Port Potager

Last weekend was a fairly big planting time for us, and just about all of it happened in the central "C" of the workshop quadrant: In this central bed we have Swiss chard, early and late carrots, cilantro, mesclun lettuce, head lettuce and spinach. Most of this bed is really only in partial sun once a nearby maple tree leafs out, but that usually works for leafy salad greens to keep them from bolting in the heat. I also used some onion sets as dividers between these plantings to mark the rows. Across the top of this quadrant are still perennial grapes and herbs. The right side and bottom are largely empty. We have a few repairs to do in these sections, and after that we’ll plant a cover crop of clover to give these beds a rest for the season. That leaves the left side, which is a much-reduced tomato section. Because the area is so much smaller, we’re not planning to do much tomato canning this year, but we should have enough for plenty of fresh eating and froze...

We eat a lot of homemade pizza throughout the year, but it’s always fun when a new ingredient is ready to harvest to shake things up a little bit.  This very green springtime pizza features a garlic béchamel sauce , asparagus, spinach and feta. It’s also garnished with lovage and some pea shoots, all from the garden (except the feta, of course). This is a great way to enjoy our earliest garden harvest of asparagus and leafy greens. I don’t think Jonas was wild about it, but we also had plenty of regular tomato sauce pizza for him, too. We’re down to our final jar of sauce now, so he might want to get on board with white pizza for the next couple months until we have some more tomatoes. (Ordinarily we don’t run out, but the drought really kept our yields down last summer).  If you’re looking for something different in your pizza repertoire, give this one a try!

Working our way around the garden, we come to the workshop quadrant. I guess we could also call this the office quadrant, since it forms the bulk my view during the day. Here’s what I’ll be gazing out at when I’m procrastinating: In the center C are celery and parsley, zucchini, cantaloupe, and a Sungold tomato plant. The Sungold, celery, and parsley are partially shaded, which should be fine. It should help slow the ultra-prolific Sungold down to a manageable harvest level, and celery and parsley will do well with some shade in the summer anyway. Across the top, as always, are our perennial grapes and herbs. In the upper portion of the right side is a succession planting of dill. This is the shadiest section of the garden, but dill is basically a weed and will do fine here. Below that is a semi-shaded section that will lie fallow for most of the season until we plant next winter’s spinach and mache in a cold frame. Across the bottom is a long trellis of peas and a r...

This spring has brought us a few new insect problems. In addition to the usual cutworm issues  in beds where things were wintered over and very minor winter moth problems , we’ve got some new bugs as well. The potato beetles have pretty well ruined one potato bed and ignored another — in the latter, the ladybugs seem to be prevailing .  Our other insect infestation this spring is affecting our beets: This is one example of a scorched-looking leaf. We’ve seen these in our beets, spinach, and Swiss chard this spring, and at first we assumed that the sun had burned them out on our first hot day a few weeks ago, since the issues seemed to coincide. But there were also other leafy greens in the same bed that were unaffected, and once we realized that the problem was only with plants in the same family, we figured it was either a disease or an insect issue. A closer look makes it fairly obvious that bugs are the problem:   I’m not sure what gardeners di...

March has it backwards this year. Our lamb-like weather was all at the beginning of the month, when we actually hit ~80 degrees and had to prop open the cold frames so as not to fry our early spring spinach salads: We are also pleased to have some kale to eat until we need that bed to plant something else later in the spring:   But then, if you wait a day or so, the temperatures will plummet and send you squarely back into lion territory: That’s the same kale, this time with several inches of snow on top. The snow came down so hard on Monday that the kids had a snow day: It all melted by the afternoon, but since then it has been much cooler. Seasonable, I guess, but I’m looking forward to April, when spring can begin in earnest and we can start getting some peas and more early greens going.

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...

