The Solstice Fire

Not really. I missed the solstice party in the frozen north, where every year they gather beneath icy stars and the pregnant moon to burn everything they could not compost. It has been too long since I was there with them, the white snow beneath, the black sky above and a golden fire reminding of spring returning.

This fire is from the summer past. With our new technologies we are no longer dependent on magic or storytellers to recreate seasons gone. It is easy now to evoke the lushness, buried in death and snow. Something lost with an accurate image gained. 

A picture of my garden in the present tense shows little but white, with the tattered flags of a last column of leeks promising one last harvest. There is a half-row of carrots there too, to be dug during the January thaw. I am busy planning and plotting for next year, deciding on what seeds and tubers I will order to supplement those distributed by Community Gardens. Instead of the tattered present here's an image of the turgid past:

   

Rapini

This is from 11/17, never posted, I'm not sure why, perhaps I wanted photos or to add more. I have included a photo of Bavarian White garlic so that you can get a sense of its size. All of my garlic was large, but the B White was massive. Anyways, the old post:

I planted it sometime. After the turnips and storage radishes.

This is the point of careful records.

It was fabulous. I picked it. One umbel had broken from green to sulfur yellow. The rest were tender, well-branched to 12 inches. I harvested one half of an area five foot square. It made a giant bunch - worth two of what you buy in the market.  It was not as dense as what I have grown accustomed to from the market, but significantly less leafy than other local Rapini I have bought at the Coop.

The surprise came when I cooked it. I wilted, then sauteed a few Portobello mushrooms with more garlic than seemed appropriate. I added the blanched Rapini.

$#%$#$ fabulous. I like Rapini. I'm a bit of a snob. This Rapini rocked. I am happy.

There should be pictures, but I misplaced the camera. 

Today I planted flower bulbs and Bavarian White garlic. The garlic was planted a month after the main planting. I am curious to compare their growth to the earlier planted garlic. I suspect they will be a bit later, but essentially equivalent in mass to those planted earlier. 

1/1 As an addendum let me note how the wrapper on this head in Tiz's hand is split open. This garlic, like too much that I harvested was dug late. The split heads do not store as well and are difficult to clean up, but much more on that subject later.  

Indian Summer

This past week our first frost was followed quickly by several others. It has been downright cold. The garden, however is flourishing. Radicchio is heading up; the turnips, beets and radishes are fattening beneath the ground. Today the sun is bright and warm, although the tide has clearly turned.

On Sunday, my parents came to visit. In the morning before they arrived, I went to the garden to stock up. For dinner I roasted chicken on a bed of leeks. Fingerling potatoes and garlic from storage were combined with the final bunch of carrots from my first planting and roasted in another pan with a simple vinaigrette. My father loves beets, so yet another pan went into the oven. I lightly coated the beets in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. A fall green salad accompanied the feast, with romaine and buttercrunch lettuce, escarole, radicchio and baby spinach partnered with apples, walnuts and blue cheese. Mmmm. Oh yes, the salad also included the first harvest of my second carrot crop "Purple Haze," which looks fabulous sliced paper thin, with its purple skin contrasting with its bright orange interior.

In the afternoon, before dinner, I took mom and pops down to show off the garden and pull some more leeks and carrots for them to take away the next morning as gifts. I included one glistening white bulb of garlic in their bag of goodies.

Monday was bright and cool. I took the day off work and spent it running errands. In the warmth of the afternoon I returned to the garden, cleaning up the last of the dead tomato vines and other warm weather crops and planted garlic. I planted 120 cloves, nearly twice as much as last year. Spanish Roja was the variety I planted most of, nearly 50 cloves. I saved almost all of this year's Roja for seed. The balance was planted with Music, German Red and Russian Red. I will probably go back and add some Bavarian to the mix, since it did so well for me this season. "That's quite a commitment of ground to make for one crop," another gardener said as we talked while I planted. "Not just one crop," I replied pointing to where this summer' s garlic had been followed by fall cabbages.

Next year Brussels sprouts, come hell or high water!

As I was weeding around my Kale I noticed that Mache had started to sprout from the seeds fallen from this spring's flowers. A gardening cycle has come full circle. There is much more to be done before the snow is thick on the ground and much more to be eaten. But I will have more time to write about gardening as I do less of it. I will return to some of my promises from earlier posts and flesh out discussions about crop rotation, garlic and potatoes. And I will dream, because that is what gardeners do during winter.

This is a lush time. I have been remiss in documenting it. Every week I bring home bags of food. My arms are bent from it . Potatoes and tomatoes ( so happy that the rains are gone!)  My new crops are flourishing: greens and brassicas, carrots and beets. Every spare night I cook, freeze or dry; trying to preserve the bounty of now for winter's barren days. My leeks are filling out and the last of the potatoes have yet to mature. Constantly, I am roasting fingerling potatoes, tomatoes or carrots. Only the tomatoes make it to the freezer, but the other vegetables prepared on the weekends or evenings, are doled out across the meals of the week. Tizzy is in school and it seems I have always taken on another project, so we cook in bursts and reap the bounty when we can. 

