Port Potager

Working our way around the garden, we come to the workshop quadrant. I guess we could also call this the office quadrant, since it forms the bulk my view during the day. Here’s what I’ll be gazing out at when I’m procrastinating: In the center C are celery and parsley, zucchini, cantaloupe, and a Sungold tomato plant. The Sungold, celery, and parsley are partially shaded, which should be fine. It should help slow the ultra-prolific Sungold down to a manageable harvest level, and celery and parsley will do well with some shade in the summer anyway. Across the top, as always, are our perennial grapes and herbs. In the upper portion of the right side is a succession planting of dill. This is the shadiest section of the garden, but dill is basically a weed and will do fine here. Below that is a semi-shaded section that will lie fallow for most of the season until we plant next winter’s spinach and mache in a cold frame. Across the bottom is a long trellis of peas and a r...

March has it backwards this year. Our lamb-like weather was all at the beginning of the month, when we actually hit ~80 degrees and had to prop open the cold frames so as not to fry our early spring spinach salads: We are also pleased to have some kale to eat until we need that bed to plant something else later in the spring:   But then, if you wait a day or so, the temperatures will plummet and send you squarely back into lion territory: That’s the same kale, this time with several inches of snow on top. The snow came down so hard on Monday that the kids had a snow day: It all melted by the afternoon, but since then it has been much cooler. Seasonable, I guess, but I’m looking forward to April, when spring can begin in earnest and we can start getting some peas and more early greens going.

Though the bulk of this month has been ridiculously frigid, once in a while we get a "warm" day. Take last Sunday, for instance:  After an early morning icy-snow situation, the afternoon temperature got up to almost  the average high that we could normally expect. We used the brief warm-up to dig out the tunnels and check on the leeks: As you can see, the plastic is a little worse for wear after being beaten down by by the snow. Once inside, Kirk really had to wrestle with the leeks to dig them out. Though we've had one warm day, the ground is still mostly frozen, even in the tunnels: He managed to get a few big ones out, though. The leaves aren't too much to look at, but the thick stems are still fine: Even the part under the soil was mostly frozen, so these are definitely for cooking: they'll be soft when they thaw. That's ok, though. When's the last time you used raw leeks for anything? We also took a look at the carro...

As I mentioned yesterday , we were super-excited to find our winter salad greens alive and well in the cold frames this past weekend. In addition to enjoying them on burgers and sandwiches, we also had a much-awaited fresh salad with Sunday dinner: So much green on this plate! We had sautéed chicken, steamed ( formerly frozen ) green beans with toasted pecans, and our spinach salad. Since it's been such a long, salad-free winter for us, the spinach would have been delicious to us if we had just eaten it raw and plain, but Kirk dressed it up to be extra-delectable with bacon and mushrooms. The salad was mostly spinach, but also had some mache and kale thrown in for good measure. The greens are topped with sliced, sautéed mushrooms, big bits of bacon, and toasted pecans. The dressing was a vinaigrette made with bacon fat leftover from frying the bacon, plus vinegar and a bit of dijon mustard.  Very rich with all that bacony goodness, and even better with the additio...

We had a lot of melting this weekend, thanks to bright sunshine and temperatures in the 50s.  The 50s! It would appear that I have fully acclimated to life as a New Englander. When we first moved here 16 years ago, I would shiver in my car in the mornings, and end up with cramps in my legs from all the tension in my muscles trying to ward off the cold. For real. Now I find that with the right gear (fleece, ski jacket, lined hat, lined boots, insulated and waterproof gloves), I can shrug off all but the worst of the polar vortex like a native. But the real sign that I've acclimated? I didn't even glance at most of those items today. It was just shy of 40 degrees outside when I left the house yesterday morning, but the sun was out, and a fleece and sneakers  (and regular clothes, of course) were plenty to enjoy a good long hike around town today.  I ended up taking off the fleece about halfway through. I'm not the only one enjoying the sudden warm...

