Port Potager

We made our garden plan back in February, but I forgot to document it. I was reminded of this when we pulled out the plan to actually start planting. It hasn’t been warm — it’s snowing as I write this — but the ground has thawed and we can get started with our hardiest cool-weather plants. The leeks we ordered came in the mail, so we had to get them in the ground. We bought transplants instead of doing them from seed this year, and they are about as big around as a pencil — much bigger than the tiny strings we’ve managed to get starting them on our own. These are much easier to work with, and I’m certain they’ll have a better survival rate than our tiny seedlings, so this looks to be a good investment. Behind the cold frame you can see a few of last year’s leeks — these are the stragglers we haven’t harvested yet. Usually when we plant in March, we’re out of luck when it comes to compost. That’s because the City Yard doesn’t open until April and our pile is usually frozen....

In theory, we should be planting peas and onions next weekend, but this is the state of things in the garden today: A series of four nor’easters and below-average temps have set us behind schedule for planting. I imagine the snow will be gone by next weekend, but I’m not sure if the soil will be ready to work or if it will be too frozen or too wet or too something else.  I’m not feeling in much of a rush this year since it’s been so miserable outside this month. The local weather reporters have taken to saying that March is the new February, and they’re right. Since we appear to have some additional time on our hands, I transplanted our broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower seedlings into peat pots: It should be noted that these seedlings look great  this year. I attribute this to more diligent use of our lamp to make sure they were getting enough light on all those cloudy, stormy days: The brassica is scheduled to be transplanted into the garden in t...

It’s that time of year again! We’ve been a little slower than usual to get the garden plan done this winter, as we’ve been driven to distraction by current events . Still, we finally finished that work today, and leek and onion seeds have already been started. Here’s hoping that the spring will bring the goodness and light of things growing and being nurtured in your corner of the world, too. Starting in the center C, you can see dots that indicate the spots where PVC pipes will be inserted for pole beans. We’re doing the bean house again here! Around the outside is a traditional companion planting of squash and pumpkins.  Across the top of the top bed is a long row of trellises cucumbers, both pickling and slicing. We’re going all in on these this year, since last summer’s drought left us with just one  cucumber for the whole season. Behind the cucumbers will be bell peppers, hot peppers, eggplant, head lettuce, and a few succession plantings of cilantro. ...

From our very cold, slow-to-start spring and  current drought  to the loss of pollinators and groundhog raids , it’s been a really rough go of it this year. Though we were beginning to despair of ever having food to eat this summer, a bit of rain this morning and some successes have us feeling more optimistic. Here’s what’s going right this week:   Remember the beet leafminers that nearly defoliated all of our beets and chard? Thanks to a regimen of removing affected leaves and twice-per-week applications of neem oil, both beets (above) and the Swiss chard (below) have bounced back quite nicely, and we’re now able to harvest both at will. The cold, cloudy winter and spring made it hard to get our tomato seedlings started indoors, and many didn’t make it when transplanted because they were so puny. Then came the drought, and though we have some blossom-end rot due to those conditions, we also have plenty of tomatoes headed our way. They’re a couple weeks...

Week two of maple sugaring is in the books. It was a quick boil today, since we didn’t have all that much sap this week. What we did have was partially frozen this morning, which makes it even faster to process. Unless it’s sub-zero, sugar won’t freeze, so you just toss away the bits of ice that have formed — it amounts to the same thing as boiling, since nature has separated out the sugar, just with cold instead of heat.  Anyway, we used the coals of our fire to make dinner: Notice that we’re all holding our hands way  off to the side: That fire is hot .  Dinner featured a remarkably summery spread made of our winter vegetables. The hot dogs are garnished with homemade, canned dill relish and tomato ketchup . We still have red and white potatoes for frying (though we’ll have to take an inventory before we eat any more to make sure we have enough seed potatoes left for spring planting). There’s also coleslaw from one of our storage cabbages, garn...

Another section of the garden plan for spring is the quadrant near the workshop and chicken coop: The right-hand bed of this section is under a small maple tree, which we keep around because it shades the chickens nicely in the summer. It definitely limits our options in that bed, though — no full sun to be had. We've found that salad greens (spinach, arugula, mesclun lettuces, beet greens) started in a cold frame do well here, since they get sun until the tree leafs out in May. If they're reasonably sized, the shade then works to our advantage to keep them from bolting. Weedy cilantro and dill also do well here, so we amend with lots of compost and just have the herbs and greens switch places each year, and it seems to work well. Along the top are still perennial grapes and herbs, which will remain in place (give or take a few small shake-ups of the herb garden that I'm mulling over). On the left at the top is a section for potatoes, though we'll als...

