Port Potager

Some of the time you would say it was luck, and some of the time you would say it was weather , but this season has been really hard on the garden in the insect department. In addition to the usual trouble with cutworms and cabbage loopers , we also have a bunch of asparagus beetles ruining that crop.   And now there are also flea beetles : That little black bug in the center is a small beets that can hop around, and we have more than just one. you can see that there’s tons of damage on that arugula leaf it’s sitting on, and every arugula plant in our mesclun patch looks the same way. They also really like radishes, so I don’t think we’ll be getting any of those to plump up any time soon.  We can live without arugula and radishes, but these bugs have also gotten into our broccoli and cauliflower, though the damage for the most part isn’t quite as severe: Since radishes are their favorite food, I planted several small patches in the broccoli and caulif...

We took advantage of this beautiful weekend to finish up some garden clean-up chores that we had put off while working on the kitchen. Now all the garden beds are tidied up for the winter, and all the root vegetables are mulched and ready for cold weather. Part of the clean up included harvesting some beets and beet greens that are not under plastic. I also picked the last radishes, which have done admirably in the cold without any protection. Add some last snippets of broccoli and a carrot, and you have a tasty winter salad: We were a little disappointed to discover that most of the arugula and lettuce in the greenhouse tunnels was limp and mushy from the wide temperature fluctuations over the past month, so this salad is mostly beet greens taken when we pulled the beets for storage. (There's a tiny bit of arugula from a volunteer patch, but not much.) That makes for a strongly flavored salad, so Kirk balanced it out with a sweet new dressing: Honey Sesame Dressing ...

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 ...

This is the best time of year in the garden, because just about everything is ripening at once. It makes from some excellent eating in August and September. To wit: The burger was great, but the salad? This might be the best salad ever. It's at least the best salad you could make with all seasonal produce in the waning days of summer.  To make it, you need a bed of young (and therefore less peppery) arugula and beet greens. Thinly slice a fennel bulb, a couple radishes, a small red onion, and a small apple (we used our last Summer Rambo , a variety that ripens in August on our heirloom 4-in-1 tree ). Drizzle with olive oil and garnish with fennel fronds.  That's all there is to it — no dressing required, really. It's so flavorful just the way it is, and it's crunchy, juicy, and awesome. We're looking forward to repeating it with other fall apples (I picked a Macoun today!), so this is likely to be on our plates until we run out of fennel.

September is the most beautiful month here in New England, and we had a stunning day today. In addition to puttering around the garden and taking care of some basic chores, we took time to climb up to the top of the Plum Island lighthouse . It's not always open to visitors, so we were happy to take advantage of this once-in-a-while view of the Merrimac making its way to the ocean: Not only does September offer the best weather of the year, but it is also the month during which our garden is at its absolute peak of production. We still have all the fruits of high summer (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant), but we also have available just about anything we want from the fall garden as well (sweet potatoes, pumpkins, cabbage, kale). From now until frost (usually mid-October for us), we can have our pick of almost everything we grow.  For example, tonight's supper is a combination of summer and fall produce on one plate: We had very summery charcoal-grilled burgers ...

We've been on a springtime weather roller coaster here the past several days, bouncing from balmy to brisk and back again. It was another big weekend in the garden, with lots of bed prep and planting (leeks, onions, carrots, parsnips, radishes, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard, and potatoes). My hamstrings and hands are still sore, but we got a lot done. It would be a shame, though, to focus only on the to-do list without enjoying all the little changes that spring brings to the garden. Here's what's blooming: Bulbs are up in the perennial border, and these blue glory-of-the-snow get better each year. We inherited them and they have naturalized nicely. There are also some darker blue Siberian squill, which are just starting to come up. We removed the spills from the sugar maple now that sugaring season is done. The wound should heal over by autumn. More blue! These sky blue muscari bulbs are in the cutting bed, but I never actually cut them down.  ...

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 ...

This weekend we got our cold frame back in place over the soil we managed to turn last weekend : As you can see, we added a new frame on the end. We have what seems to me much more than our fair share of blustery days here, and back in December  the wind took out more of the old storm windows that we use to cover our cold frames. That incident finally left us with no more back-ups, and one less than we need to cover the whole cold frame.  For a free fix, Kirk used some scrap wood to build a frame the size of the gap, then stapled some plastic around it. It's not at all pretty, but it should serve the purpose. We'll see how it holds up in the rain and snow — we may need to put some leftover chicken wire or a crosspiece to support the plastic if it starts to get weighed down in the middle. This should get us through the spring, and over the summer we plan to build some new cold frames that will be sized properly for these beds anyway. Once the cold frame was re...

