Port Potager

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...

Last weekend Kirk sowed the seeds for fall broccoli and cabbage. A day later, this is what we woke up to: After Kirk assured me he didn't just broadcast the seeds all over the bed, we figured out that they were probably mustard seedlings. The birds got a lot of the seed heads before we harvested it , so we figured the house finches probably dropped seeds in these beds as they flew away.  But then we noticed that there were hardly any seedlings popping up in the newly-cleared bed where the mustard plants used to be. That didn't add up with the "birds are messy eaters" theory of these seeds spreading around, because the most would have been dropped right where they were picking at them. Then we took a walk past the compost bins:  More mustard seedlings! Mystery solved: To amend the beds for fall planting, we used compost from the bottom of the bin where I had thrown the stems and chaff, so obviously a good deal of seeds ended up there as well. ...

After it finally warmed up a bit yesterday afternoon, we got outside to do some soil prep. Many of our beds are filled with that 50-50 loam/compost mixture that we brought in last fall , so they won't need anything more than a top dressing of compost when things are planted.  The areas where things were planted last year , though, need to be replenished, so we added a few wheelbarrows of compost and turned it into those beds. This aerated the soil as well. It's been great so far this season to be able to use our own compost from the piles we started when we first moved in back in 2010: We started with the one closest to the garage, and there was a lot of good stuff at the bottom. We pretty much used most of that one — enough to be able to remove the wire from around the outside. We want to use these two piles up and replace them with sturdier pallet compost bins , so this was a good start on making space for those as well. It's not like the compost just sc...

Lest you think this past weekend and all that sunshine has only been about flowers: We also moved the cold frame and planted it with some cool-weather salad veggies. It is in a row along the patio that will actually mostly be fallow this year. Part will be planted with strawberries, but we are phasing those in , so there is space for an early cold frame here where it won't affect anything in the planting plan later. Anyway, we put three rows of carrots (Danvers Half-long) along the back where the frame is tall, then in front of that a row of radishes and a row of beets. In front of all that are mesclun and spinach, which take up about the whole front half of the cold frame.  With our extra-warm weather, the cold frame is nice and warm, so we are hoping for quick germination and growth to tide us over until the rest of the garden is really up and running. I went out today to check the moisture, and it was quite warm inside, even with our foggy, 40-degree day today....

Thus sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud; And after summer evermore succeeds Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold: So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet. ~Henry VI, Part II, Act 2, scene 4 Today we went out to close down the garden for the winter. Why, you ask, did we not take care of this yesterday, when it was a sunny 50 degrees outside? Because we were hungover, that's why. So today, as temperatures just kept dropping, we lit a fire and got to work. Tomorrow night it's supposed to get down to single digits, so this is it for the 2011 garden. As you can see above, Kirk pulled out our arugula cold-hardiness experiment . He did manage to salvage many perfectly fine leaves — mostly new growth low to the ground. Down came the tunnels around the broccoli that we salvaged after the last big winds uncovered the tunnels and let them freeze. We packed away the PVC and the plastic for next year, when we'll have something much sturdier design...

Another trash-to-treasure accomplishment from this past weekend? New compost bins made of out of the pallets leftover from all the bricks we used back in the summer. Up to this point, our compost piles were incredibly slap-dash. When we moved in, we knew we wanted to get them started, so we used some wire fencing to make big, circular corrals for our leaves, kitchen scraps, and garden waste: As you can see, they are neither attractive nor particularly sturdy. The one on the right has fallen apart, but that also reveals that, after two seasons of breaking down, there's some nice, dark stuff in there. Still, after going to all the trouble of designing and building our dream garden, it would be a shame to spoil the view by leaving piles of crap around the edges. In fact, our compost bin design helped us deal with not one but two piles of crap at the same time: We had a dozen or so pallets in varying conditions from all the bricks stacked up in the driveway....

Did I mention that last week we got a little extra dirt to top off the remaining raised beds? So this is what 20 cubic yards looks like after a giant truck dumps it in your driveway. We had to buy more loam because we ran out of topsoil that we saved from the excavation, but we caved and got Super Soil, which is half loam and half compost. Yes, we can get all the free compost we want at the Newburyport tree dump and mix it by hand with the loam, but c'mon … we're tired . That is a lot of extra shoveling (into the car, out of the car, into the wheelbarrow, turn it into the rest of the dirt). So we splurged on the more expensive dirt, and are loving the time and labor savings. The best part? This is about half of what we actually still need to fill the rest of the beds. They don't make a truck that big, though, so we got as much as we could. Also, we figured since we were going to get charged twice for delivery anyway, we'd just get half for now. You know, in ca...

A garden is really an experience that hits all five senses. I've mostly been sharing photos, and the nature of writing about it means you're getting a lot of visual imagery. The day before we left for our quick weekend trip to Pennsylvania, though, was a case study in olfactory gardening. Here are the smells of midsummer in our garden. Ocean We enjoyed some lovely cool temperatures (like highs in the 70s, lows in the 50s) in the middle part of last week, and the wind off the water was partly responsible for this. Whenever we get an east wind, I am reminded just how close we are to the Atlantic Ocean and the Merrimack River. Of course I know this all the time, but when the cool moist air blows in over the High Street ridge, I really  know it because I can smell the sea-salt air all around me. This is one of my all-time favorite smells, so every time it blows up I am glad we moved here. Smelling the ocean makes working in the garden feel less like working and more like ...