Holiday Fieldtrip

We were recently out in Pennsylvania and has the distinct pleasure of friends taking us to the
Longwood Gardens, situated about 30 minutes east of Philly in the area of Kennett Square.  The Gardens comprise over a thousand sprawling acres of plantings, fountains, greenhouses, a tree house, and even a music house with a HUGE pipe organ!  The land on which Longw
ood sits has a long and varied history of stewardship, from the indigenous Lenni Lenape tribe,

through the clearing of land and planting of an arboretum by Quaker farmers in the early 19th century, to the eventual purchase of the property by Pierre du Pont.

He bought it in 1906 primarily to save the overgrown arboretum from being razed, but du Pont's interest in gardening soon led to grand changes to the Gardens over his lifetime and the acquisition of numerous smaller adjacent parcels to give room to additional farming activities.  After his death in 1954, the Gardens were given to the public, with a foundation set up to continue his goals of horticulture, education, performing arts and sustainability in perpetuity.

The holiday season is one of the most popular times at Longwood, with  a fabulous display of lighted trees and fountains outside - thank goodness for the hot chocolate with baileys(!) - and impressive seasonal display inside the massive greenhouse.  The chilly walk was definitely worth the price of admission, which are issued in timed tickets, so as not to crowd the many beautiful sights. You can round out the winter wonderland experience with an ice show set to music, and sing-a-long of holiday standards accompanied by the massive 10,010-pipe Aeolian organ.

I especially enjoyed the greenhouse, with numerous beautiful displays of potted bulbs: amaryllis, narcissus, and oriental lilies to name a few. These often floated in a sea of poinsettias,  alyssum, or dusty miller.  Numerous lighted plant 'chandeliers' and wreaths dotted the space, lending a lush and regal feel. There was even a display of apples, amazingly color-blocked in a shallow pond to delineate a green and red scroll pattern.  The greenhouse also featured many walls of potted orchids, an extension of Mrs. William K. du Pont's famous collection that was given to Longwood in 1957. An impressive container collection to be sure!

The orchids are part of the permanent collection and can be seen
any time.  I'm very much looking forward to a return trip in the spring or early summer to see what delights the warmer seasons bring.

Happy Garden Dreams!

A Great Day for Weeding

[Random September Garden Musing]

Today is a great day for weeding
The sun is shining, the air is crisp
The work rewarding
The pace brisk

Breathe in the blue sky
Soak in the bird song
For tomorrow it is supposed to rain
And more rain to come before long

Today is a great day for weeding
Digging up ivy, pulling out grass
The barrels are gleaming
with bare dirt en mass

Breathe in the bird song
Soak in the blue sky
Forget for now what tomorrow brings
And join the sparrow who sings on high

Long overdue weeding mind you!

Fall Planting

Light at the end of the tunnel?

Well, its been a while... renovations, reservations, vacations... they all can take their toll on the garden.  If you've had a outrageously full summer as I have, then your garden may have gone all jungle tangle on you despite all those tame spring fantasies from whence you planted.

When I remember to lift my head out of the paint bucket, or unglue myself from the back splash, I have been rewarded by the 'veggies that could' (survive neglect).  From the wild mishmash of grape vines and volunteer nasturtiums I have plucked peas, fava beans, kale, early lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and of course, zucchini.  Excavating further to the perennial herbs, I appear to still have lovage, marjoram, rosemary, sage, and Italian oregano. So with these small treasures I have maintained that small thread of connection to my garden while both worlds were enveloped in beautiful chaos.

As the seasons turn, I contemplate - can I fit in a late-September sowing of something that will have a chance to germinate in these last few fits of sun before the rains set in?  Is it too late for cover crops?

And so I turn to the Oregon Tilth Planting Calendar, and see that I might try one last hurrah with the same springtime crops I started with, as the season seemed to elapse in a blink of an eye and a cloud of sanding dust.  Those same crops that we push the envelope with in spring, because of their tolerance of lower light and cooler temperatures, are the same ones we can try to coax back into the cold season of fall.

Fall-planted fava beans, shallots and garlic will overwinter, for spring and summer crops next year.  In fact, I tried fall-planted fava beans last year, and to my delight they made it through the winter at a seemingly permanent state of 6" high, to explode with growth in spring.  In fact, they out-produced the spring-planted favas, as where they were both planted is on the North side of a large birch-bark cherry tree,

and as it leafed out in the spring, it increasingly shaded the smaller spring-planted favas while the winter-planted favas were already setting flowers and fruit.  So keep this in mind if you have a sunny spot that becomes less so as spring turns to summer.  In fact, I think I'll exclusively plant fall favas from now on. A bonus too, is that they make a good cover crop over the winter, even if they all don't make it to spring. Just turn those back into the soil, a couple weeks before you are ready to plant in spring.  For more on fava beans, check out this post.

