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...

Coming off of the drought year has been hard enough on our asparagus , which needs lots of water to thrive, but we have another problem on our hands as well: After a good week or two of a small harvest, we started to have stunted, crooked spears like this one. At first I thought the tips were being nibbled by an animal, but then we noticed this: I thought they might be aphids, but upon further inspection, it turns out that those are asparagus beetle eggs. They belong to these guys:  The red beetles are spotted asparagus beetles, which I have seen before — but never this early in the season. They’ve never caused much harm. But there are also these guys:  The black ones are common asparagus beetles , and they do  cause a lot of damage, since as the eggs hatch the larvae eat their way up the stalks. They probably got a foothold during the drought as the plants were already weakened and overwintered in larger-the-usual numbers. They’ve been...

We eat a lot of homemade pizza throughout the year, but it’s always fun when a new ingredient is ready to harvest to shake things up a little bit.  This very green springtime pizza features a garlic béchamel sauce , asparagus, spinach and feta. It’s also garnished with lovage and some pea shoots, all from the garden (except the feta, of course). This is a great way to enjoy our earliest garden harvest of asparagus and leafy greens. I don’t think Jonas was wild about it, but we also had plenty of regular tomato sauce pizza for him, too. We’re down to our final jar of sauce now, so he might want to get on board with white pizza for the next couple months until we have some more tomatoes. (Ordinarily we don’t run out, but the drought really kept our yields down last summer).  If you’re looking for something different in your pizza repertoire, give this one a try!

We chased the bees and plucked the flowers In the merry, merry month of May. ~Stephen Foster I haven't written in some time because it's been pretty lean around here. Sure, it seems  like April is springtime and that gardens would be up and running, but that's true only up to a point. You can plant out a lot of things in April and get plenty of work done, but in April all the winter stores are gone (with the exception of parsnips , that is), but nothing is big enough to eat yet. Our cold, snowy winter and very dry spring have made this April even leaner than usual.  But now it is well and truly May, and now that we have food to eat and flowers to enjoy, we're all smiles (tinged with sighs of relief) that spring has finally arrived. Here are scenes from our merriest month in the garden. Tulips in the cutting garden have suddenly bloomed, and we have a bounty this spring since I refurbished the bulb bed in the cutting garden last fall .  ...

Now that things are growing in the warm sun, we are enjoying some seasonal delights at the dinner table. We have tulips from the cutting garden: Tulips rather notoriously lose steam after their first year, and ours are no exception. Many did not re-bloom, and the ones that did are smaller than they were last season. Still, we have enough to keep up a bouquet on the dining room table, and that's enough to brighten things up indoors. Asparagus season is in full swing! To keep it from getting out of hand, Kirk turned several large bunches into  Cream of Asparagus Soup 4-5 scallions, chopped 3-4 cloves garlic, minced 2 Tbs. olive oil 2-3 large bunches of asparagus, cut into 1-inch pieces 1/2 to 1 cup cream Salt and pepper to taste  fresh tarragon for garnish 1. In a large stock pot, sauté scallions and garlic in olive oil.   2. As you cut asparagus into pieces, add to the pot and allow to sauteé while you continue chopping.  3...

Although most of our garden is devoted to growing annual vegetables, we do have several beds set aside for some perennials that come back every year. It's nice to have some (mostly) worry-free crops that just do their thing without much attention: Just add a compost top-dressing in the spring and enjoy the bounty. Here's how our perennial fruits and veggies are faring this year.  Our strawberry patch is three quarters of the way planted. The Tribute strawberries in the foreground were our first plants, and they are now in their third season. The lush patch in the middle are last year's Honeoye planting, and the dark compost section in the background marks our newly planted Seascape strawberries.  I have to say, I'm not that impressed with the Tribute strawberries. Their flavor can be kind of tart for straight eating, and the plants have not bounced back from this winter very well. In another couple years it will be time to replace them, and we will probabl...

After a very busy week (Did I ever mention that I directed the kids' play this spring? Well, I did.), we enjoyed a lovely springtime dinner. Asparagus is back, people! And in case you didn't know, the best way to eat it is grilled. And that is very easy to do. Step one: brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt: Step two: grill for 2 minutes. Just 1 minute per side will do it: Use real charcoal. It's way better than a gas grill, if you care about things like flavor. Step three: Eat it up, preferably with some grilled steak tips and herbed rice: Such a delicious, springtime treat. Incidentally, Kirk marinated the steak in soy, ginger, and garlic. The rice has butter, thyme, and some scallions for flavor. It is so, so good to have spring herbs and fresh, green vegetables to eat again. Welcome, May!

What a gorgeous day to be in the sunshine, picking veggies and fruit for dinner! Thanks to my car being in the shop, I had a preview of summer vacation today, and it was lovely. As are the pickings: Today I brought in strawberries, peas (unshelled in the photo), asparagus, a few snap peas, and broccoli.  To these items Kirk added some fresh pasta and a creamy Parmesan sauce: A delicious pasta primavera! Minus the strawberries, of course. These we snacked on during the afternoon, and the kids polished the rest off for dessert. Maybe next time I can hide some to save for more strawberry ice cream .