I am afraid I have harvested the last of the cucumbers. We have used them for Raita and salsa, cold salads and soup. They have been both stars of the show and supporting cast for more than a month now. It is hard to let them go, but the vines are yellowing and weak, the fruits that remain no longer seem capable of maturity. It is hard to imagine the wax- covered and flavourless things that I will endure for the next nine months. Next year, there will be earlier cucumbers -  and later. 

     Julie, who I have come to rely on in so many ways, has taught me anew the virtue of pickles. Next year. That is always the cry of the gardener: "Next Year!" Next year there will be pickles. Sour pickles and sweet. Beans and tomatoes preserved in brine. Next year there will be more preserved than herbs and sauces. Next year I will can everything that I can!

I have taken pictures of my garlic and other storage crops. I promise that I will give a full accounting of that in this blog, but next year there will be even more. 

I will be harvesting what I have planted this year far past Christmas, but still, I grow few of the traditional storage crops ( winter squash, cabbage, potatoes, onions, etc.) My late harvests come from late plantings and simple methods of season extension. Next year, I will leave space for pumpkins and squash, I will be sure to plant the giant drum cabbages for sauerkraut, I will have great quantities of rutabagas to cover in wax. Next year, I will be a better person and a better gardener. Next year, Lucy will not pull the ball away. Next year, Charlie Brown will kick the field goal He has always deserved.  

Apples of The Earth

It's what the French call them. Potatoes. Earth Apples. Pommes de Terre. 

When it comes time for harvest, you place the potato fork between the mounded row of plants. With a downward motion the fork is gently drawn back towards the body, spilling potatoes out of the ground, like fruit from a basket. The rosy purple skins of this potato, Caribe, make the French name seem even more reasonable. 

Potatoes come in many different colors, both inside and out. There are red, yellow and purple fleshed potatoes. Skins run the gamut from black to white. Shapes vary also. Remember an earlier posting, how I spoke of my potato with three names? I served these fingerlings (Rose Finn Apple) at the BOMB party, roasted with only olive oil and salt and pepper. The crowd went wild! Its hard to think of potatoes as a delicacy, but when fresh from the ground... especially with fingerlings, potatoes are taken to a new level.

This was the first time I have ever grown potatoes.  The first time for onions too, and garlic. All of which surprised me with their ease and their forgiving nature. They really produced without getting much attention. I am determined to do better with all of them next year, to give each more space and more affection. 

I hung more than 20lbs of garlic beneath my porch at the end of July to cure, but that is another story, with its own regrets, successes and failures.

So far, I have harvested 30 lbs. of Caribe, with half a row left in the ground. My estimates for the fingerlings are not so clear. Their yield seems to be somewhat proportionate, in that for every piece I planted, I seemed to harvest about four potatoes. For Caribe that will work out to about a tenfold increase from the four pounds I planted. Each fingerling is so much smaller though, that I find it hard to believe 40 lbs will come from the two rows of Rose Finn I planted. I will get a better sense at my next harvest. So far I have dug only part of a row and not weighed any of it. I planted my Keuka Gold potatoes later, and I didn't cut up the seed as much. I wonder how their yield will compare? I won't know for awhile, they were planted in early June, several weeks after the others and are still green and lush.

  

Bless this food to our service

The whole point of this blog is to keep a careful accounting, which I have failed miserably at. But the reason for the accounting...the reason is... to make an economic argument for something that runs deeper than balance sheets.

As the Veggie Man said to me today, "when my family asks, I try to stay away from the big picture. I don't want them to think I am a conspiracy theorist. I tell them the reason we spend so much effort in the garden is because the food tastes better."

But there is more there. 

He and I both recognize that food, energy and the environment are different parts of the same thing. And that thing is a challenge that cannot be ignored. The time has come to pay the piper. The 20th century was a glorious advance, oblivious of limits. This century we must forge ahead with scarcity as our teacher. 

What we have built uses cheap oil and an undervalued environment as the sand dunes of its foundation. What we must build does not deny the miracle of the 20th century's design, but goes back to the root. Ecosystems are finite. An economy that imagines infinite expansion because our imaginations are limitless, does not credit enough the system that makes our economy possible. What is the value of a soaking rain versus a torrential downpour? What value the small wetland that absorbs the flood?How rich each blade of grass that holds a small clump of soil and keeps it from the sea? The New Testament speaks of an accounting that marks the fall of every sparrow and each hair upon every head. We must marry our wisdom and our technology to that humility. 