Other veggies to sow now are peas and radishes. Choose quick-maturing varieties for greater success - indicated by the 'number of days' section on the seed package.  Use the package directions to plant, and ensure that the seeds stay moist if those fall rains aren't helping you out. If you get a cold snap during the germination period, try covering the seed with row cover to increase the microclimate around them by a couple of degrees.

If you have a cold frame or a method to cover your container (see resources below), then you could also try your hand with lettuce and mustard greens as they will need more protection to reach a mature stage. Look for lettuces with 'winter' or 'hiver' (French for winter) in their names, or anything that suggests being more cold-hardy. One tried and true variety is 'The Marvel of the Four Seasons' (or Mervielle de Quatre Saisons as its know in its native French).  I'm also going to broadcast sow some mesclun mix, as this is eaten at an earlier stage in growth.

The thing to remember is to be patient - the lower light and cooler temps will make the time from planting to germination longer, sometimes by double.  Help this along by either: 1] starting with transplants (bought or home-grown), 2] germinating seeds indoors just like in elementary by wrapping seeds in wet paper towel, 3] covering the seeds with a cloche, row cover, or cold frame to help warm the air a couple degrees.  Watch it though - if you have a cover on and get a 70 degree day, you can fry those little seedlings, so keep an eye on the forecast.

So in a nutshell the name of the fall planting game is:

• early varieties/short number of days
• cold-hardy varieties (like you would use in the spring)
• giving some cold-protection will help things along
• transplants are great if you can make/find them

RESOURCES

Some great sources for fall planting and looking towards overwintering crops are:

Oregon Tilth Planting Calendar - pdf you can download and use throughout the year to record planting times

Fall and Winter Vegetable Gardening in the Pacific Northwest - pdf from OSU Extension, includes how to make cold frames and cover beds

OSU's Growing Your Own is also a great, general resource, with a specific section on Fall & Winter Gardening, including a simple calculation you can do to determine if a variety you want to start now will make it before the average first frost date.

Mother Earth News - winter container garden article about bringing those veggies inside for longer harvest

Garden Betty has a fun picture tutorial about starting seeds on paper towel (or coffee filters, or newsprint).

And if you had a bumper crop this year, or just like to get a heaping box of late-season bounty from your neighbor, farmer or green grocer, check out these great Canning and Preserving Links at Very Good Food ~ For Goodness Sake.

The Garden As (In)Dependence

I recently came across a couple of articles that extol the virtues of the garden, as both a means to

our becoming more independent and self-reliant, and the reverse - understanding our dependence on farms and the natural world as a whole to supply our food. Taken together they offer two complementary angles on the complex web that is the 'food economy'.

First was Robert Rodale's 1976 editorial about personal independence from a past issue of Organic Gardening & Farming. Click here to read the whole article. What he wrote nearly 30 years ago is just as pertinent today: that by regaining some of our independence - be it through cultivation, energy, transportation or thought - we become more self-reliant and resilient, as individuals and as a nation. (Emphasis throughout is mine).

The garden is the best place to start looking for ways to help people become more independent. A garden is both the symbol and reality of self-sufficiency — especially an organic garden, which recycles organic wastes of the yard and household, permits the production of significant amounts of food with only minimal reliance on outside resources. Any campaign to boost personal independence should start by helping people become gardeners — teaching, motivating, and making land available. p.2

Through the garden we are able to do more with our own resources, and promote our independence from one of the largest areas of (potential) corporate influence in our lives -

agribusiness.

Here we can turn to the second article to see how promoting independence through the garden can help us to connect more directly with the food on our plate. Wendell Barry states in Pleasures of Eating: 

Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea —something they do not know or imagine — until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table. p.1

By engaging directly with our food through growing it, we establish a personal relationship with the seasons, the cycles, the reality of food and feeding ourselves. We are less likely to mindlessly shovel food into our mouths if we have used a shovel to procure it.

For most it is not desirable or feasible to grow all one's own (or one's family's) food, however the simple act of growing some food - be it a pot of thyme on the windowsill or thirteen barrels of tomatoes - helps us to get in touch with the miracle of life and the complex web that sustains us. This conscious eating is in contrast to what Berry observes as a an exile of eater and eaten from biological reality.

