rest of the plant appears to be thriving. A zucchini has formed and more blossoms have opened since taking this approach.

This appears to be a problem only with summer squash and not winter squash. I spent the better part of an afternoon going from plant to plant, inspecting each stem for possible damage. I found initial cracks on two yellow squash. I covered these stems — well, all of the summer squash stems — with additional soil to encourage more root growth and to provide more support. Hopefully, this will prevent further losses in the future. And, in the place of the two that I lost, new seeds have been planted. No harm in staggering the harvest, I guess.

Zucchini is supposed to be one of the simplest vegetables to grow, and as a newbie, this was one I thought I had a pretty good chance of seeing success. Wish me luck.

A word about my fence

I have to brag a little bit about my fence. We live right where new commercial and residential development borders long-time rural homes. I live in an older farmhouse, next door to a 1960s ranch with a new home built in the 1990s right behind me. The wildlife here is mostly rabbits, squirrels and ground moles with robins, wrens, hawks and doves hovering above our heads. But raccoons, ground hogs, coyote and deer are close by as well, and I’ve even recently spotted an eagle.

With one 60 by 12 foot garden bed running along my garage and drive and another 12 by 15 foot bed sitting in the back corner of the lot, you can imagine the potential cost of fencing such a garden. This year, I decided to go with the cheapest possible option. I am using deer netting, held in place by purchased wooden stakes and wood chips I got cost-free when the utility company took down a tree across the street from me, put the limbs through a chipper and left behind a huge pile of mulch in its place.

I was able to purchase a 100-foot length of deer netting from my local Lowe’s store for just under $13. I found 4-foot stakes (1 by 1 inch thick) in packages of six for less than $4 at Menards. I bought four packages. The deer netting is seven feet tall, and I cut it in half so that I had two 100-foot lengths that were 42″ high, yielding enough fence for these two garden beds for less than $30.

I stapled the deer netting in place to the wood stakes (which are soft wood, probably pine), leaving an extra six inches on the ground, which I folded out and then covered this with a thick layer of wood chips to secure the bottom edge of the fence.

Wood chip mulch runs along the bottom edge of my deer-netting fence, securing the garden from critter and providing a border that is easy to mow along.

Rather than a gate, I have a couple of sections where the deer netting is only 24-inches high, which allows me to easily step over the fence. I threaded a length of yarn along the top of these sections, so that I could easily see what I have to clear, anticipating clumsy falls into my growing produce without this precaution.

This little red wagon transported twelve loads of wood chips from across the street to secure the bottom edge of my fence.

Having gone with this inexpensive fence, I realize that my garden remains vulnerable to large animals, but with a great deal of open greenery surrounding our property, I’m willing to bet that a rampaging herd of deer is unlikely to venture close to our house and garage, where my garden beds lie. Still, I have placed many of our now-unused cloches made from soda bottles on the sticks and bamboo stakes that are in my garden for various purposes. Others hang from nearby tree branches. My theory is that these bottles are functioning much like a scarecrow, creating motion and reflections that will fill wild creatures with caution and suspicion.

I'm hoping the soda bottles in my garden will make thieving critters think twice before encroaching on my territory.

So far, so good. We’ll see if this fence continues to keep my vegetables secure through the growing season.

Homemade bamboo tomato cages (Cost: $0)

I’ve shared before the unexpected garden treasure I received from my elderly neighbor next door, whose husband planted bamboo some years before his passing, hoping to furnish the growth to our local zoo’s red pandas. The zoo turned him down, evidently having certified food sources for these valued animals, but the bamboo next door grows on.

I accepted the bamboo, planning to use it to support my pole beans. (And I do have several bean teepees in place, increasingly covered with growing bean vines.) What to do with the rest didn’t come to me immediately, until my compulsively overplanted tomatoes took off and passed my knees in height. In my ever-stringent effort to keep garden expenses to a minimum, it occurred to me that I could put my excess bamboo to use in the form of tomato cages.

I'm using my excess bamboo to make tomato cages.

There’s nothing special about their design. I don’t have a lot of extra time, so I wanted to keep their construction as simple as possible. First, I use a wood stake to make four post holes, into which I drop four sturdy pieces of bamboo, cut to 40 inches in length.

