Port Potager

The final planting quadrant is also the smallest, because it lacks the center C that the others have in favor of a patio area for picnicking. It also has a full bed of strawberries along with existing perennial plantings of roses, rhubarb and lavender, so there aren’t many areas left to fill. Across the top row is garlic that was planted back in October. When this is harvested in July, it will be replanted with winter green like arugula, bok choy and turnips. The remaining section has Paisano paste tomatoes.  Along the right side is a short trellis of snap peas, which will shade a patch of mesclun and other spring greens. Right now this is the site of our winter cold frame of mache and spinach, so our plan is simply to interplant the mesclun with these plants in early spring and gradually remove and replace things they bolt throughout the season. There are also both winter and summer carrots close to the house, where they can handle the shade that creeps in during th...

So there's no more fuss and there's no more scenes and my garden thrives! (You should see my nectarine.) But I'm telling you the same I tell Kings and Queens don't ever ever ever mess around with my greens! ~ from Into the Woods , by Stephen Sondheim We're still slogging through our kitchen renovation , and it's sucking up a lot of time that we would ordinarily be spending on preserving the last of our summer fruits — not mention cooking delicious meals using all that garden produce. An embarrassing amount of apples, pears, and tomatoes have been fed to the chickens due to our inability to eat them in a timely fashion. One thing that's doing well and can be stored in place outside  are the cool-weather greens. Though the back half of the summer was a dry one, we had a fair amount of rain early this month to get us back on track. The moisture and the cooler temperatures mean happy greens: Cilantro, because it's related to carro...

Although for the most part this fall had been mild and calm, that all changed last weekend with ( surprise! ) a gusty wind storm that tore up one of our greenhouse tunnels: This one houses our leeks (to the left), plus some root veg, bok choy, arugula, and cabbages. Well, it used to. Now it's the home of bok choy popscicles: The picture doesn't quite get across that during the rapid temperature drop into the teens, the bok choy was frozen absolutely solid. I could have broken pieces off with a snap, like that experiment where a scientist dips a rubber ball in liquid nitrogen and then smashes it on the ground. So much for the stir fry we were planning on. The leek leaves are similarly frozen, but since that's not the part we eat, it's not a problem. Underground, the fat white bulbs are still happy. Kirk was able to fix this just to cover the leek half up before the big rain storms hit last night. The leeks would likely survive the winter uncover...

This weekend we got our cold frame back in place over the soil we managed to turn last weekend : As you can see, we added a new frame on the end. We have what seems to me much more than our fair share of blustery days here, and back in December  the wind took out more of the old storm windows that we use to cover our cold frames. That incident finally left us with no more back-ups, and one less than we need to cover the whole cold frame.  For a free fix, Kirk used some scrap wood to build a frame the size of the gap, then stapled some plastic around it. It's not at all pretty, but it should serve the purpose. We'll see how it holds up in the rain and snow — we may need to put some leftover chicken wire or a crosspiece to support the plastic if it starts to get weighed down in the middle. This should get us through the spring, and over the summer we plan to build some new cold frames that will be sized properly for these beds anyway. Once the cold frame was re...

Some of our Spanish Rosa garlic has sprouted an alien life form! Not really — these are garlic scapes. Instead of a flower, sometimes garlic will sprout a scape, which is like an extra little bulblet on a stem. You could let that continue to grow and become tiny garlic cloves (this is how a garlic plant can go to seed), but if the plant puts its energy into the scape, the garlic bulb in the ground won't get very big. And that's really the goal. So we cut a few of our garlic scapes last night for dinner: These scapes are alongside a green onion and the leaves of some bok choy that has bolted (the leaves still taste fine, but there's no nice cabbage head like last fall ). We also pulled our earliest carrots and chopped up a couple of overgrown radishes for this stir fry: There's also cilantro in here from the garden. The ingredients not grown by us are the rice and pork (although the pork is from a nearby farm ). This is almost a totally Made i...

Today turned out to be pretty warm, although it began at a frosty 29 degrees Fahrenheit. For readers abroad (and according to my stats, I have readers in Russia and Germany, as well as old friends in other far-flung places!), that's about -2 degrees Celsius. That left my newly de-foliated Brussels sprouts looking unhappy, and when I went out to get a closer look, their leaves were definitely frosted over. So I took a page out of the Farmer Boy playbook and poured water over the frosted plants while they were still well shaded early in the morning. That melted the frost off before the sun hit them, and they seemed no worse for wear as the day went on. So while we mull over whether or not to get those Brussels sprouts under some greenhouse tunnels of their own, let's take a peek at some of the things we do have in there. We opened them up today to get some air circulation going to let the plants dry out a bit — some of our cilantro was a little slimy after being closed up. Th...