When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food. p.2

Both authors advocate returning at least some aspects of food production to a smaller scale - ideally erasing many or most of the steps on the trajectory from farmer to eater. Consider Rodale's (27-year-old) statement:

Eating bread in America today is an act of faith in the smooth functioning of one of the most complex food-supply systems ever conceived. p.1

Contemplate, as Rodale does, the network of farmers, grain suppliers, food chemical plants, machine shops, trucking firms, advertising firms, and plastics manufacturers that are required to make one loaf of bread. As he states, "not everything is done most efficiently in big, complex ways". With complexity is more vulnerability to the slings and arrows of fate - climate change, oil prices, inflation, labor strikes, war, business failure, and so on. Compare this with the simple act of making bread at home.

Berry echos this sentiment that bigger isn't necessarily better, but from a health and ecology standpoint; "... as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases". This dependence on drugs and chemicals is all too apparent in the conventional food systems that relies on feedlots and overcrowding to achieve 'economies of scale' in the production of animals for meat, eggs, and dairy. Not to mention the chemicals needed to maintain huge monocultures of food crops for humans and livestock.

By maintaining a close connection to the food that sustains us and our local economies, we are not only asserting our independence, we are more able to connect too with the awe-some force of life at work in each mouthful. And in this way we are most able to truly be grateful for the gifts from farm and garden. Some food of thought from Mr. Berry:

Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. p.3

May your eating be filled with pleasure.

Sources

Berry, W. 1990. Wendell Berry: The Pleasure of Eating. In: What Are People For? Reprinted at http://www.organicgardening.com/living/wendell-berry-pleasure-eating?page=0,1

Rodale, R. 1976. It’s Time for a New Declaration of Independence. Organic Gardening and Farming. Reprinted at http://www.organicgardening.com/living/new-declaration-of-independence?page=0,0

Fava Feast

One thing in the garden that I have managed to stay on top of while in the midst of a month-long-and-counting renovation is picking the fava beans.  The pods are swelling up nicely with plump emerald gems that are sweet and earthy and simple to prepare.  For a quick and easy recipe check out this VGF post.

I planted seeds last October to see how the favas might overwinter and do double duty as a cover crop.  I figured at the very least if they were killed off by frost that they would at least be adding some nitrogen to the soil.  And we didn't get a killing frost this winter so they made it through and are rewarding us with green goodness.

Young favas and purple mustard

I planted some additional favas in February when the peas went in, and the two sets of favas are only about 2 or 3 weeks different in pod development.  However, in the front yard the fall-planted favas are setting more fruit than the spring-planted ones.  I think this might be due to the large cherry tree that sits to the south of the veggie barrels there - the spring-planted favas had less light because the tree was leafing out during their early growth.  So I'm considering a spring planting next year only if I loose fall-planted ones over the winter as this seems to give them the best conditions.

I see bunnies!

Besides being delicious and fixing nitrogen in the soil, fava beans are beautiful plants. They have blue-green leaves that shimmer in the wind, composed of gracefully pinnate leaflets, and their white pea-like flowers have distinct purple-black dots on them that playfully remind me of bunnies (see for yourself!). Mine are 3 to 4 feet tall and each plant sports multiple branches, so 9 plants in a 22 inch diameter wine barrel is about the most intensely you can plant them in my experience.

Graceful favas and mustard blossoms

I've only grown the variety 'Long Pod' because its the only one they stock at the grocery store through Ed Hume seeds. However, with their great success in the cool wet spring weather here and somewhat miraculous overwintering, I'm going to branch out and try some other varieties this fall.  Fava beans (a.k.a broad beans) are common in many Mediterranean dishes, including the Italian pasta e fagoli and Lebanese foul medames. As you plan your fall garden, try some fava beans - they are a great and easy addition to your soil and table.



Pick when big and bumpy

For more about favas and specifics on how to grow them, check out this article from Ed Hume.


Verdant goodness!







Celebrate Spring!

It might not feel like it in your neck of the woods, but today is the vernal equinox - aka the first day of spring!  A time when day and night are equal.  As I write this a shaft of sunlight is breaking through the torrential downpour that we have been getting since late yesterday.  Maybe there is hope after all.

While your garden containers might look like this - or worse if you live north or east of the Pacific Northwest - there are some springy thinks that you can do in the meantime while you wait for the garden to awaken.

