Gardening: Next Year

The Farm is frantically producing food. Beans, peppers, scallions, lettuce, cucumbers, strawberries, that weird white acorn squash, those giant zucchini clubs, corn, eggplants, those odd round things that might be squash and might be cucumbers that I definitely never planted. Am I focusing on cooking and eating and perhaps giving away all this stuff, and perhaps dancing among the cornstalks? No, of course not. I'm planning next year's garden. The planning part is so much fun that I'm starting now, instead of waiting for winter and the seed catalogs.

Next year, I'll grow more Armenian cucumbers -- no bitter, almost no skin. And I'll plant my Copra onions when they're supposed to be planted, because I'll have a nice raised row all ready for them, waiting for a break in the rain. And I'll plant potatoes, because... well, because they're potatoes. But I'll find some weird ones.

And I'll plant the corn in several staggered blocks -- a little afterthought block shot past corn that was planted weeks earlier, and that leads me to believe that I shouldn't put all my eggs in one planting. And we'll get some vertical structures in this winter, so we can pick peas and beans and cucumbers and maybe squash while standing upright.

And I'll dig a lettuce bed in that almost-full-shade corner, to see if I can keep slow-growing but non-bolting salad greens growing all summer. And I'll plant seeds of sweet Italian frying peppers, because I learned this year that I'm not sure what to do with bell peppers. I don't know what to do with the Italian peppers either, but I can't resist any vegetable that includes the word "frying".

What looked like modest little blocks of beans produced more than enough to eat and to give away; now that I know how little space a decent planting takes up, I'll try more varieties. Wax beans, purple beans, Roma beans, Dragon Tongue beans, those Kentucky Wonders that I never got around to planting this year. Assuming that we get those bean supports up. And I'll plant tepary beans when they're supposed to be planted, during the rains, to see if they really can grow to maturity without extra water.

I'll plant parch corn again, because odds are it's not going to mature this year. I might plant flour corn. Oh, and there will be more sunflowers. Far, far more sunflowers.

Yay!

Image: By Thyme. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Perfume vs The Farm

A babble about The Farm on The Other Blog.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Vignette: Description

So, a discussion of descriptions came up on WritingForums, and I started to write a short description on the premise that it's better for the viewpoint character to have a reason to start spouting off about what their acquaintances look like. The example got longer and longer until it broke 200 words. So, vignette.

My growling stomach betrayed me into ordering the toasted ravioli, and then the second piece of ravioli betrayed me by shattering in my hand. I had just finished cleaning greasy crumbs and cheese off my (white) shirt and was dabbing at the smudge of tomato sauce on my (beige) pants, when I saw Jane.

Have I told you about Jane? She looks like Barbie - an aging Barbie, but all the critical pieces are still there. Perfect blond hair, flawless cheekbones, implausibly blue eyes. Yes, the bombshell figure was thickening, but it was still fine enough to make me push the rest of the ravioli away. And her white shirt was, of course, still white - what you could see of it under her suit. Not merely an expensive suit, no, but a fine vintage Chanel that spoke of taste and intelligence. Feh.

Jane is lovely. Jane is kind. Jane donates to charity and does rescue work with abused beagles. Jane has a sense of humor and a brain that belies her Barbie exterior. I hate Jane, hate her with a guilty and unreasoning passion that I have tried, for ten years, to overcome. So I put on my best smile and waved to her.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Gardening: Slow learner improves

I'm not good at changing my behavior based on written instructions. Cookbooks tell me to bring eggs to room temperature; I bake with cold eggs. The Square Foot Gardening book told me how to persuade carrot seed to sprout; I read it, ignored it, and failed for several years before "developing" a successful method... that was the same as the Square Foot Gardening method. But I didn't get any carrots, because I'm still ignoring the advice to sift the soil and add sand.

But my learning cycle is getting shorter, because the other day I did the right thing in the new garden, after ignoring good advice for only a month and a half.

The tomatoes, the cucurbits, the peppers, and the corn all wanted feeding. The corn was fighting with hundreds of half-grown weeds. Strawberries wanted picking. Lettuce wanted watering. Blueberries wanted acidifying. The last batch of bush bean seeds was waiting to be planted before the season gets too late, and enation-resistant peas were waiting to be planted so I'll have something legumey to eat after the beans are over. Columbine and Japanese anemones were waiting to be planted in the shady ornamental corner. And the cucumbers were luxuriating above nice clean soil with just a few barely-visible weed seedlings nervously poking their heads above ground. Of the above situations, which did I address first?