The holes are about eight inches deep and help keep the bamboo tomato cages in place and upright.

I used plain old yarn that I had in my closet to tie four smaller pieces of bamboo to join them surrounding the tomato plant, and I do this on two levels, although I could add a third if the tomato plants outgrow these.

Yarn wrapped around the bamboo and tied with square knots is all that holds these cages together.

I had enough bamboo to make cages to support 30 tomato plants. That’s about half of what I have planted. I haven’t yet decided what to use to support the rest, but I have to think of something soon. (I’ll let you know how that goes. My sister says she has a few wire cages left over from past seasons that she can lend me.) Whatever I come up with, I don’t think I can match the rustic charm of the cages I have in place so far.

I have 30 bamboo tomato cages in place along the south side of my little farm house.

The thing about using natural materials is that the pieces are not always uniformly straight, but I don’t mind. It all adds to their beauty. I’m not sure how bamboo weathers, but I’m hoping that these cages will last for several seasons.

My tomatoes share their bed with 18 pumpkin vines growing from six hills, along with random plantings of herbs, nasturtiums, marigolds and sunflowers. I can’t wait to see what this garden bed will look like in a few weeks.

Squash blossoms

Two days ago I was greeted in the morning with this lovely yellow squash blossom, the first on any of my squash plants:

Today, that blossom has transformed into this lovely little squash:

My first yellow squash

I am amazed at how speedy this miracle has transpired. And with that little fruit, several more blossoms have arrived, this one on a zucchini plant:

Zucchini blossom

And this one on a patty pan squash vine:

Patty pan squash blossom

My spaghetti squash, planted two weeks later, is vining out:

And a few weeks ago I added three more varieties of winter squash: a bush acorn variety (Table King), delicata and a pumpkin-like Golden Health (all three from Ferry-Morse Seed Co.)

I expect we will soon be swimming in squash. Here’s a peak of that section of my garden:

Shelled peas: my first taste ever.

Today I harvested my first handful of shelled peas. Because of murderous cutworms and possibly rampaging rabbits (see this, this and this for the full story), my pea crop this spring is on the pathetic side. But, having heard seasoned gardeners sing the praises of fresh peas, I’m very grateful for what I have.

So this is what I was able to pick today:

My first handful of shelling peas.

Okay. So that looks pretty good, right? Well, after I took away this:

I was left with this:

Pretty sad, to say the least, don’t you think? So did I share these peas with my kids? Not a chance. I did the work, after all, and if this garden kills me before the season’s end (and it may), at least I’ll go to my grave having tasted actual fresh shelled peas.

So what’s the verdict? All those gardeners were right. Sweet and delicious. Frozen peas are a distant cousin, and canned peas — well, not even close.

The end result of my new pea experience is the motivation to go for a fall harvest. I’m planning to plant in early August in my back corner plot, where the lettuce and spinach are now:

My greens garden, last week.

This will give me an area of 10 by 12 feet, enough for several rows. We should have better luck this fall. By August, the cutworms will be gone. And my fence is in place and ready to ward off all attacks. By late September, more peas!

And all you pests out there: you may try me, but you’ll never take me down!

Just a little more to go . . .

Is it ever done?

For the past month I’ve been digging dirt. And planting seeds. And putting in the seedlings that I started myself on my sun porch. And this week, having found a little more space, I added a few commercially started seedlings as well.

And so today, an unexpectedly rainy day, I’m forced to pause and evaluate what I’ve accomplished in my garden so far and what is left for me to do.

For a garden newbie, I’ve taken on a lot this year in my enthusiasm to try growing just about anything and everything my family likes. Pair that with my compulsion to put every seed to use and what do you get? A very large garden, and a few sore muscles to boot.

To be exact, my garden is actually three garden plots. The first is the one where I have my spinach and lettuce and 18 Roma tomato plants that I started in March from seed, with some cilantro mixed in and a row of onions.

My corner garden plot.

