Port Potager

The section of the garden near the swings is always on the easiest to plan. It’s reliably sunny, but two large swathes are already spoken for, with asparagus along the left side and grapes and herbs across the top.  To the right will be Brussels sprouts and a row of fennel bulbs, along with a large bed of leeks, which hopefully do better this year. Along the bottom is a trellis of peas and a row of Amish paste tomatoes for saucing.  In the center C are beets, chard, okra, and potatoes.  And that’s it! This section is full of big plants, or big patches of some of our favorites, so it’s just not very complicated — which is a nice change of pace.

For years, we’ve planted Brussels sprouts , but we’ve never managed to harvest more than just a handful of tiny sprouts , whether due to late planting, trouble with the weather, or greedy chickens and groundhogs.  Well, this year is finally different! The original Brussels sprouts we started from seed in the garden struggled in the drought, so we replaced them with transplants from a local nursery — I was lucky to find them, as these aren’t the world’s most popular vegetable. I only brought home a single six-pack, and we had decided that this would be the last year we devoted any space at all to a plant that was giving us such a poor return on the effort.  Along the way, groundhogs nibbled on the small plants, and we thought they were goners. They bounced back, and then the drought stunted everything in the garden. We thought they were done.  But by August we had small sprouts forming between the larger leaves, and I cut the tops of the stalks off to...

Continuing with the garden plans for the spring, here is the swingset quadrant diagram: The full left side is the perennial asparagus bed, so no changes there. Ditto for the top, which is still grapes in the back and perennial herbs in the front. I may end up moving around some of the herbs once they come up in the spring and I see what's there. Anyway, the upper portion of the right side is mostly head lettuce, which will be shaded by a trellis of pickling cucumbers (on the long side) and slicing cucumbers (on the short side). The shade should help keep the lettuces from bolting in the summer heat, especially since the trellises are oriented to block out afternoon sun. The lower half has pole beans along the right side, which will vine their way up poles that arch over the center path. We did this in the past closer to the house, and it worked well to form a shady arbor to support all the beans — like the bean house , but over the path instead. The rest of the bed i...

2014 might go down as the Year of the Brussels Sprout here at Ye Olde Port Potager. Although we didn't end up with a big crop, we managed enough for one dinner , which is far better than the abject failures of the past. Brussels sprouts are challenging because they are gardening's longest game. We planted the seeds way back in the middle of April, and that was even a couple weeks late thanks to last winter's unrelenting polar vortex . They are slow growers, and it wasn't until September that we had buds: Those tiny buds form just above each leaf, and on September 1 we broke the leaves off of half of our  plants to encourage the buds to develop. For the other half, we topped them: Both methods perform the same function: get the plant to grow some new leaves. It's just that the new leaves we want are shaped like tiny cabbages.  Five or six weeks later, the ones that we topped had some nice development of sprouts near the top, but not so much grow...

Last night we had a pretty excellent Sunday supper. It was all delicious, but can you spot the star ingredient? Our colorful wintertime plate included herbed mashed potatoes and gravy, a really tasty rosemary roast dressed with horseradish, roasted carrots and parsnips, and (drumroll) Brussels sprouts! If you have been following this blog for some time, you know that growing Brussels sprouts has been an ongoing challenge for us. This year we finally had some worth harvesting, and last night we enjoyed them sautéed with just a touch of maple syrup. They were sweet and tender after spending a good month out in the cold, and I will give a full accounting of the successes and failures of the Brussels sprout crop later this week. For dessert we opened up the spiced peaches that Jonas made back in the summer: True to their name, they were very, very spicy. Luckily, these were very ripe and very sweet peaches that could stand up to the powerful amount of cinnamon we ...

We've been on a springtime weather roller coaster here the past several days, bouncing from balmy to brisk and back again. It was another big weekend in the garden, with lots of bed prep and planting (leeks, onions, carrots, parsnips, radishes, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard, and potatoes). My hamstrings and hands are still sore, but we got a lot done. It would be a shame, though, to focus only on the to-do list without enjoying all the little changes that spring brings to the garden. Here's what's blooming: Bulbs are up in the perennial border, and these blue glory-of-the-snow get better each year. We inherited them and they have naturalized nicely. There are also some darker blue Siberian squill, which are just starting to come up. We removed the spills from the sugar maple now that sugaring season is done. The wound should heal over by autumn. More blue! These sky blue muscari bulbs are in the cutting bed, but I never actually cut them down.  ...

