One Sweet Pea

Sugar Ann, Deux

So, Sugar Ann is so good, we planted some more today. Also, we planted the borage, and added some Bonnie Green Bell Pepper plants (from Lowes) to the garden.

(Slightly Modified) Square Foot Bed

Upon my return from a business trip, A and I tasted our first Sugar Anns (he courteously waited for me to return, I do not know if I would have been so patient). We spent the holiday weekend in the yard, planting the garden, working on the flower beds, even purchasing some patio furniture.

Planted on Saturday, May 29th:

Burpee's Hybrid Zucchini
Bananarama Banana Peppers
Burpless Beauty Cucumbers
(MORE) Touchon Carrots
Carmello Tomato plant
Amish Paste Tomato plant
San Marzano Tomatoes (2 plants)
Black Krim Tomato plant
(MORE) Easter Egg Radishes
Scarlet Runner Pole Beans
Fortex Pole Beans
Provider Bush Beans
Nickel French Filet Beans
(MORE) Bull’s Blood Beet Greens

HERBS:

Greek Miniature Basil
San Remo Basil
Italian Parsley
Thyme
Greek Oregano
Cilantro
Bouquet Dill

Bounty

Rhubarb Memories and Future Pie Dreams

This weekend, we went to see the ladies of the Greensburg Garden Club for their annual plant sale. As A puts it, I “wanted to go buy some plants off old ladies.” With limited cash on us, we had to be very selective. However, they were selling some rhubarb for $4.00, which we agreed was worth it to give it a try in the yard somewhere.

We both have fond childhood memories of rhubarb. A is still heartbroken about the fact that when his parents moved a little over a year ago from the home they had all his life to a new place on the outskirts of Oil City, they didn’t take any rhubarb cuttings from the plant in the backyard. I remember my grandmother making rhubarb pie every year, with rhubarb from her neighbor, Vivian’s, backyard plant. I would stand on a chair in her kitchen and watch her bake (she was not an avid, or very talented baker, but she did rhubarb pie well). We were the only ones in the family who were really enthusiastic about it, so we had plenty to share amongst the two of us.

We surmised that since this rhubarb was from a local plant, the odds were good it would do just fine in our lower backyard, since there’s not enough room for it in the raised bed garden. As A keeps reminding me, it’s like a weed. But, ever since I saw in a book that the Yankee Gardener put it in with his perennial flower beds, I see it as a little fancier than a weed, I cannot help myself.

However, we planted it in an out-of-the-way place, not the side flower garden, and we are keeping our fingers crossed. It’s not looking so good for the $4.00 rhubarb…yet.

Success is Tasty

Harvested (and consumed five minutes later), April 27th, 2010

Beets are Magical

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets

Maybe it is a testament to my Slovak heritage, but I love beets. Even canned beets piled on my salad bar plate make me happy, I am no beet snob. Yes, I recognize the fact that fresh roasted beets with a drizzle of olive oil are much more tasty than cracking open the can, but I will take beets in any form. Even in ravioli, which A prepared for Valentines Day for me from this recipe.

If beets give me my seriousness, then it is no wonder that I have been told that I lack a sense of humor (and, I will admit to being stonyfaced during most popular comedies, and only laughing during the most obscure references on Family Guy episodes). I have always consumed beets with gusto, even when I was little and supposed to wrinkle my nose and pitch a fit at the dinner table, I always ate the beets, and asked for more. I was the twenty-something college student with two jars of beets in her basement apartment refrigerator, while my peers only stocked cheap beer and ketchup.

Rumor has it that the Greeks offered beet greens to the god Apollo on a silver platter at the temple of Delphi, but I will take my chances with angering the Gods, and keep these all for myself.

Ahh.The Irony

It has been so cold today, and we suffered through planting the rest of the green onions into the garden as the wind blew and I wore A’s coat. With numb fingers, we transplanted the summery tomatoes and peppers into peat pots. Now we wait.