Along the lines of this discussion I recommend a book: "The End of Food" by Paul Roberts. There are many points where I disagree with the author, although I sense he may have tamed his argument to reach a broader audience. Nonetheless, it is a broad and compelling argument. The international food system that world economies are based on is in a tenuous position. Looking only at water consumption, or oil use, or the limits of plant and animal chemistry, is enough to prove his point. When political cowardice and basic human incalcatrence ( forgive my spelling, the word I mean implies hardening, an unwillingness to move or change position) are added to his argument, Robert's picture is quite sobering. But here, in a land of deep soil and soaking rains, we need to recognize this crisis as a time of opportunity. We still have relatively compact urban centers surrounded by good farmland. It is time to redevelop our regional agricultural system and begin again to feed ourselves. It's time to turn abandoned land and ignored populations back to the important job of feeding our communities.

I will dispense with the apologies and get right to the listing of my failures! My lack of posting reflects a lack of time spent in the garden. I have not kept accurate records of my harvests, but will try to recreate them in a general sense, by consulting what frail notes I have and the few unposted drafts left in this blog's memory banks.
Roughly speaking I have managed a weekly harvest of greens averaging 4-5 pounds. My friends and neighbors have been thankful since Tiz and I can only eat a couple of pounds a week. My six broccoli plants offered 6 small-to-medium-sized heads over the last half of June. In every case, the side shoots that have followed produced more than I got from the original picking.
Our crazy weather did more than encourage the weeds, it seemed to force the brassicas in an odd way - the 5 Violet Queen cauliflowers went immediately from small head to flower and so were a complete loss. The broccoli would have been a disappointment too, if I had not gotten such production from the side shoots.
My first tomato was harvested on the 11th and shared with friends in a salad we brought to the beach at North South Lake. If I do say so myself, the salad was delicious. It featured Oak leaf, Red Sails and Speckles lettuce; escarole and red orach; fresh young carrots, red onion; herbs and a generous amount of broccoli.
Every year I promise myself I will plant more broccoli and more carrots. Fresh from the garden they become completely different vegetables. I hardly ever cook the broccoli, it is so succulent raw. When cooked it gets just 3 or 4 minutes of steaming and a small amount of butter, nothing more. And the carrots, well they are like eating candy, nothing compared to carrots from the store.
A few weeks back I gave my buddy Terri one of our big heads of Romaine (2-2.5 pounds apiece!) and a collection of herbs greens flowers etc. She also got one of the heads of broccoli. Terri is a vegetarian and a bit of a foodie, so its not like she has no knowledge of veggies, but she was shocked by the broccoli. "I don't even cook it," she said. "It's so good." Terri likes the flowers too, when I dropped off her most recent pile of food on Sunday, she still had flowers on the mantle from two weeks before. She got rid of the old bouquet and replaced it with the new bunch of dianthus and snapdragons.
Every week I have brought home big bouquets, usually one or more gets shared with friends. Last week the first sunflower bouquet went home. They are Tizzy's favorite, except perhaps for her Zinnias. Both will now be common until the end of summer.
A week ago I roasted a big batch of beets on the grill, with garlic scapes, fresh tarragon, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper. I brought them to work for a birthday party, where they were served with local goat cheese on a bed of oak leaf lettuce, surrounded by flowers and individual leaves of Speckles lettuce. People raved. Personally, I thought it was a waste of good goat cheese. I got much more pleasure from the beet greens I had steamed up and served with cider vinegar - both when they were hot and when served cold alongside an omelet.
I just don't love beets. I try, but I fail. The golden beets are better, but their greens are not near as good. What to do? Well I just planted another batch of beets and I plan to pull them up as soon as they begin to make the tiniest of beets. They will be grown strictly for their greens, which I like even more than Swiss Chard, which is saying something!
June was the end of my month from hell. I got back into the garden over the fourth of July weekend and began beating the garden back into shape. The peas were finally finished and their section of the garden was cleared. On 7/13, in that section, I planted beets, radicchio(Carmen), fennel(Firenze), carrots (Royal Chantenay), and Iceburg and Buttercrunch lettuce. I also planted basil and cilantro. I picked my first Kentucky Wonder bean and it was awesome, so tender and delicious. I also planted the last of my Provider bean seeds left from last year. That was one good bean and it sure produced a lot, but I don't recall the flavour being near as good as that of Kentucky Wonder.
There is so much I have left out, the staking of the cucumbers and melons, my first garlic harvests, chatter in the garden - did I ever report on the nematodes? Still I need to move along, if only so I can get on to another post where I will have a chance to rave about the world food economy - neither my tomatoes or my hot peppers, not my cilantro nor tomatillos, are polluted with salmonella - how certain are you that your food isn't?

It's been weeks since my last posting. the real world has interfered with the virtual. Interfered with my real-world gardening as well. I only have been able to get about 2-3 hours in my garden each week. Nonetheless, I cleared more land and planted the last of my potatos (I have pictures). My tomatoes are mostly in, as are melons and cucumbers. I have harvested about 5 pounds of mixed greens in the past two weeks - a guess derived from actually weighing a full bag of spinach on a commercial scale. I have also harvested the first quart of sugar snap peas. they were delicious and worth, by themselves, the space alloted to them. Knowing that many more quarts of peas will follow is a bonus. The tomatoes are mostly planted and my staking system is set up.
Each week brings its own bouquet. Sweet William has remained the star player, although I think other dianthus will start to bloom next week, along with volunteer sunflowers and gloriosa daisy. Spinach has responded poorly to the heat, most of it has bolted or is in the process. Interestingly, my mosty productive patch, the second planting, has managed to hold up the best. I think because I kept it hard cut and well watered during the hottest days.
Everything seems to be leaping up in response to the stifling heat and occasional thundershower. As always, weeds seem to be growing the most. It has made me think I might do a little more mulching this year than in the past.
Back to work.

