Port Potager

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...

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...

Though there's still between six and 12 inches of snow on the ground in most spots and we're nowhere near ready to plant any spring crops outdoors, we still have plenty of last year's harvest stores to enjoy for dinner. To wit: Along with filet or perch we had garlic green beans and sweet corn fritters. Despite not having a great green bean harvest last summer, we still had enough frozen beans to last through this long winter. We also still have a good deal of garlic, though some of it is beginning to sprout, which gives it kind of a greenish flavor.  The corn fritters were made possible by some frozen corn from our bumper crop of sweet corn this summer. These are basically pancakes with corn in them, but fried in a half inch of oil. Kirk made them from a recipe in The Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook , but there's a very similar recipe here . Just use regular salt and skip the sugar if you use fresh or frozen sweet corn from a farm — that's ple...

Something magical happened last weekend. Tiegan got a cookbook out at the library on Saturday morning and announced that she would be preparing dinner on Sunday. She did, and it was delicious. Check out her adaptation of a chicken pot pie from The Children's Baking Book by Denise Smart. Making the Pie 1. I made a creamy sauce with butter, flour, chicken stock, milk, sour cream, and spices. I chose salt, pepper, and dried savory and oregano from the garden. 2. I cooked the chicken in a frying pan with some oil and chopped onions. They made me cry a lot. 3. I mixed the cooked chicken, frozen peas , and frozen corn into the sauce.  4. I divided the mixture into four individual pie dishes and let it cool for a little bit. 5. I cut out puff pastry circles and put them over the dishes.  6. I put them in the oven for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. The original recipe had ham in it and no corn, but everybody enjoyed it anyway. It wasn't too har...

Just the other day I mentioned that we still had the dry stalks of our sweet corn standing in the garden to act as a decoy . My hope was to lure any corn-loving critters (raccoons? crows? squirrels?) away from Tiegan's popcorn until it was ready to harvest.  Well, here's what I saw on the way to the chicken coop for an egg this morning: One stalk and several ears of popcorn had been shredded up by some hungry animal or another. On second thought, maybe it wasn't all that hungry, or maybe Fletch interrupted its feast, because it left behind several ears that were only partially gnawed: Time to harvest the popcorn before losing any more to whatever is eating it! In my experience, once an animal gets a taste for something in your garden, it's all over. They'll be back every day (or night) until there's nothing left. This is Tiegan's corn, by the way. We gave her a four-foot-square patch in which to grow her heirloom seeds of strawberr...

The equinox is just around the corner, and soon we will be heading toward the dark days. The chickens are molting rather then laying (Sally remaining our reliable exception, of course). The temperatures (especially in the early morning hours) are cooler, and though we are still several weeks away from frost, the garden has shifted from the lush greens and vibrant reds of high summer to the mellow golds and dusky purples of autumn. I am always sad to see summer go, but there are compensations. Our very small pumpkin patch has produced a good number of heirloom Long Pie pumpkins this year. The vines have died back almost completely, and the fruits are curing in the waning hours of sunlight. Hopefully they'll have time to ripen to orange before frost. Our Cherokee Trail of Tears beans are drying on the vines. They are a papery purple now, and I have been slowly picking them so we can shell them before frost. No rush on this project, though. They dry just as well on the ...

If you've been following this blog through several growing seasons, you are already well-acquainted with our difficulties raising sweet corn. It's not an easy crop to grow in small patches because it's pollinated by the wind. This means that you need a lot of it to make sure that enough of it gets pollinated to be worthwhile — usually the ones around the edges are a loss. But if your ratio of edge to interior is too high, you're not going to get much corn. We dealt with a severe  failure to pollinate  back in 2012, and I think  last year's crop , though improved, suffered from this as well.  And let's not forget our friends  the squirrels . They are the worst .  So, given all these troubles, we agreed that this year would be the last chance for corn. If we couldn't get a decent crop, we wouldn't bother saving any space for it in next year's garden plan. We got a new variety — "Mystique" from Johnny's Seeds  — and planted just ...