I got out the scuffle hoe and hoed the cucumbers.

This slaughtered a teaspoonful of weeds. Then I hoed all of the other "clean" parts of the garden. That took ten minutes, a number that tells you both (1) how easy it is to scuffle a few bitty weeds out of already-weeded ground and (2) how little of the garden is at the nearly-weed-free point of being scuffleable. When it's all at that point, I expect that scuffling the whole thing will take an hour or two a week.

Then I went on to hand-weed a hundred square feet of weed-infested corn, on my hands and knees, until I wore out after about an hour and a half. Another four hundred or so square feet await. Of corn. That doesn't count the tomatoes and the peppers and the melons and the parts of the garden that are merrily growing weeds and nothing but weeds, as we work on getting around to planting them. Did I mention that this is the biggest vegetable garden, by far, that we've ever had?

Hoeing first, I have realized, is the key to getting on top of the garden. (I say "I have realized" even though more than one garden book has already told me this.) No matter what else is screaming for my attention, my first step should be to scuffle up the tiny weeds in any "weeded" ground that hasn't been hoed in the past, oh, three to seven days. Because if I don't do that, I will be on my hands and knees weeding that patch a week and a half later. While other weeded patches are growing a new crop of weeds. Which I will be hand-weeding another week and a half later. And round and round and round. If I want to someday stand and survey a whole garden where almost all of the green is cultivated plants and not weeds, I have to put top priority on scuffling.

I realize, of course, that this ignores other dandy weed-suppression strategies like mulch, newspaper, toxic potions, and flamethrowers. But we're avoiding the potions, Bermuda grass laughs at the mulches tried so far, and only the large-plant crops like tomatoes seem entirely appropriate for the "punch through newspaper" strategy. So for now, the scuffle hoe is my weapon of choice.

Image: By H. Wright Corp./National Film Board of Canada. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: The Farm. Y'know, sort of.

Bwahaha.

We've got the new vegetable garden. OK, really, we've had it for three weeks now. Possibly four. I forget. I am a blogging slacker, or perhaps I've been too mud-covered and sore-muscled to type. I remain excited.

We hired a Garden Projects Guy to deal with the space, and in addition to adding sprinklers he prepped it by repeatedly tilling it and raking out Bermuda grass roots. And please don't tell me that using an oversized blender on persistent roots is not the very best idea and you can't get all the roots out without spending a year hand-sifting and that we'll be arguing with Bermuda grass until the end of time. Because we know. We knew before he tilled. We did it anyway. Watching the window for corn closing in front of your very eyes will do that to you. It's tilled and squashy and plantable, and so far I'm more or less keeping on top of the weeds in the planted areas, so I'm going to maintain my delusion of control until the grass lassos me and knocks some sense into me.

The very largest vegetable garden in my past was three hundred square feet. This one is roughly eight hundred linear feet of four-foot-wide row, or ten times that.

Bwahaha.

We're calling it The Farm, since the name The Garden is taken by the garden around the house. I do realize that some people work vegetable gardens of an acre or six, without giving them grand names. I choose not to care; it is The Farm.

And so far we've planted bush beans and tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers and melons and squash and lettuce and basil and strawberries and blueberries and artichokes and cardoons and corn and tepary beans and parch corn and chives and onions and herbs and beets and radishes. And the leek seedlings are growing along, and I'll be starting the seedlings for autumn-crop broccoli and cabbage and brussels sprouts and cauliflower soon. Oh, and planting peas.

I'm ignoring other realities, in addition to the Bermuda grass. I'm ignoring the moderate to high likelihood that several things, like the parch corn and the winter squash and the melons and the tepary beans and quite possibly the cucumbers, may not mature in time for us to eat them. I'm ignoring the fact that the onions went in about eight weeks late and will therefore be scallions, not bulbs. Don't care, nope nope nope.