Someday I will figure this technology out fully. Like putting captions under photos, or leaving room for comments. Yesterday I planted more beans: Black Valentine - what can I say? The name appealed. And yet another flight of carrots (Purple Haze - not just a good name, the best of the purple carrots I tried last year) Tonight I worked on my communal responsibilities. I used a weed whacker to keep control of some paths and the area around the garden shed.Or at least I gave it the old college try. Unfortunately, I ran out of both fuel and string. Technology foiled me there also.

The photos posted earlier showed the flowers already in bloom in the garden : Dianthus barbatus, Anchusa "Loddon Royalist" and Geranium ibericum. I failed to note in the last post that my harvest included a bouquet of Dianthus. Commonly known as Sweet William they are visible in the photo of the table. They are good cut flowers, being of the same family as the carnation. The picture of the harvest is self explanatory, but the lines in the dirt between the pepper plants are where I planted spinach. Oh Yes, yesterday I extended the underplanting beneath the peppers to include oak leaf lettuce.

The pictures of our meal might seem silly, but all of that food (except those eggs - local and free range of course) were courtesy of CDCG. Either it was a product of the garden or bought from The Veggie Mobile. The mushroom/asparagus omelet was flavored with thyme and scallions from the garden and of course the salad was fresh from our plot. I wonder if it is fair to include the value of flowers as an output of the garden? I think I could find a dozen studies that show flowers have a positive effect on a person's health. Just as with my grandfather's melons, it never pays to be too parsimonious about the things that feed you.

A Thousand Words

Harvest

Writing about gardening takes me away from the garden, which I have too little time in as it is. Fortunately, it's raining now and I don't have any other chores that are too pressing. This morning was a big harvest. I have been remiss in noting previous harvests and still have not purchased a scale, so we will have to rely on estimates for my grand total. Unrecorded was the grocery bag full of Mache harvested at the beginning of the month and my first harvest of lettuce and spinach last week. This morning, I filled up two bags with three kinds of lettuce, (mostly Red Sails) spinach, orach and herbs. I'll give one bag to my friend Terri, 'cause I know she has a guest from out of town. I will keep the other bag for Tiz and me.

Over Memorial Day weekend I went to the Troy Farmers Market and the Menands Market in search of flowers for the cutting garden and pepper plants (particularly Poblanos) I didn't find Poblanos until my last stop at the Coop on the way home. The garden was busy when Tiz and I planted the flowers on Sunday. I think we spent twice as much time talking as we did planting. She cut her first bouquet, which consisted of chive blossoms and the flowers from my cover crop of crimson clover! Good deal for a cover crop, it fixes nitrogen in the soil, you can eat it - I added some flowers to the salad, but to be honest, they tasted a bit hay-like - and its beautiful. This fall I will be better prepared and make sure the area to be planted in tomatoes for the following spring will be seeded entirely to clover, so that I have a big patch to leave in bloom and still have time to turn it over before planting. I have started too many tomatoes to fit into this year's patch so I'm at a loss. 

Here is a list of planting that occurred today and over the holiday weekend. Today I planted spinach (Whale) in the spaces between the peppers I planted last weekend. I also planted two types of melon, Prescott Fond Blanc and Eden's Gem. Planting melons is completely wasteful in such a small space, but I will grow them up a trellis. For me they are a tribute to my grandfather, who made them his specialty and sold them at market. Growing melons well in the north is difficult and the space I have allotted to them means I will only harvest a handful of them for all my efforts. Although I promised to keep an accounting of what food came from the garden, I'm not about to turn mercenary about the whole thing, it takes all kinds of nourishment to feed the soul.

Anyways, back to planting. So far, of my many tomato varieties, I have planted: Amish Paste, Health Kick, Cherokee Purple (2), Kellogg's Breakfast, First Lady, Orange Banana and a tomatillo. The peppers planted were: Jalapeno, Hidalgo, Anaheim, Poblano and Early Red, a quick-turning sweet bell pepper. I also planted a six pack of some white cauliflower I picked up along the way, they were planted near the broccoli and romaine lettuce that were put in a few weeks back. I inter planted radicchio Fiero in with the cauliflower. 

My free time is gone now and I must run. I will post more pictures taken today later.

The Best Laid Plans

It was a perfect night for planting, the soil was warm; the sky threatened rain. I had my carrots, my beans, my lettuce and cukes. The ground was mostly turned. All I had to do was put the seeds in the ground. But where?