I know, I know. How can I be thinking about frost on a day, during a week like this ? It's so hot that the ice rink down the street can barely keep it together for skating classes. Still, our average first frost date is October 15, and that's just 90 days from today. That all seems very far away until you start reading the backs of seed packets. When some of your cabbages take 90 days to mature, and your broccoli is looking at 75 days, it's time to get fall planting plans underway. If you care about eating once it gets cold and dark, that is. Our peas have just finished for the season, and over the weekend we pulled out the trellises to make room for some fall crops. Ditto on the garlic, which is harvested and curing in the workshop. That leaves us space to get cracking on our fall plantings, most of which I sowed over the past couple of days: I realize that empty dirt isn't all that exciting to look at, but that's where the action is. In ...

Just when we thought we were out of the woods —  snow from the blizzard almost all melted , chickens making short work of early spring tilling chores , and seeds planted in cold frames  — this happened: We're coming up on another foot of snow falling here. Sheesh. I know that weather forecasters aren't infallible, but maybe they could dispense with the hype so we'd take them seriously when it counts. The forecast for this snow went from being kinda accurate, to major eye-roll-enducing "snowquester" hype, to backpedaling from the hype, to actual reality. Which is worse than the original prediction, which we were all told to ignore.  Anyway, a foot of snow is a (pretty big) inconvenience for us, what with school being canceled and the inevitable shoveling (paths and now garden beds, so we can continue turning and prepping them once they dry out a bit). Also a snow day for the ladies, who were put to work yesterday thanks to the addition of the...

Heartened by our success in keeping this spring's salad bed (relatively) unfrozen , Kirk took a look in the mache and spinach cold frame that we planted last fall. It has been a few weeks since we checked it out, with all the snow : And it looks great! Kirk scratched up the soil, and it is fluffy and light, and not even a little bit frozen. The plants you see are a few left-over spinach plants (and one endive), and they are doing fine. If we just had a little more sun, they'd probably start growing again. And that got us to thinking that we could probably get new spinach started in that cold frame right now. After all, the soil is great, there's plenty of space, and spinach is quick — 41 days to harvest, according to the seed packet (which is almost certainly very optimistic, but with some luck we may have spinach by Patriots' Day ). So I sowed some spinach seeds in the gaps, gave them a drink, and put the glass back on the cold frame. If you look c...

We've had this dinner before, this quiche and salad combo:  But what is special about this one is that I have a plate of fresh food in front of me on a frigid January 21st. As I write this, it is snowing and down to just 24 degrees.  And yet.  The chickens are laying ( thanks to our adjustment of their light ), the greens are growing (or at least remain in edible dormancy,  thanks to our tending of the tunnels and cold frames ).  With gardens and life, this could all change with the weather. We won't see temperatures above freezing for the next week, and that could send our chickens into a dry spell. Single-digit nights could kill our mache and kale, regardless of the protection we've built. It's a harsh week ahead. But this bit of a miracle on a plate reminds me that our ant-like diligence in summer pays off in the dark stretches of winter. There's a lot that comes our way on the wind that is out of our control, but we can still build ...

Even with a pretty nice afternoon , it's hard not to feel some serious winter blahs when the sun sets at 4:09 p.m. We're working on just over nine hours of daylight here, and that's nothing short of terrible. One thing that did help make that early nightfall better was a really great Sunday dinner. First, a tray of vegetables ready for roasting: This is full of fresh-picked carrots and leeks, plus potatoes and garlic from winter storage. They were cut into pieces, drizzled with a bit of olive oil, and given a generous helping of rosemary leaves and whole sprigs of thyme. After an hour of roasting veggies and the beef, the house smelled great, and it was time to eat. Green salad to start: Fresh from the cold frames and greenhouse tunnels are lettuces, mache, and arugula. There are also some slices of fennel bulbs that we pulled last weekend. Non-garden ingredients are thinly sliced Granny Smiths and pomegranate seeds. Yum! Then the main course: ...

