Port Potager

Though there were times during this summer’s drought when our celery was yellow and sprawled flat on the ground — rather like a cartoon version of a thirsty plant — it recovered really well this fall: That’s the celery growing in our greenhouse tunnel, and it’s really robust — pretty much the best we’ve ever done with it. I attribute this to our long autumn growing season. We had a late frost, and the nightly lows just haven’t fallen much below 30 until this week. Celery does well in cool weather and can handle some frost, so it’s been loving life in the tunnel this season. Alas, the high  temperature by the weekend will only be 27, so this week we’re working our way through the most tender items in the tunnel to eat it all up before the deep freeze. The tunnels offer some protection from the cold, but won’t be able to keep things alive once temperatures start hitting the teens.  This celery is nice enough to eat raw, and the ribs are actually wide enough...

It's that time of year again: Frost is on its way. That means it's time to get our butts in gear and protect our fall veggies from getting nipped back by the cold. With proper care, leafy greens should last through year's end, and leeks and carrots will be fine all winter (though there's no guarantee we'll be able to get to them , but they'll survive nonetheless). We never, ever manage to take care of this until the very day temperatures are expected to drop below freezing. This year there's the whole kitchen thing , but there's always something. The trouble with that is that, without fail, the day we put up the tunnels us the windiest, coldest day of the fall. Today was no exception. The streak is alive. Still, we got it done. This year we put our longest ever tunnel in place: This stretches the full 27 feet across our longest bed along the brick path. Inside are leeks, beets, turnips, bok choy, mesclun, and a handful of carrots. ...

Although for the most part this fall had been mild and calm, that all changed last weekend with ( surprise! ) a gusty wind storm that tore up one of our greenhouse tunnels: This one houses our leeks (to the left), plus some root veg, bok choy, arugula, and cabbages. Well, it used to. Now it's the home of bok choy popscicles: The picture doesn't quite get across that during the rapid temperature drop into the teens, the bok choy was frozen absolutely solid. I could have broken pieces off with a snap, like that experiment where a scientist dips a rubber ball in liquid nitrogen and then smashes it on the ground. So much for the stir fry we were planning on. The leek leaves are similarly frozen, but since that's not the part we eat, it's not a problem. Underground, the fat white bulbs are still happy. Kirk was able to fix this just to cover the leek half up before the big rain storms hit last night. The leeks would likely survive the winter uncover...

I know, I know. How can I be thinking about frost on a day, during a week like this ? It's so hot that the ice rink down the street can barely keep it together for skating classes. Still, our average first frost date is October 15, and that's just 90 days from today. That all seems very far away until you start reading the backs of seed packets. When some of your cabbages take 90 days to mature, and your broccoli is looking at 75 days, it's time to get fall planting plans underway. If you care about eating once it gets cold and dark, that is. Our peas have just finished for the season, and over the weekend we pulled out the trellises to make room for some fall crops. Ditto on the garlic, which is harvested and curing in the workshop. That leaves us space to get cracking on our fall plantings, most of which I sowed over the past couple of days: I realize that empty dirt isn't all that exciting to look at, but that's where the action is. In ...

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...

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...

Here's hoping that this is the last of the snow posts. The blizzard has been fun and all, but now we need some slow-but-steady melting to stay on track with our spring planting plan . Yesterday was a gorgeous, sunny, and warm (for February) day, so it was the perfect opportunity for the kids to play in the snow and help Kirk tunnel into some of the greenhouse tunnels to get at our carrots and leeks: The carrot section closest to the house had the worst of the drifting, and was completely covered. Four-foot-tall Jonas gives a sense of what we were up against in getting them uncovered. Carrot access complete! Of course the ground is frozen solid and we have no real leverage for digging, but at least it's a start. Kirk also managed to get to the leeks. This greenhouse tunnel wasn't completely covered, but it took some work to dig back the snow and roll away the partially buried plastic. Kirk dug up all but the last half dozen leeks and brought them ins...

We've had this dinner before, this quiche and salad combo:  But what is special about this one is that I have a plate of fresh food in front of me on a frigid January 21st. As I write this, it is snowing and down to just 24 degrees.  And yet.  The chickens are laying ( thanks to our adjustment of their light ), the greens are growing (or at least remain in edible dormancy,  thanks to our tending of the tunnels and cold frames ).  With gardens and life, this could all change with the weather. We won't see temperatures above freezing for the next week, and that could send our chickens into a dry spell. Single-digit nights could kill our mache and kale, regardless of the protection we've built. It's a harsh week ahead. But this bit of a miracle on a plate reminds me that our ant-like diligence in summer pays off in the dark stretches of winter. There's a lot that comes our way on the wind that is out of our control, but we can still build ...