Our Christmas dinner is not a tradition that rises from the garden, but rather is a reminder of our (admittedly relative) poverty when we first lived together in North Carolina.  That first year that we lived together, while I was finishing college and student teaching and Kirk was learning some very useful farm skills as an interpreter at the living history museum at Old Salem , we lived on very little money. We did the grocery shopping at the local Kroger with a carefully planned list in one hand and a calculator in the other. If I'm not mistaken, our budget was $25 for the week, and if we went over the limit, we took things out of the cart and put them back. Some weeks we had enough for everything plus pickles ; other weeks we did not.  This budget led to a careful exploration of pasta and stir fry dishes, and we learned just how far a single cut of meat can be stretched. We regularly split a chicken breast in half to share for dinner. So for our first Ch...

Yesterday, after completing our last bit of gardening for the year , Kirk made a really delectable lunch from some odds and ends. Not that you could tell — it looks like a fancy-schmancy tapas plate: These are two potato cakes garnished with some creamed spinach with carrot ribbons and turkey gravy. The kids were about to head out to the third performance of their Christmas play, and we wanted them to have a hot lunch to tide them over, but didn't want it to be too heavy. This was perfect. It was also a perfect way to use up the inordinate amount of mashed potatoes and gravy we still had left over from Thanksgiving, so I highly recommend it any time your eyes are too big for your stomach in the mashed potato department (which is really just about every time, right?). Potato Cakes 1 cup mashed potatoes 1 egg 1 tsp. baking powder 3/4 to 1 cup flour Mix mashed potatoes, egg, and baking powder in a large bowl. Gradually add flour until the mixture feels ...

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 ...

Now that things are growing in the warm sun, we are enjoying some seasonal delights at the dinner table. We have tulips from the cutting garden: Tulips rather notoriously lose steam after their first year, and ours are no exception. Many did not re-bloom, and the ones that did are smaller than they were last season. Still, we have enough to keep up a bouquet on the dining room table, and that's enough to brighten things up indoors. Asparagus season is in full swing! To keep it from getting out of hand, Kirk turned several large bunches into  Cream of Asparagus Soup 4-5 scallions, chopped 3-4 cloves garlic, minced 2 Tbs. olive oil 2-3 large bunches of asparagus, cut into 1-inch pieces 1/2 to 1 cup cream Salt and pepper to taste  fresh tarragon for garnish 1. In a large stock pot, sauté scallions and garlic in olive oil.   2. As you cut asparagus into pieces, add to the pot and allow to sauteé while you continue chopping.  3...

We're super-busy this week, so bring on the easy dinners! One of my favorite things to make ahead of time is chicken salad, and spring is the perfect season for it. All my favorite herbs to throw into a chicken salad are just coming up now, and it's lovely to have them back after a long winter. Here's how I make my favorite chicken salad. Spring Chicken Salad makes about 4 servings (1/2 cup each) for the chicken: 2 chicken breasts, deboned and without skin 1 small head of garlic 4-5 sprigs of rosemary olive oil salt pepper paprika for the dressing: 1/2 cup mayonaise 2 Tbs dijon mustard 1/8 tsp curry powder 1 large lovage leaf (and possibly its stem, if it's a fresh, young leaf) 2 chive leaves 3 green scallion leaves (or 1 small, whole scallion including the bulb) 1 large sprig thyme 1 large or 2 small ribs celery 1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Pat chicken dry and brown in a hot pan: There are three chicken breasts here, but I only us...

As I mentioned yesterday , we were super-excited to find our winter salad greens alive and well in the cold frames this past weekend. In addition to enjoying them on burgers and sandwiches, we also had a much-awaited fresh salad with Sunday dinner: So much green on this plate! We had sautéed chicken, steamed ( formerly frozen ) green beans with toasted pecans, and our spinach salad. Since it's been such a long, salad-free winter for us, the spinach would have been delicious to us if we had just eaten it raw and plain, but Kirk dressed it up to be extra-delectable with bacon and mushrooms. The salad was mostly spinach, but also had some mache and kale thrown in for good measure. The greens are topped with sliced, sautéed mushrooms, big bits of bacon, and toasted pecans. The dressing was a vinaigrette made with bacon fat leftover from frying the bacon, plus vinegar and a bit of dijon mustard.  Very rich with all that bacony goodness, and even better with the additio...