Out in the garden, where the cold frame used to be (ours are heavy but portable, so we removed it the other day, after a few weeks of having the glass off full time), you can find pretty little radishes like this: There is also a lot of young spinach, arugula, and mesclun to be had: So, finally, we enjoyed our first springtime garden dinner last night: The salad comes directly from the garden patch in the photos above. It's made of the last of our winter mache from the fridge, plus fresh spinach, arugula, and lettuce from the former cold frame bed. There are also radishes sliced thin for extra color and flavor (I find that a little bit of radish goes a long way). As usual, the only dressing is a splash of olive oil and lemon juice, plus some cracked pepper. Even Jonas the Lettuce Hater was on board with this salad. The other dish is pesto chicken over pasta. Kirk used some pesto cubes we had in the freezer (remember when we made them last fall ?) to c...

When we planted our peas last weekend, we had to make room for them in one of the rows that still had some winter veggies in it. Here's the last of the winter harvest: Here we have kale, spinach, and mache from the winter cold frame ( long since removed  from that row, actually). On the small plate to the right are onion sprouts, which are the tiniest baby onions pulled from our seed flats to thin them out. They are oniony and delicious on a salad, which is where most of these veggies ended up. We may also make some more kale chips , since there's a lot of kale left. Hopefully we'll have new salad ingredients from our cold frame again soon!

Today was an absolutely gorgeous day here in Newburyport: 75 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. In the morning we hit a local nursery to see if they had any herbs we could plant (we need to transplant some to their new locations in the back of the garden as well). To be honest, we were trying to find something to do in the garden. Alas, all they had were some flats of pansies. It really is too early to expect to put out plants yet in Massachusetts, and this probably spared us a lot of trouble protecting things when (if?) temperatures settle back into some kind of normal range.  There's just not much to do in the garden yet, so we took a hike on a local trail (which was amazing, by the way, drowned fisher cat and/or beaver and all). When we got home from our little five-mile trek, we had dinner on the patio . And not just any humdrum, mid-March dinner: burgers from the grill and salad picked fresh from the garden . Check it: That salad contains some of the kale, mac...

It's been a while since I've written, but that's because there just isn't very much going on in a Massachusetts garden in the middle of January. We've been having a pretty mild winter: Last weekend we were able to go skating on the pond , but this past week temperatures were back up into (at least) the forties, and the Winter Carnival that was supposed to take place this weekend was cancelled. I'm ambivalent about our weird winter. On one hand, it's a bummer not to have at least a little snow to sled on or a frozen pond to skate on, and I do love the gift of a snow day or two to break up the monotony of winter. On the other hand, it's been great not to have to shovel, to be getting out of school on time in June (so far, so good), and to have mild weather for our remaining garden greens. After the final January clean-up of the garden, we were left with only some kale, mache, and a tiny group of spinach seedings that sprouted too late to get very big...

… flowers dead lie wither'd on the ground, As broken glass no cement can redress …  ~Shakespeare, Poem XIII Hmm … where's the rest of the cold frame? There should be three more glass panes on that one, and now the baby mache is all exposed to temperatures in the teens (and, today, some snow). If you look carefully, you can see some bits of white in the quadrant behind the cold frames. Let's walk back there and take a closer look: Well, crap. I don't know what the biggest problem is: the likely ruination of that cold frame's mache crop, the definite destruction of the glass panes, or the suckiness that will be the clean up of all those bits of glass out of the gravel paths. Oh, and out of the leaf mulch over the garlic bed in the spring: Now, that must have been some wind. Why is it so windy here? This is the fourth or fifth time since we've lived here that we woke up to backyard destruction after a windy night … and that's not inclu...

It is, at last, getting very cold. Last night I went out and picked what I'm pretty certain was one of the last salads of the year for us. Our greenhouse hoops with carrots, lettuce, and the cilantro is on its last legs: the cilantro has started to succumb to the cold, and there's not much lettuce left in there to pick. In preparation for some really cold (low 20s) nights this weekend, I picked a lot of unprotected greens, carrots, and herbs. Here's what I ended up with: The mixed greens included arugula, spinach, beet greens, mache, mesclun, and a bit of romaine I found growing back on a stem we had cut months ago. I also added some mint, cilantro, and chives that were hanging on through the cold.  The carrots, by the way, are true baby carrots. "Baby carrots" from the grocery store are usually actually regular carrots that are whittled down to standard sizes and shapes. (I don't even want to think about what happens to the wasted carrot shavings....