Although we woke up to another dusting of snow this morning, the weather was actually quite nice: sunny and somewhere in the 40s. This was a welcome change after the bitter cold we had last week, and it was a great day to check on how the veggies in our cold frame and greenhouse tunnels fared during our extreme low temperatures. First stop on the tour were the carrots near the house: You can see a few exposed near the top. The pitchfork in the foreground was necessary for this harvest because the ground was frozen through the first few inches, even under the plastic. That's not too surprising – it was so cold last week, and this tunnel is in a corner that doesn't get that much afternoon sun in the dead of winter (it's shaded by the house now, but it's fine when the sun is on a higher path at other times of the year). Anyway, the carrots are fine, but digging them up requires some muscle to get through the soil with the fork, and then to use a trowel to wha...

Any hope of me overcoming my new obsession with hot beds  in the near future was destroyed today, by the same wind that took out another window of our cold frames: It was really gusty today, and when I got home, six of the eight glass windows that we use to cover our cold frames had been tossed around to other parts of the garden. Luckily only one broke, but now we are down to just seven, and that means that one of our cold frames is done for the year, because we need eight windows to cover both completely. And if it's not completely closed up, it obviously won't work. So I put away the three remaining windows that had been over the frame with cilantro, fennel, and dill, leaving them to certain death when temperatures drop again. I also reinforced the windows over the cold frame with the salad greens, weighing them down with bricks:  But really, is this any way to live? I had to re-batten down a lot of the plastic on the greenhouse tunnels too, for like the 5...

We took advantage of a nice day wedged between rainy ones to do some work out in the greenhouse tunnels. Yesterday in the drizzle we opened them all up wide to let them get some rain and air out, knowing that it would stay above freezing over night. Today we had to cover them back up for the coming week (this time of year it's too dark too early to try to get it done after work), so we harvested some veg for Sunday dinner , cleaned out dead and dying leaves, and clamped the plastic back into place. As we did that, though, we decided to break down the hoops from this bed: Kirk harvested the last beets out of this bed yesterday afternoon, so all that's left is a row of Swiss chard that's been picked at all season long. We decided that a better use of our greenhouse materials would be to cover our leek bed instead: So we moved the greenhouse hoops and plastic to cover the remaining leeks. You can see that some of the leek leaves are sticking out the bottom, ...

Come, ye thankful people, come, Raise the song of harvest home! All is safely gathered in, Ere the winter storms begin... ~Henry Alford The forecast for tonight is for temperatures to drop down to 30 degrees, and the National Weather Service issued its official freeze warning. That meant that I spent about an hour and a half bringing in the last of our summer harvest. I picked all the tender things that just won't make it through any bit of frost: beans, peppers, eggplant, okra, and a last few lavender buds. Here's why it took so long: That is a whole lot of peppers! We didn't realize we had so many bell peppers because they're hard to see when they are still green, and we were kind of waiting for them to turn. But now we're out of time, and I guess smarter farmers would have been enjoying them all along as green peppers instead of waiting for them to turn yellow, orange, and red. We've had a few very sweet, colorful ones, but It's jus...

… flowers dead lie wither'd on the ground, As broken glass no cement can redress …  ~Shakespeare, Poem XIII Hmm … where's the rest of the cold frame? There should be three more glass panes on that one, and now the baby mache is all exposed to temperatures in the teens (and, today, some snow). If you look carefully, you can see some bits of white in the quadrant behind the cold frames. Let's walk back there and take a closer look: Well, crap. I don't know what the biggest problem is: the likely ruination of that cold frame's mache crop, the definite destruction of the glass panes, or the suckiness that will be the clean up of all those bits of glass out of the gravel paths. Oh, and out of the leaf mulch over the garlic bed in the spring: Now, that must have been some wind. Why is it so windy here? This is the fourth or fifth time since we've lived here that we woke up to backyard destruction after a windy night … and that's not inclu...

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...

When we cleaned up the garden for the winter , we left a row of broccoli plants under a greenhouse hoop to see if their small heads and side shoots would plump up at all. When we tucked them under the plastic, they looked really great: A few weeks ago I had harvested some nice, green shoots for a salad  — they were tender and tasty, if a bit on the small side. At that time, when I cut the center head, there were lots of side shoots to be had: Ah, but then the winds blew. There was no blizzard, no storm--not really even any rain. But the wind gusted up around 40-45 mph, and that was enough to uncover our remaining broccoli: We could hear the plastic flapping loose before we went to bed, but no one was about to step out into the dark of night and wind chills of 5 degrees Fahrenheit to try to fix it. As you can see, the broccoli plants didn't like that one bit, and froze up.  All that's left to do is see what can be salvaged from the dead (or dyi...