The day before Thanksgiving is Pie Day, but in addition to the traditional baking (pumpkin and apple, which I can share later), I also made a soup for Thanksgiving lunch. I have been ruminating about using our frozen corn for a corn chowder for a few months now, and this seemed the perfect day to give it a go. Corn, after all, is a pretty traditional New England Thanksgiving food. For us, though, it has always been a challenge to grow , so using the last of our hard-won kernels warranted a special occasion.  My recipe is modified from Pioneer Woman's Corn Chowder with Chilies [sic]. I liked the idea of spicing this up, but I went with our own dried chipotles instead of the canned ones called for in the recipe. Vinegary, canned peppers seemed weird to me in a creamy soup, but her addition of masa harina is genius. Here's my version: Chipotle Corn Chowder 4 slices of bacon (ours was from Tendercrop and was corn-cob smoked, which is extra smoky and rich-tasting, ...

Temperatures are dropping, the wind is picking up, and our lovely maple is starting to put on an October show: Even so, summer isn't over until baseball ends for the season. And 'round these parts, that means when the Red Sox make their last out.  The day the baseball season ends is, for me, one of the most depressing days of the year. That's the day that summer is utterly, indisputably gone . No turning back from the onslaught of winter now. But it's not over! Grand   slams  abound, and the Sox are headed to the World Series. I'll be honest, all these late playoff-watching nights have left me more than a little sleep deprived, and the garden has gotten the bare minimum of our attention this October. Despite our benign neglect, the garden is still providing us with summery fruits and vegetables. Having not gotten the message that it's almost Halloween, there's still one zucchini plant producing, as well as tomatoes, raspberries, and ...

Last year, we had very little corn. Between the squirrels  and a generalized failure to pollinate  thanks to a failed succession-planting scheme, we pretty much got just a couple handfuls of kernels to throw in some salsa. This year, we have some corn: The ears are small, and it's just not as much as you'd hope for from 132 square feet of planting area. Each stalk only produced a single ear at the most, and many not even that. I realize that planting corn in a garden is difficult because you really need a big block of it to ensure pollination, but in the Red House we planted just six stalks one year, and got two or three big, fat ears on each one. So it's not impossible. Next year we'll try a different variety for what could be a last effort at sweet corn. Yesterday I brought in all the corn that looked even close to ready, since I could see it was starting to be picked at (I presume by squirrels, but it could be birds). Sometimes our defense agai...

You know how traditionally women did certain household chores on certain days? Like washing on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays? If you think I'm making this up , you didn't read enough Little House in the Big Woods as a kid. Well, I kind of have that this summer. Harvest on Mondays and Thursdays, deal with said harvest on Tuesdays and Fridays.  So after yesterday's picking over of the garden and orchard, here's what I had: Another twenty or thirty pounds of peaches, plus all our red and yellow onions on the counter behind them. Here's a better view. The bags are full of drying herbs and last year's mustard seeds, which I still haven't completely threshed out yet because it's a giant pain. The onions are easy — they just need to sit out in the warm air to cure before we store them in the basement.  A refill on the fruit bowl, now with nectarines in addition to peaches. (Oh, and one windfallen-but-perfectly-ripe Gala apple t...

The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. ~from "The Masque of the Red Death," by Edgar Allan Poe We've got more than just  squirrel problems with our corn this year (as if that weren't enough). We also have weird, red veined stalks (and these often these have red tassels as well). It starts with the center vein turning red: Lots of our corn looked like this, and it did not grow very tall. They also had very small ears (well, the ones we beat the squirrels to did, anyway). Not all of it turned out this way. Here's a nice, normal one with a good sized ear: (To be honest, we have to assume that ear was good based on the size of the husk the squirrels left behind). These have nice, white center veins in the leaves: So what is going on? According to a very thorough diagnostic chart from the University of Georgia , the Red Death might be a virus called Maize ...

Not that they ever really left (well, except maybe that one that, according to our neighbors, got eaten by the hawk), but the squirrels are back. With a vengeance. This time they are tag-teaming our corn: They run from the back fence into the corn and back again, one after another. There's not much we can do about it — they can climb over anything we put around the corn, short of building a greenhouse for it. So we walk around the yard picking up what's left of corn cobs and husks. Sometimes they leave scraps with actual kernels on them, which I hand directly over to the chickens. At least someone is getting some corn. To be fair, we did  get a tiny bit of corn. But it's not great, as you can see when I put an average-size tomato in the photo for scale: These ears are pretty tiny, and what the squirrels are getting aren't any bigger. I don't know if it's due to the dry weather, the variety, or the slightly shady bed, but corn hasn...