One of the reasons for this blog is to keep a record. Most every piece of ground in my garden had two crops grown on it last year, much of it supported three. For example a portion of the third row had: lettuce, followed by green beans, followed by radishes. To be a good organic gardener it is essential to rotate crops, so that plants of the same family don't follow after the other, creating a buildup of pests or disease associated with that plant family in the soil. Unfortunately, two major plant families, the brassicas and the nightshades account for a majority of the favorite garden crops, throw in the squashes and it seems impossible to find  a place to grow anything without running into problems. The nightshades are supposed to have 2-4 years between planting. The negotiations required to keep peppers, tomatoes and potatoes off the same ground in a plot my size are more than difficult, they are impossible.

Last night I planted Kentucky Wonder Bush Beans and French Breakfast Radishes. The radishes were planted in a row between the Red Baron Onions, I'm hoping the onions will keep the flea beetles at bay. In the spots where earlier I planted radishes and kohlrabi, I gave up the losing battle against the flea beetles. I turned the soil over and planted again. There I planted Burpee's Golden Beets and one of my favorite lettuces from last year, Speckles. Speckles is a succulent butterhead-type heirloom, with soft green leaves covered in tiny maroon spots. I think it is best harvested at the size of a softball when its coloring is most distinctive and its texture is just right. 

Off to work. I will continue the crop rotation discussion later, revealing my primitive and ineffective method. 

Rose Finn Apple

My fingerling potato is so classy it has three names. I didn't quite get it right last time so I thought I would make a correction. Not knowing about potatoes I perused the web for good info on planting. I found the advice here and then ignored it. Not ignored really, but failed to follow correctly. Instead of properly preparing the seed potatoes when they arrived, I just put them in the basement and forgot about them. 

When it came time to cut the potatoes into their one-inch pieces (each containing at least one eye) It was easy to see where the eyes were, because they had already sprouted. I followed the directions and put the cut pieces into a paper bag, but shaking the bag, as instructed, is clearly out of the question. The sprouts are an inch or two long and I'm afraid I will break them. I have made do with a gentle tumble and a small prayer that I am not breaking off tender shoots and cutting short the promising life of tasty taters. I'm going to plant them a little sooner than recommended as well, because I will be away this weekend and I'm afraid of what they will look like by Monday.

Fortunately The Keuka Gold are egg- sized and don't need to be cut up. 

Last night I went to the garden after work. I weeded and mulched the raspberries and planted sets of broccoli and romaine lettuce. I planted them together, because I noticed last year that the cole crops (brassicas) did best when they were interplanted with other vegetables, it seemed to reduce the feeding of the flea beetles. There was a dramatic growth difference between a row of broccoli planted alone and the one right next to it planted in combination with lettuce. I think the difference in leaf color confused the flea beetles enough to put them off their feed.   

Rain and Potatoes

The drought broke with a week of cool and wet that has lingered, pulling our first true April weather into May. This week starts a warming trend. The garden has loved rain and relief from the heat and will be ready now, I think, to take advantage of the coming week's warmth.

Weather and obligations have kept me from doing much in the garden. Tizzy and I went down last night and I planted carrot seeds (Little Fingers and Scarlet Nantes,) while she planted out some herb sets (chamomile and parsley)

Since my last post I have also put out sets of Cauliflower (Violet Queen) and Leek (American Flag) I have been lax in recording planting dates in the house, so I can't say when my sets were started. In the past two weeks I started a French baby leek from seed and Swiss chard seeds in recycled containers, the leek probably two weeks ago and the chard last week.

I promised to talk of potatoes. Last summer I went to an event sponsored by NOFA-NY where organic vegetable variety trials were evaluated. There were taste tests involved, I sampled nearly 50 potatoes, 30 tomatoes and 20 different open pollinated melons. The potato I liked the best was Caribe, with bright purple skin and equally bright white flesh. To round out my order from Fedco this spring I ordered Keuka Gold, a selection from Cornell meant to rival Yukon Gold's appeal, but to be a better producer. YK is renowned among growers as having a terrible yield. Farmers there spoke well of Keuka, though several were vehement in their dislike of YK, saying its taste and texture were sub-par. They all bowed to Martha Stewart, though and the power of the market place, YK is the potato with the strongest brand recognition. They grow what sells. I also ordered some fingerlings (Rose Finn) This marks my beginnings as a potato farmer, which I promise to continue to discuss, because I have already made some errors and the tubers are not even in the ground yet. Later though, I have to go earn my daily bread.

Went to the garden today after work. It was well hot. I brought my 5-gallon bucket along, filled with water. I understand that climate change is not expressed in one hot day or another, but this is the second April in a row with excessive heat and little rain. I noted in my journal last year the thunderstorms of early May. The weather predicted them for tonight. It has been two weeks now in the 70's and 80's with no rain, two weeks going on three. I'm not saying... I'm just saying.

