Port Potager

Continuing around the garden to the swingset quadrant, we have our planting plan for the 2018 season: On the left, as always, is the asparagus . It’s not nearly as productive as it once was, so this spring we will try renovating it by resetting the crowns lower in the earth and adding some lime to counteract the soil acidity from a nearby evergreen tree.  Across the top are perennial grapes and herbs — nothing to see there.  Along the right side is space for Jenny Lind melons, which is a new variety of small, green fleshed melons. This is an heirloom variety popular among the Pennsylvania Dutch, and we got the seeds on a trip to the Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum last spring. There’s also a potato patch. Along the bottom is a very small length of trellised cucumbers, which will be for slicing. We have tons of pickles from last summer, so we won’t be planting any pickling cukes at all. There’s also an assortment of dill, arugula, beets and cauliflo...

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 final planting quadrant is also the smallest, because it lacks the center C that the others have in favor of a patio area for picnicking. It also has a full bed of strawberries along with existing perennial plantings of roses, rhubarb and lavender, so there aren’t many areas left to fill. Across the top row is garlic that was planted back in October. When this is harvested in July, it will be replanted with winter green like arugula, bok choy and turnips. The remaining section has Paisano paste tomatoes.  Along the right side is a short trellis of snap peas, which will shade a patch of mesclun and other spring greens. Right now this is the site of our winter cold frame of mache and spinach, so our plan is simply to interplant the mesclun with these plants in early spring and gradually remove and replace things they bolt throughout the season. There are also both winter and summer carrots close to the house, where they can handle the shade that creeps in during th...

We took advantage of this beautiful weekend to finish up some garden clean-up chores that we had put off while working on the kitchen. Now all the garden beds are tidied up for the winter, and all the root vegetables are mulched and ready for cold weather. Part of the clean up included harvesting some beets and beet greens that are not under plastic. I also picked the last radishes, which have done admirably in the cold without any protection. Add some last snippets of broccoli and a carrot, and you have a tasty winter salad: We were a little disappointed to discover that most of the arugula and lettuce in the greenhouse tunnels was limp and mushy from the wide temperature fluctuations over the past month, so this salad is mostly beet greens taken when we pulled the beets for storage. (There's a tiny bit of arugula from a volunteer patch, but not much.) That makes for a strongly flavored salad, so Kirk balanced it out with a sweet new dressing: Honey Sesame Dressing ...

So there's no more fuss and there's no more scenes and my garden thrives! (You should see my nectarine.) But I'm telling you the same I tell Kings and Queens don't ever ever ever mess around with my greens! ~ from Into the Woods , by Stephen Sondheim We're still slogging through our kitchen renovation , and it's sucking up a lot of time that we would ordinarily be spending on preserving the last of our summer fruits — not mention cooking delicious meals using all that garden produce. An embarrassing amount of apples, pears, and tomatoes have been fed to the chickens due to our inability to eat them in a timely fashion. One thing that's doing well and can be stored in place outside  are the cool-weather greens. Though the back half of the summer was a dry one, we had a fair amount of rain early this month to get us back on track. The moisture and the cooler temperatures mean happy greens: Cilantro, because it's related to carro...

This is the best time of year in the garden, because just about everything is ripening at once. It makes from some excellent eating in August and September. To wit: The burger was great, but the salad? This might be the best salad ever. It's at least the best salad you could make with all seasonal produce in the waning days of summer.  To make it, you need a bed of young (and therefore less peppery) arugula and beet greens. Thinly slice a fennel bulb, a couple radishes, a small red onion, and a small apple (we used our last Summer Rambo , a variety that ripens in August on our heirloom 4-in-1 tree ). Drizzle with olive oil and garnish with fennel fronds.  That's all there is to it — no dressing required, really. It's so flavorful just the way it is, and it's crunchy, juicy, and awesome. We're looking forward to repeating it with other fall apples (I picked a Macoun today!), so this is likely to be on our plates until we run out of fennel.