This plot gets full sun in the morning up until about 11 a.m., when shade from nearby maple trees shade it somewhat, making the light more filtered, but still relatively bright. At about 3 p.m. the southern third of the plot gets full sun once again for about four more hours. This is where I have the tomato plants. It is not my main tomato plot, but I put in the extra plants here, the ones that didn’t fit in the plot next to the house with the rest of the tomatoes. That plot gets full sun all day long, but I have to say that these tomatoes in the corner plot are doing very well too. They were smaller seedlings when I planted them about two weeks ago, but they’ve almost caught up with their brothers in the full sun. It turns out that they benefit from a daily watering early each morning just before dawn, courtesy of my next door neighbor’s automatic sprinkler. (I hope this is a good thing. So far, it has been.)

I continue to grow my lettuce inside their soda bottle-cloches. I’ve been harvesting lettuce from this plot almost daily for three weeks now, cutting the outer leaves and leaving the smallest one or two for further growth. (I probably should have started at least a week earlier.) The plants are starting to get too tall for the soda bottles, and a couple of days ago, as I’ve been removing the bottles to cut lettuce for our salad bowl, I started moving the two-liter bottles over to the new row of lettuce that I planted two weeks ago. The bottles have been great for leaving my lettuce leaves free of aphid, slugs, spider mites and the dreaded cut worms, and I’m holding my breath on how the older plants will do without them.

The baby spinach, on the north end of the plot, did not do well inside the cloches and this crop has been a bit of a disappointment. The extra warmth provided inside the plastic caused the plants to grow spindly, and the leaves wilted and burned if they touched the plastic. I removed the cloches once I realized this, and my girls and I have had a couple of salads and a breakfast spinach frittata from this crop, but now I see that red spider mites have damaged the lower leaves on most of the plants. I’ve tried washing them off, as I’ve seen recommended on several organic gardening sites. But I haven’t been entirely successful. We’re finishing off this crop and replanting new spinach in the place of the old as we do. This time I’m taking out the pine mulch and planting the spinach in rows closer together — with the individual plants about five inches apart on all sides.

Here’s my tomato and pumpkin plot next to our house:

My tomato plants and pumpkin hills share this garden plot with flowers and herbs.

Here I have 38 Roma tomato plants, six hills of pumpkins planted with 30 pumpkin seeds (19 have sprouted at last count), four sweet bell pepper plants and loads of herbs and flowers. I started the nasturtium inside by seed, both climbing and bush plants, and they seem to be thriving. My marigolds, on the other hand, also started inside in flats, are not. Of the 50 I planted, I have three left, and they are tiny little things — although they’ve grown considerably once I got them in the garden and out of my sun porch. You can see I also have lovely roses and the lamb’s ear is flowering right now as well. I’ve planted a variety of sunflowers directly next to the house, and there are four o’clocks (a childhood favorite of mine) starting to sprout there as well.

You can see that I have a few soda bottles over the smaller tomato plants in the foreground. That’s to protect them from my grandchildren, who are particularly drawn to this plot and sometimes walk about inside it, which is a bit of an inconvenience, as I’ve forgotten to put in garden paths here and there. Actually, I’m removing those bottles as soon as the rain clears, because the plants inside are starting to outgrow them, and their leaves don’t like touching the plastic either.

I have to show you how I’ve planted some herbs directly into this garden. It looks a little compulsive but, like I said, it helps signal my grandchildren (and me, because sometimes I forget) that something is planted there. I cut the inside cardboard from toilet paper rolls into halves, label the top edge with the name of the herb I’m planting there, put the cardboard into the ground, fill with starting mixture (because I’m planting delicate herb seeds) and then plant the seeds inside the cardboard.

You can see the basil sprouting inside the cardboard.

I have found this method very handy, as there is no way my little herbs would survive otherwise. I don’t always take the time to look at the seating chart before venturing into my garden.

You might be wondering, why so many tomatoes and why Romas? Apart from my inability to stop planting once I’m on a roll, you can also attribute this to our family’s need for mega abundance in tomato sauce throughout the year. None of us cares that much for fresh tomatoes (although I have one plant each of cherry, grape and Big Boy for my grandchildren and one son). Since I was planting from seed, I wanted to make sure enough survived to give us a decent harvest. So far, so good.

Then there is my large garden plot, which is next to the drive and the garage:

My long and narrow garden plot follows the drive and extends back along the drive into the back yard.

