Gardening: The Cutting Row

So, we've declared that one of the long rows in The Farm will be devoted to cutting flowers. That's eighty feet by four feet of space, all of it with at least half day sun.

Woohoo!

I've already started planting perennials. Two each of a few kinds of Japanese anemones, including Honorine Jobert, my favorite. I'd tell you what the others are, but, um, I forget. I'll have to make a note when I get out there.

Two plants each of a single-flowered and a double-flowered coreopsis. (Cultivars, you ask? I avert my eyes and promise to go make that note, too.) Two Magnus coneflowers. Two black-eyed Susan plants. Eight assorted columbine. In case you're wondering what the unifying theme is, it's that I went to the Grange and bought two of every plant that (1) I like, that (2) wasn't rootbound, and that (3) at least one source claimed was suitable for cutting. Not exactly systematic, but there was bare space out there!

I also bought some unsatisfyingly short things - squat little dahlias and, even worse, squat little sunflowers. I refuse to buy the sad, short cosmos seedlings. Why won't nurseries sell the tall ones? I suppose it's because people who aren't me like "bedding" annuals. Plus, people like to buy annuals that are already blooming, and it's hard to get a blooming four-foot-tall soft plant home without breaking it in half. So if I want the tall stuff, I have to seed it myself. This year I seeded Art Deco zinnias and Double Click cosmos, with delightful results; I'll repeat both next year, plus more kinds of  cosmos and zinnias, plus sunflowers.

I'm busily hunting online nurseries for more perennials. Vintage Gardens is going away in 2013 (noooo!), so I'm making lists of roses and possibly hydrangeas to buy from them--and Himself and I are discussing the possibility of devoting another long row just to roses. And every year I regret my failure to plant dahlias and chrysanthemums, so I plan to finally correct that error, though I haven't begun to narrow down the hundreds of options. I like the whacky ones that look like they need to comb their hair, or they're ready to blast off for Alpha Centauri, or they're waiting for you to get a little closer so that they can shoot spores in your face. That kind.

Then there are bulbs. Tulips, of course. At six inches between bulbs and a four-foot-wide row, that's sixteen bulbs per linear foot of row. That's a lot of bulbs, and enough space to offer at least a chance that they'll come back next year.

And...

Um...

My brain just stopped. Maybe those short squat little dahlias successfully aimed their spores.

First vase photo: By trish. Wikimedia Commons.
Second vase photo: By Patrick.Charpiat. Wikimedia Commons.
Third vase photo: By David Palterer. Wikimedia Commons.
Dahilia photo: By Vulkan. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Random Randomness

• I cut my first winter squash today. Unfortunately, I don't know what it is; the pencil-written wooden tag was rubbed off by the time I thought to make a note, and the woman who sold it to me and said that it tasted like chestnuts wasn't at the next farmer's market. I know that it covers an amazing amount of ground and produces an amazing number of squashes, for a single plant. And the squashes look rather like pictures of white acorn squash, though they turn a slightly darker tan when they ripen.
• A friend ate one of the Delicata Honey Boat squashes at the summer squash stage, and said that it was good and sweet. I've rarely eaten a summer squash that didn't taste like water. Maybe I should start eating immature winter squashes instead.
• I planted three kinds of squash and no pumpkins. What's with that? I'll correct it next year.
• I cut a zinnia and put it in a vase. Two weeks later, it was still alive. This is both good and a little bit frightening.
• There are unidentified round fruits on one of the plants in the cucumber patch. I still don't know if they're cucumbers, melons, or alien pods. 
• I still haven't eaten a sunflower bud. This was one of my big planned experiments this year, but I slacked off. If I don't get moving, all the sunflower buds are going to flower.
• Apparently, I sold about half of my vegetable gardening books to the used book store when I resigned myself to a small garden space. Now I need to decide which ones to re-buy. But I'm more pleased with myself for having done the decluttering than I am annoyed with my errors.
• The two watermelons in the garden are each only slightly larger than a softball. Next year I'm going to try Blacktail Mountain watermelon, if I can get the seeds. I read about it in Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties; it's supposed to successfully ripen melons in cooler and higher parts of Oregon than I live in. I think.
• This is the first time in months that I didn't have a sad, reproachful cluster of plants in pots huddled around the hose bibb waiting to be planted; a friend and I got the last of them in the ground this morning. Of course, I'll buy more any minute now.
• There's a volunteer petunia in the corn. That's just weird.
• Speaking of the corn, the main corn crop is ready to eat! We're in the middle of the generosity/gluttony dance where we want to give lots away to keep it from going to waste, and want to keep it to make sure we don't give away so much that we can't eat ourselves silly.
• I know that corn is supposed to have lots of genetic diversity, but does that extend to pure white kernels and corny yellow kernels on different ears that came from the seed packet? The silk colors were very different, too. Is this normal? And shouldn't the white and yellow be mixed in the same ear, depending on what fertilized what strand of cornsilk?
• Is it wrong to plant tulips as annuals? I need to know!
• Either way, it's time to order tulips. And to make sure that I ordered enough shallots and garlic and potato onions and Egyptian walking onions. And gopher wire. I read that without gopher wire, there will be no garlic whatsoever.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

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.