Port Potager

ICYMI: I wrote a book of short stories: If you haven’t read it yet, now’s your chance! Annorlunda Books is having a 50% off sale at Gumroad , where you can download the ebook for just a couple bucks.  To do that, you’ll need the coupon code BACKTOSCHOOL to use at checkout.  Enjoy!

My book is officially out there for you to buy! You can get Both Sides of My Skin in paperback or as an ebook by clicking HERE .  Or if you’re feeling lucky, you can enter my publisher’s giveaway promotion on Goodreads to get a free copy by clicking HERE . Good luck!

When I was still teaching, I was faced with getting an obligatory master’s degree. All public school teachers in Massachusetts have to do this eventually to keep their licensure up to date, but it’s an awful lot of work to go back to school while still teaching school. And for an English teacher (which I was for eight years), it’s kind of a nightmare. No one works harder than a high school English teacher. It’s a never-ending cavalcade of shit in the form of a bottomless stack of (terrible) papers to grade. When you layer additional coursework and research papers on top of that, you might as well kiss your sanity goodbye. So I thought that choosing the Creative Writing concentration of an English M.A. would at least make it more fun and provide a layer of personal fulfillment to the mix. As long as I had to shell out thousands of dollars and hours for an advanced degree, I might as well enjoy it, right? So that’s what I did. It was still a shit-ton of work, but when it was over ...

In non-gardening news, I wrote a book. And it has a cover : This book has nothing to do with gardening. Instead it’s a collections of short stories that I actually wrote quite a while ago as part of my master’s thesis. It’s due out from Annorlunda Books in December.  I’ll keep you posted on where you can pre-order (should you be so inclined) starting in November!

Although it is much warmer this weekend that it has been — dare I suggest that winter has finally loosened its grip? — we weren't able to make much headway out in the garden. It just would be too much to hope for to jump right into a sunny, 60 degree stretch of days, right? We're squarely in the midst of some cold, soaking rain. Not that I'm complaining. After all, it's not snow. The rain has washed away almost all of our last bits of the white stuff, and I imagine the rest will be gone by Monday. Things are starting to thaw, and the soaking rains will definitely help bring things back to life as we ring in April. We did manage to get our week's worth of sap boiled and also opened up the cold frames to catch some of that free water falling from the sky (before closing them up again to protect delicate seedling and as-yet unsprouted seeds from the downpours we're meant to get over night and tomorrow). Still, we had to give up on our planned planting of ...

Taking care of a sick kid opens up a little reading time, so I've been able to finish  American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America , which Kirk picked up from the library a few weeks ago.  As always, the best part of a gardening book is the photos, and this book has really beautiful ones, plus some nice renderings of the planting plans per season. There are also profiles of many other community gardens across the country, plus some seasonal recipes. I liked the fact that this book shared the learning curve of maintaining a big vegetable garden — apparently even having the National Park Service on your side doesn't guarantee that things always go right! I also picked up some ideas to improve our hoop houses over the winter. Check out this photo from obamafoodorama : These use giant wooden battens along the ground over which is rolled the ends of the plastic. Then those are held in place with sandbags. I'm not quite...

I just finished a book that I stumbled on at the library several weeks ago: Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land ,  by Kurt Timmermeister. (Grammar alert: I copied the title exactly as it appears on the cover; I do not endorse the capitalization of the preposition "off" in the title. I suppose one could argue that "live off" functions as a verb, and that therefore "off" isn't a preposition at all in the structure of the title ... this is clearly a topic for another blog. I wonder if "World Grammar Police" is an available url?) Anyway, this is a memoir from a guy who bought a crappy farm on an island near Seattle and rehabbed it to be a working dairy farm. Eventually he quit his job, and he now makes a pretty self-sufficient living off his 12 acres. I'm not whole heartedly recommending this book — I wasn't a fan of the writing style, which relied far too heavily on adverbs to add interest to its repetitive sentence s...