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...

After a week in which we were struggling to acclimate ourselves to the blustery cold, today we were granted a sunny, almost-warm day. It was actually pleasant to be outside again, so we wasted no time picking up the last of the leaves and cleaning up the last bits of herbs that finally died in the freezing temperatures of the past week. We also were able to bring in a surprisingly ample post-frost harvest. There's still plenty of food out there under the cover of glass, plastic, or straw, so we should be eating well for the next few months. It may well be the last nice day, but it's not the last harvest. Here's what we brought in today: This kale bouquet is just a small bit of what we have. A lot of the Russian kale got nipped back by the cold since we left it unprotected, but we fixed that today, and there are still a whole lot of leafy greens left for the winter. Our last three cabbages were unaffected by the freezing weather, but won't last forev...

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...

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...

One of the last things we picked from the garden was arugula. It is pretty hardy and stays fairly sweet (as sweet as arugula can be, anyway) in the cold temperatures of late autumn. I forgot to mention another use for it: This is a chicken soup that Kirk made, and at the last minute he added some of our freshly picked arugula. It was delicious! I have to say, I found this kind of surprising. The idea of mushy greens in a soup sounded pretty terrible to me (think about a bad Italian Wedding soup, for example, or maybe cabbage in a soup — blecch). The secret here was adding the greens shortly before serving to keep it fresh: I'm not sure how well the arugula would hold up if you added it to the soup pot with all the other ingredients. Another reason this soup was so good is because Kirk makes his own stock. This involves saving up the carcasses of whole roasting chickens and boiling them down with herbs and vegetables. I believe this particular bowl of soup came from the bit...

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...

Two items are still going (relatively) strong in our winter garden — and I can say that now that it is officially winter. Sure, it's super-warm today (52 degrees as I am writing this, even though the sun set about 45 minutes ago), but for me, the cold has never been the hard part of winter. The truly terrible part is the darkness . So solstice is worth celebrating — after our mere 9 hours and 4 minutes of daylight in Newburyport today, we are climbing back up from what always feels to me like the bottom of the year.  Anyway, despite the darkness and the temperatures that dropped to the teens last weekend, we've got some unprotected kale that is doing just fine: The kale is the curly, slightly bluish greenery you see here. Several weeds are also (still) thriving, too. This kale had been under the greenhouse hoop, and wasn't doing particularly well--there isn't much here. It doesn't need the heat under the plastic at all, and actually tastes sweeter when...

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....

In addition to the greenhouse tunnel , we also have a couple of cold frames in the garden. They were built to size for the garden beds in the old house, so they are not four feet wide to fit our new beds. That's why we have those rows of pea trellises behind them: Inside the cold frames above are beets, carrots, mesclun, and arugula. To the right is an empty-looking frame that used to have turnips, but now that those have all been pulled, there are new mache and spinach seedlings in there. The cold frames, by the way, are just boxes that sit on top of the raised bed. The back side is higher so that the glass (recycled storm windows inherited from a friend) sit on a slant toward the winter afternoon sun. We could probably insulate these further with bales of hay around the outside or by having them inside a green house tunnel for double the heat capture. Part of our winter gardening will include finalizing plans for winter greenhouses to use next year that are better than ...

This weekend marks the first time in Newburyport that we've been able to take a stroll around the garden before making the grocery list to plan our dinners (or at least side dishes) around what is growing. Here's what we saw and what we decided to make with it. Radishes and Lettuce Our first radishes are ready to go. We didn't plant that many because in the past we've ended up with way more than we could ever eat, but a few are nice — especially since they come up so quickly. We use them as a row marker between two rows of carrots, and when the radishes are ready, the carrots are big enough to be thinned out. This row of mesclun is one of several rows of lettuce around the garden. This was planted later, but is ready to eat sooner than the lettuces in the background, because it's just a leaf lettuce. The ones in the back are our butterhead and redleaf, which take longer to mature because they are head lettuces. If you look really closely, you can see...