Carrots, of course! We pulled these last week, but then got so caught up in the winter preparation that I forgot about it. These are from the first planting of carrots that we put in back in August . These are about 83 days into that planting, and were the biggest ones. This particular variety is Danvers Half Long, and they don't get very long (as the name suggests). Instead, they stay kind of fat and stumpy. There are many other carrots, but not many are crowning out of the soil yet, so we will let them stay in the ground as long as we can. Many are in a cold frame or under the greenhouse tunnel, so they should hopefully be good for several more weeks without freezing. So not too many carrots yet, but what we did do with them was excellent: This is a much more interesting version of the stir fry dishes we've been having with the garden veggies. In addition to our typical chicken and bok choy, this includes the carrots and some snap peas from the garden as well. (T...

We still have pea blossoms ( white and purple ) in the vegetable garden, and the occasional (white) bean blossom that is still going strong. Two new items from out back in the veggie garden: The Munstead lavender I planted late has blossomed. I had no expectations of it flowering this year, and was content to catch its scent by just brushing up against its leaves (which are quite fragrant on their own). I could see it budding out for a while, and was hoping it would get to flower before frost, and here it is! It's kind of spindly this year, but these flowers are all bonus, so who cares? I'm hoping it will fill in to a fragrant mini-hedge along the entrance to our patio next year. The second flower is an accidental one: blossoms on bok choy that has bolted. I suppose this goes to show that planting 16 heads of bok choy in one round of planting (and in each of two more subsequent plantings) is more than we can eat. Next year I'll cut that in half, but what can I s...

All that cabbage looper squishing paid off: our bok choy is ready! In the old garden we were never successful with bok choy, so this fully fleshed-out head is very exciting. As you can see if you look closely, I had just finished watering it when Kirk called out for some for the stir fry. Two knife slices later: It occurred to me that for the past few months I haven't been in any of these photos, and I don't want you to think that Kirk does all the work. So here is me harvesting. Instead of pulling the bok choy, I cut it off at the stem. With regular cabbage, this will cause it to grow back in the form of several mini-cabbages. I'm not sure exactly what will happen with bok choy, but one that Kirk cut last week already has some new shoots: I'll keep you posted on how the re-growth goes. As for dinner, Kirk made a stir fry with those two heads of bok choy and some chicken. Also in the mix were ginger, garlic, mirin, soy sauce, and rice vinegar. Oh, a...

Hurricane Irene turned out not to be a very big deal for us. The power flickered maybe 3 times but stayed on; the cable went out for a couple hours on Sunday and again this morning. During the storm, Kirk had to run outside during a break in the rain (yes, we had breaks in the rain here on the North Shore) to stake one of our peach tree that had developed a worrisome  Torre di Pisa  quality to it. The only thing we had lying about to use as a stake was this bamboo pole. It is one of several leftovers that were part of privacy fence sections we used in the Red House. I really like the way it looks, and am now wondering if they will be strong enough for permanent use. Today (as you can see in the photos) is just gorgeous, and when I went out into the brilliant blue and sunshine, this is what I found in the garden: Some maple leaves blew onto the patio and into the garden beds. And … A branch came down. This is a four-foot path, so that should give you an idea o...

The weather this week has been just gorgeous, so it has been a pleasure to go out each morning and make a loop around the winter veggies to pull stray weeds, keep seedlings watered, and to get the lawn sprinklers going. Oh, and I have a new job during that walk-about as well. Since the earthquake didn't manage to shake these guys off, I have to pick the cabbage loopers off all the plants they are eating. This one is on a cabbage seedling. If you're having trouble seeing him, I am too. They are ever-so-cleverly the exact same color as the leaves of all plants in the cabbage family: cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc. To make it even harder, they are very often right in the center of the leaf along the vein, and they are well-camouflaged there because they look like a continuation of that. That's where this one is, in case you haven't put your contacts in yet today. He's right below the giant holes chewed in the leaves. If a few tiny holes were the only...

The boring part of today was pulling more weeds out of the last section of bed around the patio area (a leftover task from yesterday). The frustrating part of today was running out of compost before we could finish amending said bed, leaving a task incomplete until the tree dump opens again on Tuesday (provided we have access to a truck, that is). The great part of today? Sowing the fall veggie seeds! This is only a small section of the beds that we sowed today, but it's the most interesting one to look at because we put up the trellis and pea netting. Kirk built it for our old garden and made it take-apart-able, so it was all ready to go after a season packed up in the garage. The ladder is there because we needed some height from which to bring the sledgehammer down upon the posts, but it went back together great, after the annoyance of untangling the netting and threading the posts through it (much less arguing about that this time around, though, so hooray for marital h...