More, More, More

Planted more lettuce today, the mixed greens seem to be doing well. The other square, mesclun mix (not to be pronounced mescaline, which
A likes to point out that I sometimes do, and therefore am inadvertently talking about some trippy drug that has connotations of stumbling around the desert and licking a frog and such), did not fair well in the above average heat, and lack of attention caused by our leaving town for a few days. We decided to try again to see if it was the seeds, the weather, or us that is the problem. My vote is the seeds, A votes for weather.

A Shovel-Ready Project

Unlike the bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that seems to bind up every government project with red tape, we truly are ready to plant in the garden. This week, we planted two squares of lettuce before we left town. The weather was beautiful, and the bed looked so bare, we could not help ourselves. Then, today, upon returning home, we planted radishes and carrots (the countdown to bread slathered with butter and radishes and salt has begun) We transplanted more herbs from the tiny cell growing tray to larger peat pots.

A Better Basket

Today, instead of an Easter basket filled with candy that disappears so quickly, only to reappear as extra pounds of belly fat, we started the tomatoes, peppers and “my” peas outside in a container. This will give us a harvest that lasts much longer than a bag of Gene and Boots jelly beans (although, I admit, I ate a few of those for nostalgia’s sake and so did A. I think my mom slipped him an extra bag as we were leaving, but I cannot be sure).

Seeds started indoors this weekend:

Black Krim Tomatoes
Amish Paste Tomatoes
San Marzano Tomatoes
Caramelo Tomatoes
Bananarama Banana Peppers (huge, perfect for stuffing!)

Garden Bed

Dirt Under Our Fingernails

The 12’x4’ garden bed is installed. It is ready for lettuce. Thanks to A’s unwavering, almost maniacal enthusiasm, we were able to spend one evening after work assembling the kit, the next digging out the sod in the installation area, and the following day digging and then leveling the bed and going to Agway for supplies (you know Agway is a good choice when your town’s primary source for organic produce at the local farmer’s market is seen getting his supplies there) and “making” soil from a formula that includes peat moss and vermiculite and sand and compost and lime. It’s done. It looks beautiful. According to the neighbor, the kit’s posts are nicer than those on their actual bed frame.

If it were up to me, the process would have been spread out over a longer period of time, with breaks for leisurely breakfast and too much coffee and maybe a brief timeout to watch an episode of something on the Investigation Discovery channel. If it were up to me, I would’ve been distracted by knitting or teaching the cat to play fetch or obsessively washing the dishes.

But, see that’s the thing about this whole project, it is not just up to me, and therefore, I received my necessary nudges. And, I found out that I can carry 50 lb. bags of sand, use a socket wrench, and that I am really good at mixing with a hoe (it seemed like mixing dough for baking, somehow).

So, we are ready, and we have even installed some protection against the Great Vole Infestation of N. 3rd Street, which may or may not originate in our yard, but definitely effects houses on our block.





The Supply List:

(1) 12x4 raised bed kit (purchased with Christmas money from A’s parents)
(3.5) bags of 3.8 cubic feet of peat moss
(2.75) bags of 4 cubic feet of coarse vermiculite
(6) 50 lb. bags of play sand
(3) bags of mushroom compost
(1) bag of lime
(1) bag of PlantTone organic fertilizer
(2) sheets, 12’ long, by 24” wide of hardware cloth
some of the existing soil from the yard

Also necessary:
(2) cups of coffee
(2) tuna melts
(1) hose hooked up to the basement sink

Seed Starting

The snow has almost melted, and we spent the morning evaluating the area for the garden plot (looking at that list of plants below, then at the space for the raised bed, I wonder how it is going to work. But, according to Square Foot Gardening, it will), as well as planting our first seeds in the basement. Today we started the onions, both kinds of basil, the parsley and thyme. Most were so small, they looked like specks of dirt. I was afraid that if I sneezed, they would be lost in the recesses of the basement like those S-hooks that still haven't appeared after I lost them while "helping" to hang the lights for growing.

Good luck seeds!