I ate a blueberry today. I have banana peppers ready to eat and lettuce a week away from eating and lots of hard green tomatoes busily progressing and itty bitty barely-there green beans, and only two plants so far have been yanked into the Gopher Twilight Zone. So there.

Bwahaha.

Image: By Vitchybini. Wikimedia Commons.

Vignette: Uprising

"Interview."

"Yep."

"I'm supposed to interview you?"

"Yep."

"Why?"

"Well, apparently she was reading something on some writing forum, about interviewing characters, and they said that the characters could interview each other instead, so you'd get information about two personalities for the price of one."

"Characters?"

"Yep."

"Meaning us."

"Yep."

"She's kind of blowing right through that fourth wall thing, isn't she?"

"Well, yes. So maybe you should ask me about my hob--"

"No no no. No hobbies. No favorite colors. No childhood traumatic memories. Forget that. While that wall is open, I've got some questions for her."

"Um..."

"Like what's with this fieldstone-into-bricks transformation? I though this was modern realism, and now we've got magic, or we're having a long dream, or something. That's not what I signed up for."

"Well, it was just that one--"

"No, it wasn't just that one. There was the bit with the candy shop coming to life. The candy part coming to life, I mean. You weren't there, it was just me and some kid. I'll never be able to look at a jelly baby again."

"I'm thinking that was a dream--"

"And I'm getting a major unrequited love vibe here. Any minute now there'll be scenes with me following you around like a loyal sheepdog while you're dating every marketing executive in--what city do we live in anyway?"

"I think it might be Chicago."

"Great. Snow. That's all I need. You see my point? I want some answers here."

"Yeah. I don't think you're going to get them."

"Why not?"

"She just passed two hundred words."

"Damn it!"

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: That Hardening Off Thing

So, I rarely raise seeds. And they even more rarely survive the experience. But this year, with the World's Smallest Greenhouse, I now have about eight flats of seedlings, and still no tilled ground to put them in. (Stop raining! Now!) I've run out of things to use for potting on and so has the hardware store and so has the Grange, so the Tat Soi and about a dozen zinnias and three dozen cosmos and the second round of romaine and some tomatoes and peppers that I cheated and bought in small sixpacks and replanted to bigger pots, are sitting around busily planning to get rootbound. And the kale and seed-planted tomatoes and peppers and onions aren't far behind.

(Tat Soi, you may ask? Kale, you may ask? Why did I plant cool-loving greens as summer looms, you may ask? I'm not always very bright.)

I'm eyeing my few remaining CowPots, but at about fifty cents a pot, the price of a homegrown head of lettuce goes up drastically. On the other hand, paying for two-day shipping for jumbo plug trays from Johnny's is even worse. I'm tentatively planning to solve this problem for the future by buying a soil block maker, thus eliminating the need for pots altogether, but that doesn't help the already-existing seedlings. I rather wish that I were the sort of person to eat a lot of yogurt.

(Speaking of CowPots, you know those advertising pictures of them with the roots just sticking straight out of the pot? It's happening to the tomatoes. It's really almost alarming. Aren't roots supposed to sense air and recoil?)

So the instant that I do have tilled ground, I want to plant. Which made me realize, late last night: I haven't hardened anybody off! Ack! Potential delays!

I've never done the hardening off thing before, due to the aforementioned lack of seedling survival. The advice for doing so seems to mostly assume that you'll be hardening off from a nice warm basement under lights, perhaps using an unheated greenhouse as an interim stop. I'm starting in an unheated greenhouse, so I'm not sure what to do, but I'm tentatively assuming that I can accelerate the usual schedule.

So this morning I hauled five flats from greenhouse to deck, to what looked like nice part shade and a gentle breeze. The breeze stayed gentle, but when I returned three hours later to put the flats away before lunch, I realized that they were in full sun, and the leaf lettuce wasn't a bit happy about it. Oops. I rushed them all back to the greenhouse and opened the vents extra wide and gave everybody a fresh drink, and they seemed to be doing OK a couple of hours later. The lettuce was trying to guilt-trip me with slightly floppy leaves, but everybody else seemed unfazed.

So I'm still thinking that tomorrow I'll leave them until after lunch, and the next day until just before dinner, and the next day after dinner, and then I'll let them sit outside all night and hope that the raccoons haven't been waiting for a salad bar.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.