Port Potager

Another trash-to-treasure accomplishment from this past weekend? New compost bins made of out of the pallets leftover from all the bricks we used back in the summer. Up to this point, our compost piles were incredibly slap-dash. When we moved in, we knew we wanted to get them started, so we used some wire fencing to make big, circular corrals for our leaves, kitchen scraps, and garden waste: As you can see, they are neither attractive nor particularly sturdy. The one on the right has fallen apart, but that also reveals that, after two seasons of breaking down, there's some nice, dark stuff in there. Still, after going to all the trouble of designing and building our dream garden, it would be a shame to spoil the view by leaving piles of crap around the edges. In fact, our compost bin design helped us deal with not one but two piles of crap at the same time: We had a dozen or so pallets in varying conditions from all the bricks stacked up in the driveway....

Looks like I made the right call by refusing to rake leaves until they had all  fallen. That decision was not only more efficient, but it also set us up to take our time with the fall clean-up over the long holiday weekend, and it let us do it in the comfort of temperatures in the mid-60s. It was a little disorienting to feel like three seasons were mixing together, but it was way more enjoyable than it usually is. We have taken down several trees since we moved in, but we still have a gigantic maple in the front yard. This tree manages to dump leaves absolutely  everywhere , so raking is a pretty big job (there are two other deciduous trees in the back that contribute too, but nowhere near the way the big one does). It's good to have lots of help: The kids did a lot of jumping, but they also stood on the tarp to hold it down while Kirk pushed the leaves onto it. Then everyone grabbed a corner to lug the pile to the back. This was repeated several times. While that w...

It feels like much, much longer ago, but about three weeks ago , I broke off many of the leaves on our Brussels sprouts plants to encourage the buds to fill out to an edible size. I also fertilized, watered, and gave a little love to these plants. The only other thing we did for them between then and now is added a hoop house over them to keep them from freezing and to try to encourage them to grow, even though the season really ought to be over. Our Brussels sprouts were nowhere near ready for Thanksgiving dinner, so we bought some from Tendercrop . As a point of comparison, here's what they look like when grown by people who know what they are doing: And here's what ours looked like as of today: Not at all impressive, although a few are plumping up here and there. the best ones are on the small stalk that I accidentally beheaded while pulling the leaves off a few weeks ago: Looking at this one — the one that I was pretty sure would die without any leaves...

My original plan was to take some pictures of all the vegetables we used from the garden for Thanksgiving dinner, then show how we prepared them in a series of before and after photos. This plan went well first thing in the morning when we went out to pick what we needed: Clockwise from the top we have mixed greens and herb salad (lettuces, arugula, kale, beet greens, mint, and cilantro), cabbage and broccoli, frozen green beans from earlier in the season, frozen peas from earlier in the season, a jar of dried sage, chives, and carrots. My Thanksgiving photography took a nosedive as the day went on, though. I took only one other picture all day, and it wasn't of prepared food or even of the kids. So instead of a big recipe extravaganza, here's what I learned yesterday: 1. It takes three times as long to pick damp vegetables on a freezing morning than it does to pick them later in the afternoon. This is because you have to stop several times to thaw your wet, frozen ...

The Colonial Nursery is a actually one of the sites that you can visit without purchasing a ticket to all of Colonial Williamsburg. This is because, in addition to being a period garden, it is also a store. All the shops are open to the public at large, so it is possible to do some sightseeing on the cheap if you are so inclined.  Below is a photo of the fall garden. You can see, of course, lots of greens and brassica. In the center of the bed are leeks: We have been thinking about leeks in the last few days. Kirk is currently reading John Seymour's The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It , and his description of leeks is worth sharing: In cold, wet areas, this is one of the most useful plants, for it stands the winter and provides good  food and vitamins in the months when little else has survived except kale. Onions are hard to grow  and to keep, but leeks are an easy substitute. The Welsh are very sensible to have this excellent plant  as an em...

I have a feeling most visitors to Colonial Williamsburg do their ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the pleasure gardens at the Governor's Palace, not the vegetable garden . They are lovely, although definitely less lush in November than they must be in the height of the summer. Still, the "bones" of a Colonial garden, especially in the South, consists of its boxwood hedging and edges, and that part is every bit as green and beautiful at this time of year — perhaps more so, since without all the flowers, the architecture of the boxwood gets top billing. First stop? The maze: This photo gives a good idea of the scale of the privet maze. The kids really enjoyed it, although I don't think it was as challenging as I remember it being. As you can see in the photo just to the left of the children, not all of the hedges are fully filled in. I'm not sure if this was due to the time of year or a recent pruning, or if the bushes are just in a phase of being thinner than in...

After exploring Great Hopes Plantation , we continued on into Colonial Williamsburg proper to the Governor's Palace . After the tour of the inside of the building (which has been recently redecorated, by the way, to reflect what it would have been like with a family living there instead of just a bachelor governor), we went out to the grounds. In the South, colonial kitchens were housed in an outbuilding. Below you can see the (quite large) kitchen for the Palace: The brick kitchen buildings stand at the top of a terraced kitchen garden that extends quite a distance down the slope to a pond. It is hidden from passersby on the street by the brick wall. The Palace itself is behind what we see of the kitchen here. Not surprisingly, we see kale and collards in these beds, as well as some fruit trees on the ends that are going dormant (my guess was figs and peaches, but it's hard to tell when they are almost bare). This view of the kitchen is from the bottom of the...