This plot is 60 feet long. For the first 15 feet or so on the western side, it is about 12 feet wide, but closer to the garage it narrows to 10 feet in width. Here we have patches of what’s left of the peas. As I put in this garden, I started on the western side (in the background of the photo) and day-by-day worked my way east. I had to pause for a week or so to wait for my nest of rabbits to grow up and leave, but yesterday I planted over the spot where I uncovered the rabbits a couple of weeks ago. I still have about eight feet on the eastern end left to plant, but all-in-all, I’m nearly done now.

In this plot I have several rows of filet beans (bush style), one row of which is now more than a foot tall with blossoms. These beans I planted in a small flat back in April, hoping that I might be able to have an early crop. It looks like that effort may be paying off soon. I also have 30 pole bean plants — you can see the bamboo teepees that they will soon be climbing as they grow. I also have two hills of cucumbers sprouting as well nearby.

And what else? For squash: three rows of zucchini and three rows of yellow, two rows of spaghetti, and four hills of patty pan squash. For brassica: two rows of broccoli (which I started inside from seed), two rows of brussels sprouts, one row of cabbage, and one row of cauliflower (these last I bought commercially started). And, of course, there are radishes planted in between everything.

On the far eastern section of the garden, there is no direct sun until after 2 p.m. in the afternoon. There I have put in (going west to east) carrots, onion, and my lettuce mix. (I also have earlier-planted carrots in between my two rows of broccoli.) I have another eight feet left to prepare at the very end of this plot. I had hope to do that today, but today’s rain has postponed that until tomorrow. I’ve decided simply to put in more lettuce varieties, and I have purchased two salad blends for this: French Mesclun and Italian (Plantation Products, Inc.) You can’t tell I’m really enjoying these daily pickings of fresh lettuce, can you?

After that? Well, there are the two small flats of muskmelon that are growing heartily still on my sunporch. It’s been such a cool spring this year that I’m a little nervous about getting them out into the garden. But that’s going to have to happen this weekend. I’m going to put them on the western edge of the garden, outside the fenced area, so that their vines can grown out onto the wider portion of the drive there. If we are successful with the muskmelon this year, we might also try watermelon next year.

We have peas!

Despite the devastation my pea crop experienced in late April (details here), the day has arrived. I finally have peas. There aren’t many, but at present the snow peas are plentiful enough that I can use them in my salads or in a stir fry or two.

My garden's spring harvest now includes peas and radishes.

At this point, less than one fourth of the peas that I originally planted remain. There were four different varieties — a snow pea variety (Dwarf Gray Sugar, W. Atlee Burpee & Co.), an edible-pod sugar pea variety (Mammoth Melting Sugar, W. Atlee Burpee Co.), and two varieties of shellings peas (Dark Seeded Early Perfection & Burpeeana Early, also both W. Atlee Burpee & Co.). After losing about 300 pea plants, I moved what remained closer together and, as a result, the varieties ended up all mixed together. In other words, I no longer knew which plant would bear which type of pea. What to do about this? Hurray for the Internet once again.

By doing a search on all four varieties, I was able to gather enough information to help me identify which was which. For example, the Mammoth Melting peas grow on vines reaching four to five feet. These are easily the tallest of the peas, as the height of the other pea vines ranges from 24 to 30 inches. I have about a dozen Mammoth melting vines growing vigorously, some on a trellis I made with stakes and wire fencing that I had on hand. The others grow on trellises of tree branches and twine.

Mammoth Melting sugar peas in my garden

The Dwarf Gray sugar peas are very easy to spot. While the other varieties have white blossoms, these peas have blossoms violet-red in color, with reddish tinted stems. These peas also seem to be growing vigorously, but it appears that just 15 or so plants survived the April assault.

Dwarf Gray sugar peas in my garden

The rest are the shelling peas. I am having more difficulty telling these two apart. One appears to have a darker foliage. The Dark Seeded Early Perfection is described as having larger pods and somewhat longer vines. Perhaps I’ll be able to distinguish them as the pods fill out more. At present, while I have more than 50 of these plants, many are not thriving. Many were munched upon earlier this spring, but because of peas’ incredible will to live, the plants grew side shoots. Some have done well, but some have not. Only time will tell what kind of harvest they will bear.