We had a lot of melting this weekend, thanks to bright sunshine and temperatures in the 50s.  The 50s! It would appear that I have fully acclimated to life as a New Englander. When we first moved here 16 years ago, I would shiver in my car in the mornings, and end up with cramps in my legs from all the tension in my muscles trying to ward off the cold. For real. Now I find that with the right gear (fleece, ski jacket, lined hat, lined boots, insulated and waterproof gloves), I can shrug off all but the worst of the polar vortex like a native. But the real sign that I've acclimated? I didn't even glance at most of those items today. It was just shy of 40 degrees outside when I left the house yesterday morning, but the sun was out, and a fleece and sneakers  (and regular clothes, of course) were plenty to enjoy a good long hike around town today.  I ended up taking off the fleece about halfway through. I'm not the only one enjoying the sudden warm...

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 ...

Just when we thought we were out of the woods —  snow from the blizzard almost all melted , chickens making short work of early spring tilling chores , and seeds planted in cold frames  — this happened: We're coming up on another foot of snow falling here. Sheesh. I know that weather forecasters aren't infallible, but maybe they could dispense with the hype so we'd take them seriously when it counts. The forecast for this snow went from being kinda accurate, to major eye-roll-enducing "snowquester" hype, to backpedaling from the hype, to actual reality. Which is worse than the original prediction, which we were all told to ignore.  Anyway, a foot of snow is a (pretty big) inconvenience for us, what with school being canceled and the inevitable shoveling (paths and now garden beds, so we can continue turning and prepping them once they dry out a bit). Also a snow day for the ladies, who were put to work yesterday thanks to the addition of the...

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...

Heartened by our success in keeping this spring's salad bed (relatively) unfrozen , Kirk took a look in the mache and spinach cold frame that we planted last fall. It has been a few weeks since we checked it out, with all the snow : And it looks great! Kirk scratched up the soil, and it is fluffy and light, and not even a little bit frozen. The plants you see are a few left-over spinach plants (and one endive), and they are doing fine. If we just had a little more sun, they'd probably start growing again. And that got us to thinking that we could probably get new spinach started in that cold frame right now. After all, the soil is great, there's plenty of space, and spinach is quick — 41 days to harvest, according to the seed packet (which is almost certainly very optimistic, but with some luck we may have spinach by Patriots' Day ). So I sowed some spinach seeds in the gaps, gave them a drink, and put the glass back on the cold frame. If you look c...

Yesterday was the final Sunday of Advent, the evening of our Joy supper: This is a spinach and bacon quiche, which celebrates our joy that the chickens are all laying perfectly well again now. We also had a spinach and kale salad, with some matchstick carrots (and apple chunks from a local orchard). The kale has been snowed on a couple times now, and never is any the worse for wear in the elements. The spinach is under glass in the cold frame, and it's just as tasty. It also brings us joy that we can still head out into the garden for our dinners, even though it is now officially winter.  I also had a glass of dandelion wine with dinner. It is definitely better well-chilled (our first tasting  was at room temperature), although perhaps too dry for such a light meal.  Now that Advent is complete, we have just a day to go until Christmas. Hope your holidays are filled with all the hope, peace, love, and joy you can handle!

Last weekend we had friends over for grilling, and of course we served up lots of garden veggies. In addition to snap peas and love dip , Kirk also baked up some vegetable tarts. These were super easy with some store-bought puff pastry. All he did was roll out the pastry dough into squares and roll up a bit around the edges for a little crust frame. Then he spread filling on top and baked for a bit in the oven — those directions are on the box. The more interesting part is the filling (well, it's more like a topping, since there's no top shell). The ones on the left are spinach and goat cheese tarts. These were made by layering slices of goat cheese onto the pastry, then covering that with cooked spinach and Swiss chard (the colorful stems looked nice chopped into the otherwise dark green mixture). I think he also added a bit of garlic in with the cooked spinach as well. The ones on the right were made with garden peas (left whole) mixed with cream cheese, chives...