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...

Our potatoes this year grew quickly, flowered, and died back, leaving us a pretty decent harvest under the ground. We've left them there because they're nice and safe under ground until we're ready to cure them for storage. We did dig up one bed that was planted with Kennebecs and Adirondack Reds: The Adirondack Reds are new to us this year. I ordered them from Johnny's as a replacement for our Red Pontiac potatoes , which we ate last winter instead of saving any for seed. Unlike the Red Pontiacs, these red potatoes are colored all the way through the flesh, which made for some colorful mashed potatoes: This meal brought back a strong, visceral memory of the first time I ate dinner at a friend's house. My first grade best friend Wendy loved mashed potatoes (I did not), and she especially loved them with ketchup. She stirred huge squirts of ketchup into her snow white mashed potatoes until they turned bright pink. I had never seen such a thing, and ...

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....

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...

This Sunday we enjoyed some football food while we watched the AFC Championship game: sliders! Our mini-burgers were topped with bacon and cheddar, plus caramelized red onions, bread and butter pickles , and homemade ketchup from the garden. Well, pickles and ketchup don't come directly from the garden, but their ingredients do. We also had purple and yellow French fries and a light slaw. Our storage cabbage is still doing well in the basement, and Kirk made a new winter slaw with shredded cabbage and carrot, plus a couple of thawed cilantro cubes , salt and pepper. The dressing is a light vinaigrette of olive oil and vinagre de banano (banana vinegar) from Costa Rica . It's a really delicious vinegar that tastes like a fruity, caramel-y malt vinegar. I've never seen it in around here before, and if I can't find any, I may have to try to make some when we run out. Anyway, it's just the thing for this crispy winter salad. And to drink? Chocolate mi...

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 has been an all-around excellent growing season, especially for our cool-weather crops. Despite their slow start , we had cabbages all summer long, and we still have a couple left in the garden that weren't krauted. I am also still snipping side shoots of broccoli (just had some for dinner!), which means that we've been harvesting broccoli for three and a half months now. That's definitely a new record for us.  But most glorious of all has been our kale crop this fall: We planted the kale back in August, and it has done very well this season, thanks to our relatively wet and cool summer. The kale above is a Russian variety, although there is also some Swiss chard behind it. This was a bonus round of kale that Kirk put in by transplanting some of the thinnings from the main bed. They totally took off, and now we have almost twice as much kale as we had originally planned. Our main kale bed (above) is a four by eight foot box of 32 plants. The half ...

After sampling several versions of local rice and bean dishes during our beach weekend here in Costa Rica, we went shopping for ingredients to do our own cooking when we got back to Turrialba, the town where we are living and going to school. Between our own palates and the information I got from my Spanish teacher Heyni, we were ready to make our own version of a traditional gallo pinto .  Gallo pinto means "spotted rooster," but really it's the name of typical mix of beans and rice and spices. This is usually served with eggs for breakfast, but we decided to have it with some chicken for dinner. Here are our ingredients: Clockwise from the top, first we have salsa de vegetales  (also, for reasons unknown, called  salsa inglesa ),   which is a local condiment used mostly on bean and rice dishes. It's a non-spicy, savory mix of onion, carrot, cucumber, cauliflower, garlic, pepper, and cumin. We grabbed the cheap version, but the standard is appare...

Although we were very good about fencing the cabbages this year to protect them from hungry skunks and groundhogs, it turns out something else has been eating away at them: See the way those leaves are clipped off right at the bottom? At first I wasn't sure what was going on, because of the insect damage further up the leaf, but that nibbling at the bottom is a classic sign of cutworms. We have dealt with them before , and there's just nothing more disheartening than watching your tiny transplants (especially ones you raised from seed over the winter) get mowed down overnight.  Half of our winter cabbages were beyond saving:  As you can see, I suspected cutworms earlier, and used a yogurt cup with the bottom cut out as a ring around it to keep the worms at bay. That was too little, too late for this plant, though. Time to try a more drastic remedy before we lose all of the cabbages. First, we dug up our remaining plants and temporarily moved them to an un...