Daydreams of Sugar Ann

Funny how some things take forever (waiting on acceptance or rejection responses from literary magazines, my ever-slowly increasing savings account, the arrival of food in a favorite restaurant) and some go so quickly. I am reminded of an NPR story recently where they asked older people and younger people to accurately judge when a minute had passed (or maybe it was 90 seconds. I was driving. And completely paying attention to the road). The older the participants were, the worse they did. Time actually seemed to pass more quickly.

It seems silly to be thinking about the garden when there is 20” of unmelting snow in the backyard, with another 7-10” expected tonight, but, if you think about it, it is almost the middle of February. Which means it is almost March. Which means we should be thinking about digging up some of the hill in the backyard and assembling the raised bed and hauling in soil so that we are ready in time.

Because time passes quickly for two old fogies like A and myself. Before we know it, it will be time to have a basement full of seeds sprouting under shop lights (and for nightly prayers that Lucy does not eat them).

The older I get, I can feel this time difference with seasons. It seems as if it was just summer, and we were making weekend meals with vegetables from A’s garden. And now, winter will be over (soon) and before I can take a breath, we will be knee deep in green beans and tomatoes and zucchini. I will be picking and canning and making fritters.

It is these things I will think about when I am shoveling the latest batch of snow—tomatoes, basil and mozzarella, zucchini pie, and my imperative 2010 garden selection: the Sugar Ann snap pea. It is a miniature snap pea, and, well, anything tiny is cute, and cute equals good, right?

Seed Selection and Planning

Does a completed garden plan illustrate the ability to compromise? If two people can decide on exactly what to grow in a 12’ by 4’ space and not kill each other, or at least not fight until the very end, is it a sign of a healthy relationship?

We managed. It was made easier by the fact that we like some of the same things, and both have an abnormally strong love of beans and tomatoes. But, where A sees the garden as a larger, better extension of the one he had last year, I see it as overwhelming and possibly intimidating and, until the garden is here and happening, a little bit of anxiety comes over me if we talk about it too long. Yes, I can be convinced to add a pot of borage on one corner to attract bees, no, I do not want to grow my own chamomile for tea, even if I drink chamomile so often that I have three containers of it in the kitchen cupboard.

My first-ever, on-my-own vegetable garden was a little sad. The cucumbers got mold, the squash never grew, and the tomatoes were just acceptable, not great, in my opinion. I realized that the area I chose was too shady in the afternoon. I learned to not necessarily take advice from my neighbors, because, even though a former resident might have had their tomatoes in that area of the backyard, it was most likely so long ago that the treeline had changed, and trees, once not an issue, would now cast long shadows over the tiny plot of dirt.

So, like many other areas of my life, the anticipation of the garden—the garden in my mind—was causing me to worry, and it would until we actually assembled the raised bed and planted the seeds and had some success. Because that was the crux, I was afraid of failure. I wanted everything to be good this time around; I wanted our garden’s bounty to look like the images in the Burpee catalog.

And that is where A and I differ: he sees it as one big extreme possibility, and I am afraid. I am hoping that he can teach me some of this positive-possibility trait in addition to the wisdom of patience (I am sure the garden will help out with the patience thing, too). So, no chamomile…yet. But there's a chance that if I make a birthday cake this summer, it will come with crystallized borage flowers atop the icing, because, supposedly, that's what you can do with borage besides attract bees.

We decided on the following:

Sweet Salad Mix
Gourmet Blend Lettuce
Burpee's Hybrid Zucchini
Bananarama Banana Peppers
Burpless Beauty Cucumbers
Touchon Carrots
Carmello Tomatoes
Amish Paste Tomatoes
San Marzano Tomatoes
Black Krim Tomatoes
Bull's Blood Beets
Easter Egg Radishes
Scarlet Runner Pole Beans
Fortex Pole Beans
Provider Bush Beans
Nickel French Filet Beans
Sugar Ann Snap Peas
White Lisbon Onions
Greek Miniature Basil
San Remo Basil
Italian Parsley
Thyme
Greek Oregano
Cilantro
Bouquet Dill

And of course, Borage.