Some of our Spanish Rosa garlic has sprouted an alien life form! Not really — these are garlic scapes. Instead of a flower, sometimes garlic will sprout a scape, which is like an extra little bulblet on a stem. You could let that continue to grow and become tiny garlic cloves (this is how a garlic plant can go to seed), but if the plant puts its energy into the scape, the garlic bulb in the ground won't get very big. And that's really the goal. So we cut a few of our garlic scapes last night for dinner: These scapes are alongside a green onion and the leaves of some bok choy that has bolted (the leaves still taste fine, but there's no nice cabbage head like last fall ). We also pulled our earliest carrots and chopped up a couple of overgrown radishes for this stir fry: There's also cilantro in here from the garden. The ingredients not grown by us are the rice and pork (although the pork is from a nearby farm ). This is almost a totally Made i...

Out in the garden, where the cold frame used to be (ours are heavy but portable, so we removed it the other day, after a few weeks of having the glass off full time), you can find pretty little radishes like this: There is also a lot of young spinach, arugula, and mesclun to be had: So, finally, we enjoyed our first springtime garden dinner last night: The salad comes directly from the garden patch in the photos above. It's made of the last of our winter mache from the fridge, plus fresh spinach, arugula, and lettuce from the former cold frame bed. There are also radishes sliced thin for extra color and flavor (I find that a little bit of radish goes a long way). As usual, the only dressing is a splash of olive oil and lemon juice, plus some cracked pepper. Even Jonas the Lettuce Hater was on board with this salad. The other dish is pesto chicken over pasta. Kirk used some pesto cubes we had in the freezer (remember when we made them last fall ?) to c...

While out and about in the garden yesterday afternoon, I came across this guy: That is a radish. We must have missed it when we pulled them up (much) earlier this fall, and this is what happens when you let them go: you get a radish that is almost as long and as big around as your foot. I'm not sure how edible this will be — I'm thinking it will have a pretty big bite to it. Our plan is to grate it and use it sparingly over a salad, unless it is just too terrible to eat at all, a la Scarlett O'Hara's garden .

This is my third day of work and our third day of rain, so I haven't spent much time outside in the garden this week. We've all been stuck inside, but apparently that big old garden is never far from our thoughts. To wit, check out Tiegan's first homework assignment of fourth grade: To get to know each other, the kids need to fill a bag with items that represent their personalities (based on the bulleted prompts at the bottom of the page). What's that in the ziploc baggie? A radish she went out and picked from the garden to take in to school. She chose it because it's a "non-leaf vegetable." Below is a close-up of the prompts. See if you can guess which one the radish is in response to. It could be almost any of them, but if you guessed "something special about your family," you win the prize. Your prize can be the radish. Mine is a great kid.

This weekend marks the first time in Newburyport that we've been able to take a stroll around the garden before making the grocery list to plan our dinners (or at least side dishes) around what is growing. Here's what we saw and what we decided to make with it. Radishes and Lettuce Our first radishes are ready to go. We didn't plant that many because in the past we've ended up with way more than we could ever eat, but a few are nice — especially since they come up so quickly. We use them as a row marker between two rows of carrots, and when the radishes are ready, the carrots are big enough to be thinned out. This row of mesclun is one of several rows of lettuce around the garden. This was planted later, but is ready to eat sooner than the lettuces in the background, because it's just a leaf lettuce. The ones in the back are our butterhead and redleaf, which take longer to mature because they are head lettuces. If you look really closely, you can see...

The boring part of today was pulling more weeds out of the last section of bed around the patio area (a leftover task from yesterday). The frustrating part of today was running out of compost before we could finish amending said bed, leaving a task incomplete until the tree dump opens again on Tuesday (provided we have access to a truck, that is). The great part of today? Sowing the fall veggie seeds! This is only a small section of the beds that we sowed today, but it's the most interesting one to look at because we put up the trellis and pea netting. Kirk built it for our old garden and made it take-apart-able, so it was all ready to go after a season packed up in the garage. The ladder is there because we needed some height from which to bring the sledgehammer down upon the posts, but it went back together great, after the annoyance of untangling the netting and threading the posts through it (much less arguing about that this time around, though, so hooray for marital h...