In the past 11 days, I have eaten asparagus for 10 different meals. That's how we roll here — eat it while it's in season and delicious! While freshly cut asparagus is so tender you can eat it raw, we've managed to have it a variety of ways. Version 1: Stir fry. Always a go-to way to eat up lots of garden veg, Kirk also threw in radishes and mustard greens in one, and made a yummy garlic-ginger-lime sauce for another. Leftovers are my preferred lunch (because I am terribly lazy at 6 a.m. and that's the easiest thing to pack), so stir-fry has accounted for four of my asparagus meals this month. Version 2: Steamed with a bit of lemon as a side dish. The steaming, as I mentioned before, is almost optional, but it does bring out its gorgeous color, and the lemon is nice. Version 3: Pasta Primavera. As I have pointed out in a previous post , taking the (not super intense) effort to make this with fresh pasta will change your life. The pasta is coated in just a ...

We got back from Mexico this weekend and were eager to get a look around the garden. While we were relaxing, a lot was happening here: rhubarb, daffodils, tulips, peas, and our latest sowing of salad greens all popped up. And, most surprising of all, was the moment we first saw this: For a brief moment, we weren't sure what we were looking at. It's kind of other-worldly, hovering as it is over the earth, and to us it seemed to have appeared over night (though this can't possibly be true, can it?). A closer look: Asparagus. Everywhere!  We'll get a better look when we get around to weeding it (which it clearly needs), but it looks so far like the whole bed has started coming up, with no major winter losses. The above photo shows how it starts with a purplish tinge, but most spears change to all green as they grow.  Trying to keep in mind that, since we only planted these last spring , we are supposed to harvest only "lightly" this...

Over the weekend, we put a tunnel over half of our asparagus bed: To do this, Kirk hammered a stake into the dirt first to make some guide holes for the PVC. We don't normally need to do that, but this early in the season the dirt isn't thoroughly warmed and soft. The idea here is that the heat that is strapped under the plastic will trick our asparagus into coming up earlier than it normally would. This will hopefully extend our harvest by a few weeks, and we'll still have the other half of the asparagus coming up at its natural time.  Good thing we got that in place, because we are suffering all kinds of soil setbacks, with yet another day of snow yesterday. Here's what it looks like today: So at least half of our asparagus bed is protected and warming on this, the official first day of spring. As you can see in the photo above, we had to shovel snow off of the raised bed in the foreground. We didn't do that for the whole garden, but we did t...

This would seem obvious enough, that bit about the rain making things grow. But when you haven't had much rain, it can be shocking how fast things will shoot up after just one good day of rain (which we had yesterday). The most obvious beneficiary is our salad cold frame: It's just about bursting at the seams with lettuces and spinach, and the radishes are big enough now that they need to be pulled and kept in the fridge so they don't get overgrown and terrible. You can compare all this growth to a photo from just a week and a half ago if you don't believe me. Our next section of salad greens and cool weather crops has all come up with the rain as well: This looks to be good timing, as it should be ready to eat when we've picked over all the good stuff in the cold frame from the previous photo. This is one succession planting of what we've been calling our "cool season rows." It is, from left to right: radishes, carrots, lettuce,...

This week we planted three vegetables: asparagus, parsnips, and corn. Our asparagus crowns (Jersey Supreme) came in the mail from Johnny's in the middle of the week, and we were lucky that Kirk was able to get an afternoon off so we could get them in the ground before the rains came today. Asparagus in an investment in the future. We won't be able to harvest any of it this year, and only a little bit next year, if  the stalks that come up are big enough. But the third year, we should be in business with weeks of asparagus in the spring and early summer. We planted 48 roots like the ones above. We planted ours about 14 inches part in holes 6 to 8 inches deep. Kirk would dig the holes and drop the root in; I'd follow behind with a big handful of compost for each and then lightly cover the holes with loose earth. After they were all in the ground, they got a watering. All that's left to do is add lots of compost each season and wait a year for some asparagus...

Last but not least in our planning of where to put our perennials fruits and veggies: asparagus! As we have seen with some of the other perennial  fruits and herbs , each time something gets moved around on the plan, it forces a whole series of plan changes. Kind of like veggie chess. Our original plan was to have a long bed of asparagus on the outside edge of the patio quadrant, which would make (in the summer, anyway) a nice ferny screen to block the boring view of the fence. But that spot is now taken up by the strawberries, so we had to find another place: We decided to move them back towards the lawn, running along the same line as the strawberries, but in the rear quadrant (in the photo they are to the far left). Because we decided on a hybrid variety of asparagus ( Jersey Supreme , which we will order from Johnny's Selected Seeds ), there will be more spears per plant, and we won't need to plant as many for the same yield. That allows us to leave the end of tha...