Port Potager

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...

After a lovely day at the beach on Plum Island, I went out to weed and thin our first plantings . Guess what? There were enough leaves from the seedlings I had to pull out for an honest-to-God salad! Here's what I saved from the thinning: On the left is lettuce; on the right is bok choy. That's kind of a weird salad ingredient, but it was small and tender. There's more: On the left is arugula; on the right is beet greens (with the red stems) and turnip greens (with white/purple stems). We decided to mix it all together for a micro-green salad for dinner. Kirk topped the salad with the world's easiest dressing: lemon zest, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and olive oil. No mixing or measuring — just squeeze or sprinkle or drizzle on and toss.  It's really light and fresh, and perfect when your veggies already taste good. The finished product: This was delicious and satisfying … right up until I noticed part of it was crawling around my plate. Even though ...

Summer is on its last legs, and we have just one weekend left to enjoy of it. It's a long weekend for me, since we don't have class on Rosh Hashanah — a perfect time to get in our gardening chores while it's still nice out.  Some clean-up from the summer garden is already under way: Kirk pulled out a spent zucchini plant, as well as our pickling cukes and one of our tomatillos. I also yanked four Roma tomatoes that were blocking the sun from new lettuces. Last fruits were saved (including some green tomatoes — more on our plans for those later), and the rest is compost. A lot of our work now is around our fall plantings — and all of the water, since I'm no longer irrigating summer plants. Here's what's starting to come into its own as cooler weather sets in: The cold frame is in place, and seedlings of mache, mesclun and spinach are doing well. I filled in some gaps today, sowing our last seeds of 2012. The glass that is on the cold frame isn...

Although this summer was been mild and hurricane-free, we often do get a good deal of wind here. Our old row cover fabric  from the spring took a beating because of it, so we picked up some new to protect our broccoli bed from cabbage loopers : This fabric is of much better quality than the stuff we used before, and it comes in rolls 13 feet wide. We got a 16-foot length, which (as you can see) is too big for our 4x8 broccoli patch. Turns our we based our measurements on our older, taller PVC hoops. Better too big than too small, though. We folded up the ends and used bricks to hold them in place: Another upgrade to help hold the row covers in place are these pvc clips: I read about these in  The Year Round Vegetable Gardener , by Niki Jabbour. All it takes is a bit of PVC a size up in diameter from the ones you use for hoops. Kirk cut them into these short pieces, then cut a slice out the long way, leaving the black PVC in a C-shaped piece. Then you j...

Back in August when we planted the Brussels sprout seeds, we knew it was an experiment that would probably fail. According to the seed packet, the variety we planted ("Long Island Improved") matures in 110 days. When you add in the 7-14 days for the seeds to germinate, that would bring our estimated harvest date to somewhere between November 18 and December 2. That's a pretty late harvest date, but we figured we'd give it a try anyway, especially since they are supposed to taste much better when harvested after a frost or two. Those November dates would certainly take care of that, and we thought it'd be nice to have some for Thanksgiving if it worked out. These plants came up quickly but got a bit of a slow start courtesy of the cabbage loopers that were munching on the leaves back in the summer. Once that was taken care of, though, the plants seemed to do well. Maybe too well, because I pretty much ignored them in favor of all that bok choy and lettuce, a...

Maybe we are destined never to have Brussels sprouts. Last year we planted them too late, and there wasn't enough time for the sprouts to grow bigger than a pea. This year we planted them nice and early, but we’re having all kinds of other problems. First, they grow very, very slowly. Here's one that was sown at the end of April: That's all the bigger it is after almost two months. Part of that might be because the spot where we planted them is too shady: It gets some sun later in the afternoon, but in the future, this patch is probably better for summer lettuces and cabbages, where the shade could help keep them from bolting. As you can see in the photo, there are lots of spots marked with compost circles where seedlings have either not come up, or have been eaten, or are just too tiny to see yet. Here's a formerly nice-looking plant that has been chewed on: This time, the culprit isn't cabbage loopers or our squirrel vandals . Not...

Some of the time you would say it was luck, and some of the time you would say it was weather , but this season has been really hard on the garden in the insect department. In addition to the usual trouble with cutworms and cabbage loopers , we also have a bunch of asparagus beetles ruining that crop.   And now there are also flea beetles : That little black bug in the center is a small beets that can hop around, and we have more than just one. you can see that there’s tons of damage on that arugula leaf it’s sitting on, and every arugula plant in our mesclun patch looks the same way. They also really like radishes, so I don’t think we’ll be getting any of those to plump up any time soon.  We can live without arugula and radishes, but these bugs have also gotten into our broccoli and cauliflower, though the damage for the most part isn’t quite as severe: Since radishes are their favorite food, I planted several small patches in the broccoli and caulif...

The further we get into May, the more our garden really looks like a garden. Lots of seedlings are filling out, and it feels like we are on the verge of having more menu choices than just lettuce by the time June gets here. A look at where things stand right now: Our cabbages are doing quite well. The largest ones are starting to form small heads — well, their inner leaves are curling up to start that process, anyway. Not quite all of them survived, but most are looking sturdy enough. I hate to jinx it, but cabbage loopers don't look to be a major issue for us so far this spring. Most of the broccoli is also doing well, and the biggest seem almost ready to send up their central stalks for the heads of broccoli. A few are still tiny because they were started from seed to replace lost seedlings, but if they make it without bolting in the heat, we'll have a bit of an (unintentionally) staggered harvest. Here is our allium bed. To the right, our garlic is ...

It feels like much, much longer ago, but about three weeks ago , I broke off many of the leaves on our Brussels sprouts plants to encourage the buds to fill out to an edible size. I also fertilized, watered, and gave a little love to these plants. The only other thing we did for them between then and now is added a hoop house over them to keep them from freezing and to try to encourage them to grow, even though the season really ought to be over. Our Brussels sprouts were nowhere near ready for Thanksgiving dinner, so we bought some from Tendercrop . As a point of comparison, here's what they look like when grown by people who know what they are doing: And here's what ours looked like as of today: Not at all impressive, although a few are plumping up here and there. the best ones are on the small stalk that I accidentally beheaded while pulling the leaves off a few weeks ago: Looking at this one — the one that I was pretty sure would die without any leaves...

It's been a very hard week here in the garden. For one thing, we're dealing with quite an onslaught of winter moths . Have you seen lots of little inchworms hanging from silk threads this spring? They love maples, and are eating their way through the small red Norway maple in the back yard. I haven't noticed a big issue with the sugar maple or fruit trees out front, but it's probably just a matter of time.  They've been dive bombing out of the evergreen in the back yard also, presumably in search of greener pastures: And they've found what they're looking for: That used to be a young cabbage transplant, and almost all of them look like this now. I'd been stumped about what was eating them for a couple weeks: It's not loopers , and the damage to the stems isn't clean like a cutworm . Well, now I know. If we had known this was coming, we'd have put down the row cover as soon as we planted them. By now it might be too late....