Many of the spring blooming bulbs and other plants can withstand a little more cold than your average blooms.  Crocus, Narcissus (including daffodils), Primula, pansies, tulips, and dwarf irises are all good choices for a pop of color at this time when we need it most.  These are usually found cheaply outside of all manner of stores this time of year to entice you into Spring Fever.  And while most could theoretically come back again next spring, many people treat them like annuals and turf them into the compost once the blooms have faded and we move into more temperate climes.

Another great plant for spring is the hellebore, and this can be treated more like an investment.  The beautiful cream, pink, purple or green flowers, streaked with tiny flecks, are one of the first perennials to bloom in late winter/early spring.  The bloom time is long - mine has be going for a month and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon - and is followed by handsome palmate (five-lobed) evergreen leaves.  This has the added bonus of creating a nice dark green backdrop to whatever blooms next, rather than creating a 'hole' in the garden that occurs after spring bulbs have withered.  You could most definitely grow hellebores in a container, though I would tend towards one with thicker sides for better insulation, or even wrapping the pot in burlap for a charming rustic look while adding some protection from the cold. They are great in part-shade, and are great underneath large deciduous trees.

Speaking of under trees, I like to add containers there to have the benefit of plants and color, while not being frustrated by digging around large roots, trying to shoehorn in plants.  An added bonus is that the contained plants don't have to compete with the tree for water, a feat which they would undoubtedly loose.  The tree also provides a slightly warmer microclimate, which is great to exploit for 'extending the season' so to speak - shrinking winter by extending spring and fall.

These containers happen to also be by my front steps, and so provide a nice heart-warming touch of spring where guests, passersby, the mailman and I can all enjoy it!  I planted up two, 12" diameter containers with an assortment of springy things.  The third container (under fir boughs) is a shallow bowl that holds tuberous begonias, which I am trying to overwinter successfully for a second year (last year was by total fluke, and the fact that we did not get a killing frost).  I am slowly removing more layers of boughs to acclimate them to the warming temperatures, while still protecting them from the swings of spring weather.  I check periodically to see if there are green shoots, at which point I'll remove more boughs to let more light in.  Keep your fingers crossed!

The forward-most brown, 12" container includes:

• 3 - 4" yellow primroses 
• 1 - 6-pack of burgundy pansies  

The primulas are grouped in the center.  Take care to arrange these such that their shapes complement each other to form what looks like one central plant or mass of flowers.  If one is a little smaller, place it in the spot where it will get the most sun (usually at the front but not always). This will give it a chance to catch up.  Then arrange the pansies evenly spaced around the outer edge. I'm expecting that the pansies will grow to fill in the gaps, but you could also add another 6-pack worth of pansies in the same or a contrasting color to have an instantly full pot.

In the rear 12" container, I did a 'front-facing' design with taller plants, at the back as it is really only viewed from three sides.  It includes:

• 1 - 4" pot of full-sized daffodils
• 1 - 4" pot of mini daffodils
• 1 - 4" pot of orange tulips
• 3 - 4" pots of yellow primroses
• 1 - 6-pack of burgundy pansies

Both daffodils are at the back as they are the tallest, tulips in the middle back as a medium height layer, and primroses in the middle in an inverted triangle around the tulips.  The pansies ring along the front edge, around the front three-quarters of the pot.

Happy Planting! Happy Spring!

I hope this gives you some ideas on how to enjoy some spring blooms while we wait for the whole symphony to warm up.  In the mean time, plan a Vernal Feast with Very Good Food!

Caprine Containers

While in Hawai'i recently I was enthralled by a friend's creative use of skulls as 'containers', or rather hosts, to all kinds of epiphytes (orchids & airplants) and even some succulents.

Hung outside in all manner of form and orientation, the natural pukas [1] in the skulls form a myriad of spots to tuck in small plants.  These creative containers also very slowly release nutrients to the plants as wind, rain, sun and time erode them.

If you are wondering about their origins, these skulls are primarily from goats, of which there are many feral herds on the Big Island, and which often have unfavorable encounters with traffic.  The heads are then buried in an ant hill for cleaning of any soft tissue, and then planted with Phalaenopsis spp., Mokara spp., Oncidium spp., Tiarella spp., and others.  Planting in a skull might not be your cup of tea, but it is a great example of renewal in the cycle of life.

For another round find in Hawai’i, check out a Very Good Food recipe turning beautiful yellow liliko’i (Passiflora edulis var. flavicarp; yellow passion fruit) into juice…and martinis!

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[1] Hawai’ian word for hole or opening