I was raised here in Upstate with the understanding that the last frost date was May 15th and that planting the "hot" crops should wait till Memorial Day. Thunderstorms are supposed to wait till August. I saw tomatoes from Georgia at a big box store over the weekend and I was tempted to plant one. It might be nice to have tomatoes by the Fourth as some recompense for the destruction of the entire ecosystem.

Now that I am sufficiently farmer-like, with my bitching about the weather, let's get to the crops and the planting. I visited the garden Sunday evening (to water) and to (optimistically) plant more cool weather crops. I planted Beets, (Wodan) onions, (Long white bunching, which noted on the packet that I could plant in fall to over winter{ guess I forgot that!}) and Long-Standing cilantro. The cilantro, like the onion, was from last year's seed. The cilantro I planted last year in late summer didn't bolt even when the snow came. I hope it will perform as well in the hot weather, since cilantro usually passes all too quickly to coriander for me.

I have no hope for my crop of kohlrabi, because Sunday marked the arrival of the flea beetle. The arugula, which had finally settled in from transplanting, was completely subsumed in them and close to death. The radishes are pockmarked and tonight I noticed the mache was covered with a fine black dust -  hundreds of tiny flea beetles. I tried to take a picture, but my camera was not up to the task. It's time to pick the mache anyway, the heat has made it begin to go to seed and I want to make my first harvest.

I planted my onion sets (Red Baron) tonight from the Fedco order, but that's for another post, because I want to talk about my potatoes. When I was leaving another gardener turned on the spigot and water poured out! I rushed to the shed and pulled out a hose. The water is on! My seedlings got more than survival rations for the first time in weeks. Now, if it would only rain.

 

Went down to the garden today after work. It was glorious, these first days of spring with the honest sweat on my forehead and the rich smell of dirt. I have hopped down twice since my last post, stealing a half hour or so each time. AJ and I exchanged greetings - he's a new gardener, but I know him from long ago, another place and time. He was concerned about whether he would be too late getting in his peas. The plot he inherited was quite a mess. It had been abandoned last year by a gardener who had health problems. AJ was thinking that just preparing it for planting would keep him occupied for quite some time. He despaired a bit of getting a harvest until late in the season. I told him that's what radishes were for.

I assured him that it was a gardener's nature to feel behind - I had sworn that I would get my peas in earlier -  but that he should be encouraged to know that one of the best windows of planting was between August 1 and September 15. Last year we brought the salad and roasted vegetables to Thanksgiving dinner, fresh from the garden and the result of late summer planting.

That brings me to the photo I closed my last post with. It was planted at the end of September, it will be my first harvest. It's mache, or corn salad, a green common in Europe, but less well known here. I met a farmer from Columbia County last year, who grew it in her winter hoophouse. She said she sold it to the chefs in NYC for $30 a lb. 

The garden has given me some pleasant surprises already. Arugula and mizuna that I kept under row covers all winter long have emerged alive in the spring and ready to go. Onions that I planted for a fall crop of scallions never quite got it together for fall, but seem to have overwintered fine in the open garden. I am hoping for nice scallions by the middle of May. And today I noticed a small radicchio plant that somehow made it through, I will pamper it and see if its inclination will be to go to seed or make a head. I don't know if it is from a seed that did not germinate last fall or some piece of plant that survived the snows.

Since my last post I planted another flight of spinach (variety unknown) the radish 'Champion,' escarole 'Broad-leafed Batavian' and kohlrabi 'Purple Vienna.' All of them were planted in blocks, rather than rows, on 4/14. It will be interesting to compare production of Spinach under the two circumstances, my first Spinach crop was planted in three tightly spaced rows. I think that first crop of spinach is just coming up, the lettuce certainly is. The peas, well, with the peas I was a bit impatient. I dug about in one of the rows until I found a pea seed. I had to find out how they were doing. It had sent out its first long root, the one that settles down before the shoot reaches up to the light. When it reaches 60 or 70 on Friday afternoon, my peas will be out soaking up the rays!  

Working

Let's do it. The point of this thing, I've worked in the garden twice now. With my digital camera there can even be pictures. This first one was taken during a visit in March. 

It's the nature of gardening to feel behind and already I feel like a couple weeks are lost. I wanted to have my peas in for weeks - at least I got them planted today, as well as setting out some arugula started from seed a month ago (3/3 it has only been lingering and really was ready to plant two weeks back). I hope it gets some size to it before the flea beetles are out. Flea beetles in this garden are not nuisances, they are menaces, last year they outright killed some cabbage sets and turned two summer plantings of rutabagas to dust. I will have plenty of chances to talk about pests in the future, so let me turn to more pleasant things. 