A word about the trellises that I am using. I mentioned the fence-and-stake trellis. This was made using wire fencing that had been left in my garage when I moved here. I found working with it a bit difficult, due to the arthritis I have in my hands, so I used old tree branches and twine to construct trellises for the rest of my crop. I didn’t want to put a lot of money into my trellises, as I wasn’t at all certain I was going to keep these plants alive long enough to see a harvest. They aren’t especially pretty, but they are doing the job. And, in their own way, they have a rustic charm that probably would be more attractive if I had more vines covering them.

I still don’t have enough shelling peas to put together a meal, but I’ve heard a great deal from other gardeners about what a treat these will be.

In the meantime, we’ve been pulling up some of those radishes planted between the beans and squash. MMmmm. Now my salads have some color and some spice. My son Jacob, who stopped by yesterday afternoon right after I pulled the first red globes out of the soil, declared them the juiciest radishes he’s ever tasted. In fact, he ate all of them, and I had to go out for more later in the day. It’s good to know they are a hit, because they are bountiful here and I’m going to need help consuming all of them.

A child’s-eye view of my garden

My granddaughter Jadyn loves to help water my garden.

One of the best things about a garden is that it can involve the entire family, particularly children. Ever since I began digging in the dirt this has not been an entirely solo project. My sons turned over the dirt for me when their father found a rototiller that we could borrow one weekend. Never underestimate the power of a motor-driven gadget to pull in the interest of men. I would still be digging up our two garden plots — one 12 by 15 feet and the other 10 by 60 feet — had it not been for their contribution.

Now that green is sprouting up everywhere, I have the attention of my grandchildren, Jadyn (who will be nine this summer) and Jaxon (who just turned two). That’s good, because I have planned quite a few things with them particularly in mind. Why else would I have planted six hills of pumpkins — 30 seeds — if there weren’t children to share in the harvest?

Today I am working on the two teepees of pole beans that I hope to have functional for the children before the month is out. Each teepee has 15 beans around three poles that meet about six feet up. The beans have all sprouted now, and my generous next door neighbor (who also furnished much of my pine needle mulch) has given me an unusual treasure.

You can still see the work of Rita’s husband, who passed away a few years ago, in place behind her back yard. This garden must have been a marvel, although all that remains now is the crops that return every year — strawberries, raspberries and rhubarb. Among these crops, on each end of the garden, are very large stands of bamboo.

Now, I didn’t even know you could grow bamboo in northern Indiana. Evidently, Rita’s husband had the idea of planting bamboo to help feed the red pandas that our community zoo had acquired a decade ago. Unfortunately, it turns out that the zoo is pretty selective about what it feeds its animals and must get its bamboo from approved growers, so the bamboo never actually made it to the pandas. Instead, I am reaping the benefits, as there are plenty of towering bamboo poles left from last year’s growth that Rita’s daughter and grandchildren would have burned had I not asked for them. And several of these poles will form the support poles for my own grandchildren’s pole bean teepees. And there will be plenty left to construct tomato cages as well.

But garden architecture is the last thing on my grandchildren’s mind just now. A couple of weeks ago, during that crunch week in which I was hurriedly sowing seeds in the large plot next to my garage, I uncovered a rabbit’s nest under a pile of pine needle mulch. Only I didn’t know it was a rabbit’s nest at first, and the image of what seemed like dozens of palm-sized brown rodent bodies streaming from the ground will haunt my nightmares for a very long time.

Although the bunnies seemed perfectly able to get around quickly on their own, there remained a touch of that white blaze on their foreheads that marks the immature bunny. I rounded up as many of them that I could — five, which was probably less than half of them — and successfully returned them to their nest. They have since flown the coop (so to speak), but wouldn’t you know it, one has taken up residency in my garage. This is an older, farm-style garage with a large number of possible entrances and exits that I’ll never be able to block off without bringing in a professional contractor. So, for the time being, we have a juvenile rabbit living next to my garden. My challenge now is to keep him happy outside the garden and safe from the three golden retrievers who live here too.

Our resident bunny, hiding in the clutter in the garage

Lettuce tickle your taste buds

Lettuce from my garden

We’ve been enjoying lettuce from our garden for two weeks now, and my girls and I have each consumed large salads at least every other day since then.

