Port Potager

In theory, we should be planting peas and onions next weekend, but this is the state of things in the garden today: A series of four nor’easters and below-average temps have set us behind schedule for planting. I imagine the snow will be gone by next weekend, but I’m not sure if the soil will be ready to work or if it will be too frozen or too wet or too something else.  I’m not feeling in much of a rush this year since it’s been so miserable outside this month. The local weather reporters have taken to saying that March is the new February, and they’re right. Since we appear to have some additional time on our hands, I transplanted our broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower seedlings into peat pots: It should be noted that these seedlings look great  this year. I attribute this to more diligent use of our lamp to make sure they were getting enough light on all those cloudy, stormy days: The brassica is scheduled to be transplanted into the garden in t...

If you’ve been reading this blog for even a little bit, you’ve probably noticed how much we love tomatoes . One of the purest joys of summer is a nearly endless stream of fresh tomatoes, eaten warm from the vine with little to no preparation. Our favorite food is in jeopardy. We always start our tomatoes from seed during the winter, and we usually end up repotting them to give them more room to grow before setting them out in the garden. This year, however, our seedlings remained teeny-tiny for weeks. They sprouted quickly but then appeared to be stunted. This is actually one of the biggest  ones Kirk set out last weekend: If you’re thinking that’s too tiny to transplant, you’re probably right, but we did it anyway because they were just wasting away in the seed flats . Our hope was that some would begin to thrive in the richer soil of the actual garden. This looks to be true for the one above and for a handful of others (notably the Paisanos), but we lost a whole ...

It occurs to me that my last post was a little depressing , what with all the broken glass and hail. Things really aren't all that bad. Despite the way this winter insists on hanging around, we have a lot of new growth on our seed-starting shelf : Four whole trays of onions and leeks are getting bigger each day. They have their secondary leaves now and have been fertilized once already with some nutrient-rich aquarium water . These are brand new salad seedlings, which include arugula, spinach, lettuce and beets for greens. These germinated quickly, but will need to ride out several more weeks indoors until the cold frame soil warms up. The weather the past few days has not  been helpful in this department as lows have been in the teens. We also need to replace some glass on the cold frames to trap the heat they'll need to survive, so we're not expecting fresh salads any time soon. Our cabbage and broccoli seedlings are looking really good this y...

Finally! A weekend warm enough to get outside and dig in the dirt!  You may recall that last weekend the weather was terrible, our soil was still partially frozen, and we weren't able to adhere to our original planting schedule. Well, in a week's time the crocuses have bloomed and the soil has warmed (well, most of it, anyway). Because we had some catching up to do, our first weekend outside was a big one. Here's the run down of all the stuff we did. 1. Uncovered the fig tree: Back in the fall we stacked potato boxes around the fig tree  and filled them with leaves to protect the tree from the cold and wind. As you can see, the leaves kept the shape of the box. I guess we'll see in a few weeks how the tree fared as it leafs out again. Despite some droopy branches, there's at least one bud on it that looks ok so far, and if it made it through this harsh if a winter, I think it'll be a keeper. 2. Lots of garden bed prep. This means turn...

Kind of a sucky gardening day. I don't think that I should need my winter coat and gloves to fertilize fruit trees in April. I don't think there should be a windchill of 29 degrees in April. And I definitely don't think there should be 35 mph wind gusts in April: That's the destruction: yet another fence section bit the dust in the wind. So instead of building our last cold frame, Kirk is spending a cold afternoon working on rebuilding the fence section. Not cheap, either. The only bright side is that we can salvage the scrap from the old one for our new potato boxes . But still ... damn. Oh, and here's the death: These are ( were , in the case of all but three plants) our broccoli and cabbage seedlings. I've been hardening them off over the past two weeks, but this week was really too hard, I guess. They started out pretty spindly (especially the broccoli), most likely due to a two or three week stretch of cloudy days after they first spro...