On Monday (3/7) I planted a triple row of spinach (Melody) next to my garlic, as well as a split row of lettuce - half Buttercrunch and half Red Sails. The Red Sails is lovely, but no comparison to Buttercrunch in flavor. I hope to get two or three spring spinach plantings; lettuce will be almost continuous from now until November's last harvest. I will probably trial about ten different lettuce varieties. I have two other red varieties already started inside, one leaf and one romaine. Because I figure such a short window of opportunity for the arugula I planted it alongside and between my 10' double row of Sugar Daddy Peas. I know nothing of Sugar Daddy, except I assume its a sugar snap type, not a shelling pea. Maybe I will go onto Vegetable Varieties, one of my favorite websites, to check it out.

So far between cleanup and planting I have spent about an hour and a half in the garden. On Monday I pruned my raspberries, cutting the canes down to about 18." This means I will lose my summer crop, but they should make up for it in the fall, when the fruit is less bothered by bugs anyway. Hopefully it will keep them a little more out of my way during the growing season as well, since they will be starting off a little smaller. I am lucky with the berries, because they came with the plot and are grandfathered in. CDCG doesn't allow people to plant raspberries anymore because they have a tendency to take over. There are several plots here at Ridgefield, which is an old garden, that are completely covered with raspberries. Indeed, last springtime I was forced to defend my own borders with a sharp spade to keep out the encroaching runners of neighbor's berries. Fortunately, it didn't take much effort to keep them at bay after they were thrown from the ramparts the first time. 

There are a few things besides garlic and raspberries left in the garden from last year. Here's a picture of one:

 

WHERE

In Upstate New York, where the Mohawk and Hudson River converge there are a cluster of cities. Small by today's standards, they combine to make a metropolitan area of about three quarters of a million people. But they are old, Albany will soon be celebrating its 400th birthday and Troy, well Troy is the place where Henry Hudson turned around. Schenectady is the third of the triumvirate, the city that light made. A range of other cities fill the spaces in between: Waterford, Cohoes, Watervliet, Green Island, Rensselaer, each shaped by the industry that made them strong and the ethnic groups that defined them; each made rich by the power of water and what it carried.

For a hundred years they have been on the downside, except for Schenectady, which was made mighty by electricity, its downfall was more precipitous and recent. In each, stately homes were abandoned for new ones in the suburbs. Rich farmland was covered with split level ranches and absurd 12-room show homes with multiple rooflines. Neighborhoods in Albany's center can have poverty rates 10 times those of Delmar, a suburb just several miles away. A vigorous wave of urban homesteading in the early 80's stabilized some of Albany's neighborhoods, but that seems a long time ago. In other cities, Troy,  Schenectady, Cohoes, the revival was more recent and seems to be continuing.

My garden is in the City of Albany, in a pleasant neighborhood of tree-lined streets. Many of the buildings nearby have been cut up into apartments for students, although this is probably the healthiest part of town, in terms of home ownership.

In terms of gardening, we are well within Zone 5. Frosts end sooner here and begin later then they would if we were outside of town, but because the garden is located next to the large open area of a park, the first frost struck my garden a little sooner than it did at some of the smaller gardens immediately surrounded by buildings. 

Our CG is pretty big, about a half acre in size I would guess. There must be 30 or 40 garden plots, farmed by couples, families and friends. It is difficult to know all of my fellow gardeners. I did not attend our spring clean up last year, which is a great way to become acquainted, because I had to work. My lovely wife represented us instead. This year I will make it.

Another constant of the gardening year, where fellow gardeners mingle, is at sign-ups. Each returning gardener is required to reregister their plot and pay their yearly fee. I did that last week. To my surprise the fee was $15, not the $20 I mentioned in my first post. What a deal! An added bonus is the free seeds, with a great selection of vegetables and flowers to choose from. I made an order from FEDCO for some seed potatoes and onions a few weeks back, because they are something you can't count on from CDCG. I got great seed garlic from the organization last fall, which I am excited about. This will be the first time I have grown either potatoes or garlic.

Returning gardeners can keep their plots, or they have first choice at new plots that have opened up elsewhere. Sometimes people want to get a sunnier plot, or even move out of the garden to another one closer to their home. Some gardens are quite popular and difficult to get into. Gardeners' may have to wait several years to get the perfect location.

Next comes new gardener sign-ups, untimely covered, under the posting of WHEN

What

Community Gardening seems pretty self-explanatory to me. Land held in common for the common need. In reality, the concept is a bit more nuanced. CGs have different looks and functions depending on where they are found around the world. Our American version, like most things American, seems born of a conscious idealism blended with a pragmatism of the moment. Because moments change and gardens are an ephemeral art, this current resurgence of Community Gardening is not so much the culmination of a continuous historical line as the latest strand, one more thread in a loose web of fits and starts that includes: The Potato Patch Farms of the 1890's, the Thrift Gardens of the Depression, and perhaps the best known of the public gardening efforts, the Victory Garden.

But the Victory Gardens, like their antecedents, were passing; they quickly turned from providing 40% of the nation's produce back into lawns, or were ground beneath the wheels of an expanding postwar economy and population. Wheels figured large in everything that followed. The last century was the Age of Cars. I'm sure that more than anything else, Victory Gardens turned to asphalt.