When I made the decision to plant lettuce earlier this spring, I did so largely because of the shadiness of the plot we had prepared. Situated in the back southeast corner of our lot, this garden plot measures about 12 by 15 feet and has three large trees nearby, one on the south, one on the west and one on the north. This also means that the ground has roots beneath the surface that hinders good soil preparation more than six inches down. The plot gets full sun from sunrise through about 11 a.m. and then filtered sun for most of the day after that. The south end of the plot gets full sun again in the late afternoon and evening, so I set aside a third of that end to see if I could grow tomatoes there successfully. The north third I planted with baby spinach. In the middle, I planted the flat of lettuce seedlings that I started inside in mid-March, as well as two other flats that were started later.

The lettuce (Summerlong Gourmet Mix, W.Atlee Burpee & Co.) is composed of six different tender green or red lettuces: Four Seasons, Lollo Rossa, Buttercrunch, Craquerelle du Midi, Black Seeded Simpson and Salad Bowl. Their flavors are on the mild side, which is most popular in my household. Once I complete this 1 gram package (which is likely to take all summer), I am going to have to buy individual packages so that I will know which is which. There is one that is so tender it practically disintegrates in my fingers when I handle it. But that one is the one with the most appealing flavor, so I don’t intend to avoid it, but simply find strategies for handling it.

I put the seedlings outside into the garden in mid-April and covered them with cloches made from soda bottles. Recently, I planted another row directly into the garden plot. I’d like to know if there is an advantage sowing the seeds into the flats.

The cloches are wonderful at keeping out insects and protecting the lettuce from rabbits, as I have not yet fenced off this plot (although that is on my to do list for the coming week). They aren’t fail proof — yesterday I found my first slug — but it’s very nice to harvest lettuce with lovely, flawless leaves. One small downside is that dirt & debris often falls from the cloches as I remove them onto the lettuce leaves, but that easily rinses away in the cleaning process. Another aspect of the cloches that has been a benefit is that I believe the plants stay warmer and thus grow faster inside the plastic. However, as the season heats up, that could turn into a detriment and the cloches may have to go to prevent frying my greens.

The first time I harvested my lettuce greens, I was dismayed to find that when I rinsed them in mass in a colander the way I clean my store-bought lettuce, their leaf structure is far too tender for the weight of the water, and they all went limp.
Thank goodness for the Internet and the gardening friends I have made on Twitter. My friend Dan (@cityslipper) at Your Home Kitchen Garden clued me in to his technique of allowing the lettuce to float in water and then rinsing the individual leaves one-by-one. This man knows what he’s talking about. Doing this solved my problem. Now I have a dedicated pail that I fill with water and put the cut leaves into it as I harvest them. I then rinse the lettuce leaves individually on an outside table with a weak stream from the garden hose before spinning them dry. This method is very efficient, and I can quickly harvest and clean a salad large enough for the three of us in a matter of ten minutes, if I don’t dawdle.

So far I’ve been able to cut the outer leaves of the lettuce plants and leave the inner one or two small leaves on the stalk. By doing this, the plant continues to grow and provide additional harvests. I haven’t yet exhausted any of the plants, so I can’t tell at this point how long I’ll be able to do that. But I plan to put in additional new rows of lettuce each week to make certain that my family and I will continue to enjoy these amazing greens all summer long.

Crunch time in my garden

The irony of writing a blog about gardening is that when there is the most activity going on in the actual garden, the blog suffers from lack of attention. The past three weeks have been hectic and back-breaking, as I made the push to get as much of my garden planted as early as possible once the last frost day (May 15) had passed.

I started a few days before the actual last frost date, on May 12, as there was no forecast of frost for the days ahead. First, I planted the eight 2-inch tall filet bean bush-style plants (Haricot Verts, Plantation Products) that I had started the month before in a flat on my sun porch. The flat was a little experiment to see if I could get an earlier harvest for a row of beans, which are a family favorite. I was not able to get any other beans planted until May 23, so I have to conclude that the experiment seems to have paid off. I now have one row of foot-tall bean plants while the others are only today sprouting out of the soil and into the world.