It is cold. It's been cold all weekend. Tomorrow it will snow, and we are expecting so much that the state had to reschedule the MCAS exam (our statewide, bullshit standardized test).  Major prognostication fail, Punxsutawny Phil . And so we wait. Seedlings are popping up in the cold frames and on the windowsills, and they are doing well despite the freezing temps. So well, in fact, that the leeks and onions are rather in need of a haircut: These are our red onion seedings, which we planted about six weeks ago. As you can see, they are floppy and unruly. (The leeks are far better behaved, standing upright like good little soldiers — yet another example of their superiority .) Once onions and leeks get to be over four or five inches high, you can trim them back so they aren't so top heavy. This is a finesse job, because you have to ever-so-carefully untangle and lift up individual leaves, which are still pretty delicate. After their haircut (which I perfor...

Over the weekend we set out our broccoli and cabbage seedlings. These are the tiny plants that we started from seed back in February . These seedlings had been doing really well , up until the time when they were left out on the wind and got a sunburn during the hardening off process. That debacle killed some of the tiniest and slowed the growth of the rest. Still, we had several strong plants left, so we set them out on schedule: Above are very tiny broccoli seedlings. They are set in one-foot squares, a la Square Foot Gardening . Most of these seedlings have two adult leaves and a small root system, so in theory they should be transplant-able. Still, they seem kind of pathetic after their disastrous hardening-off, so I planted a seed or two next to each one as an insurance policy. An additional insurance policy here is the row cover you see above. Kirk quickly knocked together what basically amounts to a large wooden staple that we pushed part way into the earth. A...

One project on this past week's to-do list was to get our broccoli and cabbage seedlings ready to plant outside. Remember how well they were doing sitting in the sunny window with their aquarium fertilizer ? Here's a reminder: So last Saturday I started setting the seed flat outside on the screened-in porch to get the plants acclimated to the colder air outside. This went well for the first several days, until we started moving them into the sunshine. Then one afternoon the wind (the goddamned wind here!) kicked up, and when I got home to the seedlings, they looked like this: Some of what you see there are the initial seed leaves falling off, which is normal. A lot more of it, though, are wilty, shriveled leaves that dried out in the wind. It's not a total disaster, because they perked up again (not perfectly, but enough) over night when they were back inside and watered again. It is also bone-dry here, so the conditions were harsher than I realized (unti...

The past two days were just too beautiful to do anything but go for long walks in the sunshine on Plum Island: I don't think it's possible to overstate what an incredible gift this week has been. I guess if you live below the Mason Dixon line it might be hard to understand, but an 80-degree day in March in northeastern Massachusetts is nothing short of miraculous. Anyway, while I was dipping my toes in the ocean with my kids, stuff happened while I wasn't really looking, including the following: Our granite steps finally arrived! We never got around to ordering them when we finished all the bricks, but now that they are in place, it looks like they've always been there. Kirk muscled them into position while I was at the beach, so that was a doubly nice surprise.   Along with the delivery of our back steps came another giant pile of dirt from Landscaper's Depot . This is another mixture of half loam and half compost, and we need it to fi...

So far, the aquarium water fertilizer seems to be doing the seedlings a lot of good: This is just a day or two after I gave the broccoli and cabbage a teaspoonful of diluted aquarium water, and the results have been pretty impressive. You can see in the broccoli seedlings above that the real leaves are much bigger than they were before I fertilized, if you compare it to this photo taken the day I was working on the aquarium water thing: Ok, so I admit that this picture is taken from farther away than the first one, but if you click on it to enlarge, it's pretty clear how much smaller these seedlings are before they got the magic aquarium water treatment. If I were more scientific, I would be measuring and taking daily pictures from the exact same distance, but I'm not. Maybe that would be a good science project for one of the kids next year. Anyway, the point is that, so far, that tiny bit of fertilizer is working out. Maybe by next weekend I will need t...

Last weekend I started some tomatillo seeds. These plants get big and bushy and are quite prolific, so we only have three plants in our garden plan. I planted three seeds each in three yogurt cups to hedge our bets: They are in a black cake pan to try to give them some extra heat, since tomatillos need really warm temperatures to germinate — even at 75-80 degrees, it can take two weeks for the seeds to sprout. Nothing is going on yet, but that's not surprising since our indoor temps are likely around 65 degrees, and maybe 70 in that window on a sunny day. These seeds aren't exactly new (maybe three seasons old?), but we store them very carefully in an airtight container in the back of the refrigerator, and that has served us well for saving seeds in the past. Hopefully this is just a matter of being patient for another week or so.  The rest of the seedlings are doing well. The leeks we started two weeks ago have sprouted and are stretching up to the sun: T...