The Colonial Nursery is a actually one of the sites that you can visit without purchasing a ticket to all of Colonial Williamsburg. This is because, in addition to being a period garden, it is also a store. All the shops are open to the public at large, so it is possible to do some sightseeing on the cheap if you are so inclined.  Below is a photo of the fall garden. You can see, of course, lots of greens and brassica. In the center of the bed are leeks: We have been thinking about leeks in the last few days. Kirk is currently reading John Seymour's The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It , and his description of leeks is worth sharing: In cold, wet areas, this is one of the most useful plants, for it stands the winter and provides good  food and vitamins in the months when little else has survived except kale. Onions are hard to grow  and to keep, but leeks are an easy substitute. The Welsh are very sensible to have this excellent plant  as an em...

Tomatoes are always the superstar of the summer garden, but we didn't have anywhere near enough time to make that happen this year. The summer vegetable we did  manage to sneak into our fall garden? Green beans! These are Blue Lake, a bush variety (meaning they don't need to climb poles or trellises, but kind of flop on the ground in a relatively compact way). We planted them the first week of August, and this weekend (two months later) we were able to harvest a whole mess of them (this bucket is about 1/4 of them). First, we had a bunch for supper, straight-up steamed and brought to the table all summery and as-is: After supper, though, I went to work preserving them for later in the fall. These are my Thanksgiving beans, you see. I like them frozen much better than canned, and I prepped them according to the Ball Blue Book , which has never steered us wrong. 1. Rinse and drain, then snap off the stems and the little strings at the bottom (if the bean hasn't c...

Earlier this week we harvested our first peas: If you're thinking this doesn't look like much, you're right. Even though these pods barely fill a soup bowl, they had to be picked and eaten before they got too big and dried out. If you don't pick them, the vine dies back because it thinks it's done its job producing seeds and can quit. Anyway, once shelled, this is what we got for our first meal: Everyone did an admirable job sharing their single spoonful of peas, but methinks we need to plant a LOT more next year. According to Back to Basics: How to Learn and Enjoy Traditional American Skills (an awesome  back-to-the-land, Reader's-Digest-goes-hippie book from the 70s that you should buy immediately), a self-sufficient gardener should allow 10 row feet of peas per person. That mean we need 40 rows of peas for our family. We planted about 25 this year, but half are snap peas. This is what 25 feet of peas look like: So next year, I think we should...

Preparing  From a gardening best-practices standpoint, we probably never should have gone on vacation two weeks ago. It was awesome, but you may recall that we came back to garden beds that looked like this: Well, they're even worse now—completely covered in crabgrass and other assorted weeds. If we had skipped vacation, we would have had the garden beds under control before this happened, but no. As it is, we have a completely irritating extra step as we prepare the planting beds. Step 1: Pull the weeds.  Last weekend we took the time to cover all the beds around the large patio area with the black plastic we had used in the side yard . This didn't work as brilliantly as it did on the lawn area, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because it wasn't as hot or sunny this week, or maybe crabgrass is just ridiculously well adapted to people trying to kill it. Some bits were dead, but most was just starting to yellow, which left us a lot to pull. We ended u...

June 13, 2011 One of several perks of Kirk's new position at the hospital is that he works in a smaller department, and was therefore able to get a second week of vacation during the summer (due to decreased competition for the popular dates). His second week off miraculously coincided with the week that Glenn was able to come and work on the back yard with the Bobcat and actual expertise, so the two of them worked together to get the raised beds in place. Meanwhile, I got to go to work and return home to enjoy significant, near-magical progress every day. For example, here's what I saw Monday, and I was so excited I ran in the house to grab the camera: So it took about a day to screw together the 2x12s to form the edges for the raised beds you see here. The sawing and building part was actually pretty quick, but getting the boxes into place was another issue. See Kirk digging? He had to move just about all the dirt that was roughed into place because it wasn't in q...