Earlier this summer, I blamed a baby skunk (and its presumed nearby family) for destroying our broccoli and Brussels sprouts. Despite putting a fence around our brassica bed, we were still losing branches off of those crops: But not, as you can clearly see in the photo above, any nibbles off the cabbages. What a strange creature! It takes all the trouble to get in around the fencing, and nibbles on less-than-ideal remnants of broccoli and Brussels sprouts while completely ignoring big, beautiful cabbages than are a foot away. Well, up until earlier this week, that is. That's when, during a stroll to the compost pile, I discovered that A) the skunk had finally sampled a bit of a cabbage, and B) it's not a skunk at all, but a groundhog! He saw me and ran, giving away his point of entry in the process. So clearly there's a major weakness in our chicken wire fencing around the "C." The "doorway" to the keyhole just has loose fenc...

Since the utter decimation of our broccoli plants (all 32 of them), we have also experienced some friendly fire: The chickens got into the Brussels sprouts again. Time to get serious about protecting our food. With some more stakes inherited from the move into this house and some more rolls of chicken wire from the hardware store, we added a big cage around the Brussels sprouts patch. That will definitely keep out the chickens, and hopefully whatever else has been munching on our brassica. So far it's working on the cabbages pretty well. As you may recall, the Brussels sprouts aren't doing terribly well in that shady spot anyway, so we also decided to cut our losses there and sow more lettuces between the rows of Brussels sprouts. If we get a few Brussels sprouts there, great; if not, we are hoping that we can eke some summer lettuce out of that shady spot, since many of ours have either been eaten or have bolted past the point of being edible (although...

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...

We are finally finished dumping dirt into our raised beds! This is the last quadrant, and we wasted no time getting seeds into those beds once we were done filling them. This weekend marks our frost-free date, so it was time to get cracking on our planting and sowing. In the center "C" you can see our bamboo tepees (made by pulling apart an extra section of bamboo fencing we used for privacy at the Red House — glad to put them to good use!). Around each tepee are planted Cherokee Trail of Tears, an heirloom black bean that will climb those poles. In the squared off ends of the "C" are zucchini and nasturtium seeds as well. In the foreground of this bed are also mustard seedlings (too tiny to see, but they are in the rectangular section that is dark from having been watered). Our tomatillos are just off frame. Other seeds that went into the ground this weekend, now that we're pretty sure nothing will freeze: sunflowers, chamomile, and borage, plus...

Since the garden is shut down for the winter, the Brussels sprouts have been picked and the plants pulled out: The experiment is over. You can review the progress of this weird vegetable here and here . Over the weekend we dismantled the greenhouse tunnel that had been protecting them, and here is what we had: On the bright side, these plants were in good shape — no signs at all of any frostbite. As members of the cabbage family they should be fairly hardy, and having them in the tunnel definitely worked to keep them alive. As you can see by their size, though, not freezing isn't exactly the same as growing. There just wasn't enough warmth and sunlight in December to encourage those tiny sprouts to get any bigger. So the tunnel is a great place to store  Brussels sprouts, but I think we'd need a heated greenhouse to ripen them further. The solution to that issue is obviously to plant them earlier in the season. I’m thinking they need perhaps an extra month, which...

Remember all the cabbage we were fermenting into sauerkraut ? Well, two weeks later, we took the brick and the plate off the crock to see what we had: Mmmm. That forkful was salty, but full of flavor. As with Virginia ham, salt is the major preservative of sauerkraut, and it is a good idea to rinse it a bit before eating it. As you can see above, our sauerkraut after two weeks is still quite green, and it is also still fairly crunchy. This could probably sit in the crock for another two weeks to be fully finished, but we really wanted to have some on New Year's, so we called it done. We also decided that we would call this concoction "new sauerkraut," since it is still pretty mild and fresh tasting — like a new, fresh pickle instead of one that's been in brine for six months. I think the kids liked this mild version better than the stronger, more traditional sauerkraut.  At this point you may be wondering: why the obsession with eating sau...

This weekend we got out to do our last garden chores of the 2011 season. From here on out, we'll only be harvesting — and precious little of that, since it got so cold. The entire day we were working on Sunday, it never got beyond 35 degrees, and the wind chill was only in the 20s. That's about when it stops being fun to be outside doing anything other than sledding or pond skating, if you ask me. The first thing we did was to finally patch up the bricks around this driveway fence post: Although that section of fence has been re-installed for almost a full five months now, we only filled the bricks in around the gap on Saturday afternoon. I'm not sure why we kept putting it off (although it might have had something to do with my vow never to pick up another brick as long as I live), but it wasn't very hard to do. Anyway, we got them in before the ground freezes and (possibly) heaves, so I guess it's all good. And that is officially the last brick l...