After putting in that first row of filet beans, I next planted two rows of broccoli plants (Barbados Hybrid, Ferry-Morse Seed Co.) that I had started in flats about the same time as the beans. Later in the week I had to be away for four days. In my absence, marked by an unusual late frost the first night (May 18th) followed by four days of hot sunshine and no rain, all but one of those infant broccoli plants shriveled up and died. Did the frost kill them? Or was it the lack of rain? Maybe cutworms were the culprits. Who knows? But thankfully, I had another flat of broccoli that I had planned to put in upon my return on the 22nd, and those filled the gaps left behind by their dead siblings. (One thing that I have learned up front about gardening is that it pays to have lots of back-up plants ready and waiting should something else prove to fail.)

Also planted that first week were four hills of patty pan squash, three rows of zucchini (Burpee’s Fordhook Zucchini, W. Atlee Burpee & Co.), three rows of yellow squash (Early Prolific Straightneck, W. Atlee Burpee & Co.), and two rows of carrots (Petite ‘n Sweet, W. Atlee Burpee & Co.). It doesn’t sound like much for six days of planting, but keep in mind that we rototilled the garden plot way back in March, and in the time since weeds have taken over the tilled soil. Additionally, given my experience with the peas, I was on a careful lookout for cutworms as I turned over the soil once again to ready it for planting. You might be interested to know that I averaged about one cutworm per spade full of soil. (I threw the round larvae out onto the driveway for the birds to eat. I made an abundance of feathered friends during the course of the week, to be sure.)

Additionally, I have radishes everywhere. I planted an entire package, putting in a few seeds into every row between the various squashes. One thing I remember watching my grandmother garden when I was a child is that she always alternated ever seed with a radish seed. The radishes sprout first — here in three or four days — and are ready to eat after three to four weeks. (Which is right now, in case you are curious.) So, while I am waiting for the rest of the seeds to sprout and then grow, I can pull out the ready-to-harvest radishes to make room for them. This summer, I will eat many radishes in memory of my Grandma Benson.

Old and regrettably damaged photo of Grandma Benson holding baby me

Here I have to point out another fact that I have learned this year as a novice gardener. Digging in the garden is a real pain in the butt. Literally. With exercise like this, who needs a gym? I may not have the perfect figure, but this summer I have glutes to die for. Women half my age should be so lucky.

When I resumed planting in my garden on May 23rd, returning after a five-day absence, I planted four hills of cucumbers (two of Early Pride Hybrid and two of Lemon, both from W. Atlee Burpee & Co.) 30 pole bean seeds (Kentucky Wonder, W. Atlee & Co.), and another 15 filet beans. Then, in a new plot along the sunny side of our house, I turned over the sod and put in sunflowers and four o’clocks (all now sprouting) against the house and in front of these 39 Roma tomatoes plants that I started from seed and grew on my sun porch. In front of the tomatoes are six hills of pumpkins just sprouting today (Jack-O’-Lantern, W. Atlee Burpee & Co.). For those who care to know, that’s 30 pumpkin seeds, a full 4-gram package.

And, if that isn’t enough, I put another 18 tomatoes in the back garden plot with the lettuce and baby spinach. Additionally, I have planted the excess 50-plus tomato plants (the back-ups) in every container I could find, and what I don’t use I’ll soon give away to family, friends and just about anyone else who will take them. And, yes, all of these are Roma tomatoes, every single one of them. We aren’t big for fresh tomatoes in this family, but we do like tomato sauce, and hopefully I’ll be putting away plenty of tomato sauce for the winter. Okay, admittedly I went a little overboard on the tomatoes, but like I said earlier, the one gardening rule I have learned to count on is to have plenty of back-ups.

I still have a 10 by 15 foot plot left to turn over on the far east side of my large garden plot. This section of my garden only gets direct sun after about 1:30 p.m., so I haven’t entirely decided what I should plant here. I have a 12-foot row of peas doing very nicely along one end, so this may be where I put in my fall crop of peas. I have plenty of baby spinach and lettuce seeds left also, and given that the soil in this section is a little rooty due to large trees a little bit away on the east and south, this site might be best dedicated to more greens. I’ll gladly take suggestions from anyone who can offer some.