It was cars that pushed expansion out from the city center, leaving urban buildings and neighborhoods abandoned in their wake. The new mobility and its aftermath shaped the physicality of the present stage of CG, which takes its philosophical underpinnings from the social movements of the 60's and 70's. These gardens have tended to be smaller and more urban than what came before. They are described through a language of inclusion and identity. Their environmental contribution is extolled. Their virtue is a return to lost community, a social understanding that is nativist in its most aboriginal sense. This is the commons so long ago lost. While Flit (Now with more DDT!!) was used to chase pests from the Victory Garden, most CGs of today are run organically. It is this growing interest and acceptance of the logic of organics and the recognition of the importance of local foods and farmers that has propelled CG from its crunchy roots into the forefront of public discussion.

Thirty five years ago The Omnivore's Dilemma would just have been a Hippy screed, mentioned in the same breath as The Secret Life of Plants. It would have been talked about over reefers and beer, not considered worthy of NY Times best seller lists, or of being debated in Congress with the Farm Bill. But it seems that when it came to food, those crunchy granola-eating freaks were spot on. (Actually not far off in that plants-being-able-to-talk thing either. A Google search on plant communications leads to boringly scientific articles distressingly free of groovy interludes with eastern mystics. Present-day researchers never seem to hook plants up to lie detectors, either.)

Now that the agriculture industry thinks there is more to be gained by studying organics than by poo-pooing it, the research is beginning to pile up. Organic foods are healthier and organic soils are more productive. Plants grown organically are more resistant to pests and disease. 

The agribusiness establishment has continued to ignore the obvious fact that organic growing is better for the environment; their reasoned response being that it doesn't matter, because the world's population can only be supported by "conventional" agriculture. A twenty-year study out of Cornell finally puts the nail in that coffin. It seems we can have our cake and eat it without quadrupling cancer rates among children and turning aquatic creatures into hermaphrodites.

The CG group I belong to, Capital District Community Gardens, is one of the oldest from this new age of CG, with 47 gardens scattered across three counties. I have only seen a handful of the gardens, but even among them there is great variation. Each CG, like all gardens, is an expression of place, which is what I will talk about in my next post: "Where." Are you sensing a theme?  

WHY

So I started to garden. Or a garden. It was not my first, but my first with vegetables, really with vegetables, since I was young and farming with my grandfather. This was a shared garden, a community garden: as much a product of place as was my grandfather's. Instead of heifers staring brown-eyed through the fence wire and a breeze of fresh mown hay from the top of Cherry Tree Hill, there were shouts from the park beyond the fence, the stray cats that liked to shit in fresh turned earth and the occasional foul ball in the beans.

That was last year. I attended a sign-up and an indoctrination. I payed my $20 and was given the basic rules of Community Gardening:

• Thou shall garden organically, without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides
• Thou shall not harm another's garden, nor shall you accidentally make yours a little bigger or theirs a little smaller
• Thou shall not steal from another's garden, nor should you barrow
• Coveting another's garden is natural. Get over it. They have corn, but you have cantaloupes
• Thou shall not use sprinklers. They are a font of wickedness, spreading foliar diseases and wasting community water
• Your plot is a temple. Keep it clean
• Share and share alike. That means the mowing as much as the finished compost
• Vegetables should not make you angry     

I was lucky, Allison, the Garden Coordinator, shined on me and gave me the former plot of a pair of dedicated gardeners. They had moved on to another city, leaving behind their crumbly, black, well-drained soil. My plot has good sun, on some of the highest ground in the garden. I was shocked at how lovely it was, when I first worked it in April and the Horsemint was in bloom. I turned over the rich earth and made four four-foot by twenty-foot raised beds, with narrow paths between. This is my main plot, but there is more, across the common pathway leading to the tool shed that fronts my plot, I have a narrow parcel that mirrors the larger one and abuts the park. It is roughly 10x20, another 200 square feet. This plot is my face to the world and is used primarily for flowers, not a small thing. I may have shared more flowers than anything else from my garden and though my lovely wife praised and enjoyed our vegetables, it was the bouquets of sunflowers and Zinnias, snapdragons and strawflower that brought her the greatest happiness.

Out of those 400 square feet I pulled a tremendous bounty, enough vegetables to be the mainstay of our diets from mid May until the end of November. During a January thaw I went to the garden and pulled 10 or 15 pounds of carrots from the ground. I know when I go there in a few weeks, there will be the succulent leaves of Mache to pick for an early salad.

There was much more gained then food. The halting conversations with the red-haired Russian lady, our talks little more than a collection of smiles and small gifts from each other's garden. She was the first to engage me and she set the tone, with a spray of fragrant dill seedlings, when the soil had barely warmed.

This is meant to be a blog though, not a novel. Let me get to the point. I was amazed at how much food came from my 400 square feet. I am determined to make a diary of this community garden year, to explain my motives, to keep an accounting, to show the quality and quantity of meals that can be pulled from the heart of a city.