The Garden Diaries

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2009
This morning I wake in a modest room in the Evergreen Motel in Cynthiana, KY. Just down the road towards town is a vast, low, white anonymous warehouse where thousands of pounds of tobacco are being rolled into cigarettes by extraordinarily clever and fast machines. When we first came here years ago to bring Joan’s father down to visit his KY relatives, the warehouse was flanked by a huge tobacco auction barn. That barn was torn down maybe 6 years ago, and its demise marked the end of commercial tobacco production in Harrison County. The little tobacco farmers are out of business all over Kentucky as a result of the removal of federal subsidies and allotments. The big growers now contract directly with the tobacco companies for a specified amount of tobacco, and they deliver on contract. What are the little guys growing now? Not much, but older, and maybe a little hay or corn. I feel a little bereft down here, 1200 miles from my garden in NH. Carrots, turnips and beets are still in the ground, and I’ve got quite a bit of work still to build more compost piles and mulch many of the beds with leaves. But on the other hand, it’s good to gone, and waking here in the Evergreen Motel, run by a cheerful East Indian guy who many years ago figured out how to push back against the endemic racism down here, is as good a place to be gone as any. The Pioneer Valley of eastern Massachusetts used to be a major tobacco growing center…though most of the production was leaves for the outer wrappers for cigars. Hmmm….wondering if there’s any lingering market there that I could fill with a little tobacco patch in Waterloo. These days, though, it’s probably safer to grow dope then nicotine.

Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009
Killing frosts the past several nights. Carrots, turnips, beets, parsnips are still in the ground. Kale and broccoli persevere. The winter rye and vetch mix up 4-5 inches high. The biochar test turnip beds continue to grow. These 25 degrees nights don’t seem to bother them at all. The poor soil control plot seems to be getting a bit yellow. The 10% biochar plot seems to continue to grow more consistently than the others. The manure/compost/good soil plot has several turnips that are further along than any of the other plots, and the good soil/compost/20% biochar plot seems to be starting to grow more quickly. Just enough dabbling in science to make me want to open up a larger test plot area for the spring. Time to do soil tests this next couple of days. And dig up new beds, cover with compost and mulch…perhaps ground up leaf mulch, since my neighbor gave me a pile of leaves four feet high and 15 feet radius! The month is hectic with work, and it’s hard to keep the focus on the garden. Though, if I could, I think I would throw all the work away and do nothing but garden.

Friday, Sept. 25, 2009
It wasn’t until about six p.m. yesterday that I finally understood that if you’re serious about growing food you are really gardening all year long. That’s not the sort of commitment that holds hands happily with my characteristically careless nature, but there I was yesterday evening, clearing out the tomato beds, the peas and the zucchini and digging up the dirt again. Didn’t I just do this a few months ago? Couldn’t it wait till next spring? And why am I about to plant a crop called winter rye that I can’t even eat, and will just have to dig back into the soil after the ground thaws in April. Because I’m becoming, without any real act of self-discipline, a grower. Which is like saying I’m becoming a sailor after I’ve taken a Sunfish out on a pond for an afternoon. But becoming is the better part of being, and I’m grateful for whatever strange grip this garden of ours has me in. Never in my life, or in all the 40 gardens I’ve grown in some fashion in 40 summers from Battleground, Indiana to Waterloo, NH, have I ever dug up a bed next to the broccoli that’s still producing and seeded it with winter rye, and decided what I’ll plant there next May. Maybe it’s just hedonism. I’ve never eaten better than I’ve eaten this past three months. And I’m willing to do anything, even plan ahead, to make sure that I’ll be able to take those same pleasures again next summer.

Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2009
We returned to Waterloo last week after a week away to find that the tomato blight had completely killed all 20 plants. Ripe red tomatoes were hanging in the dead vines, and some were already beginning to rot. The tomato crop is a disappointment, certainly, but it also makes me feel that this garden was not merely a fancy, a hobby. Like hundreds of major growers across New England, we lost our tomatoes, and we are not alone. Growing stuff is a crapshoot. That’s the lesson we take humbly from the people who have been doing it year after year for years. But there is little time to lament what didn’t produce for us, because so much else has come forward. Turnips five inches in diameter, and so sweet that when I deep fried thin slices last night we could taste the carmelized sugar in the crisp edges. We harvested a hundred onions, which are now drying in the garage. The bush beans keep producing, and Joan keeps freezing them. The beets are ready to pull up, as are the carrots. The parsnips are still growing, and we’ll leave them in the ground til early spring. We have delicata, pumpkin, acorn and other squashes coming ripe from the volunteer plants. We’re picking and drying basil. The ground cherries are thick on the vines. The broccoli plants continue to produce florets. There are still 30 pounds of potatoes in the ground. The Eastham turnips from the biochar test plots are growing well…though the surprise is that the 10 percent biochar/poor soil plot is doing the best. The hot pepper and green plants are still producing, and the eggplants are still swelling and new flowers have blossomed. The deer ate the scarlet runner beans, but the three other varieties of shell bean are loaded and drying on the plants. Late lettuce, kale and other hardy greens are healthy and growing. And now comes the test of how serious we are as gardeners…not so much harvested the food as harvesting what we’ve learned this summer. Writing it up, studying what went well and what didn’t, and getting the next garden ready. We’ll plant garlic in Oct. And green manures. And save seeds from the best crops, and decide where we’ll expand the garden for next year, and send off soil tests. Method, analysis, science, art. In December the good gardener plants on paper.

Saturday, August 22, 2009
After a week of no rain, thunderstorms moved in yesterday, and it rained lightly but steadily all night. The eggplant is finally beginning to set on, the potato plants are dead and I’ll cut them today and leave the potatoes in the ground another couple of weeks. Winter squash from some 10 volunteers is forming, and the tomatoes are filling out and reddening. I’m probably most pleased about my shell beans…carbo and protein crops…which may amount to half a gallon of dry beans this winter.

So, this is pretty much it, the garden is mature and giving us what it has, including the knowledge about what worked and didn’t work. I was a failure at record keeping, and inconstant in much of my tending and care. But through September and October I vow to do much better, to set down the lessons from this summer in a way that will be helpful to other folks, and to begin next year’s much expanded garden by digging up the lawn, piling up some massive compost piles, planting garlic and even trying out some late fall early winter crops. I’m getting frost blanket material, which should take us well into Nov. and even Dec. Depending. Everything depends, doesn’t it.

Monday, August 17, 2009
The biochar test turnip plots are up. I guess I lost track of when I planted them, but must have been about Aug. 2. Germination was a bit spotty, and particularly bad in the standard (manure + compost) plot. Why? Dunno. As of yesterday there doesn’t seem to be any particular diff in size of seedlings among the plots.

The bad crop news of course all around NE is the Late blight in tomatoes and potatoes. Looks like we’ve got it here. I’m a little fuzzy on the diagnosis…and have clipped all the bad looking leaves on the tomatoes, but the potatoes really have collapsed in the past several days, and the word is you gotta just cut your losses. Cut the plants, dig the potatoes. The spores will wash down and infect the potatoes. This is a reality check on gardening. Just as it was on the Irish potato farmers, because it was the cause of the potato famine which set of the wave of emigration. But the history of potatoes in Ireland, as I recall has some darker side to it, some political chicanery involving the pressure to put the Irish poor on a potato diet…should look into that. Meanwhile…not sure if we’ll have our 50 lbs of potatoes afterall for the winter.

Friday, July 31, 2009
The rain has been nearly incessant for several days, and my best laid plans to prepare 4 small testbeds for my biochar/compost mix have been drowned out. The Eastham turnip seeds from Bob Wells lie in their packet on the kitchen table. What I’m planning to do is dig 4 raised beds, about 2 feet by four feet each. Two of them are in rather poor, sandy soil at the edge of the garden, and two are in good soil that was growing plants last year. I’ll but 25 seeds in each bed. Bed #1 will be turnips in poor soil, no compost, no nothin’. Bed #2 will be turnips in poor soil with ten percent by volume dug in of the biochar mix. Bed #3 will be good soil with the compost/buffalo manure mix and some pro-grow I’ve used on the rest of the garden. And Bed #4 will be good soil with the biochar/compost mix and no manure or fertilizer.

Sunday, July 21, 2009
With the garden pretty much established, tomatoes tied up, jukes producing more than we can use, green beans coming in, new greens planted and growing, I am feeling confident enough to try out a 1000 year old gardening tip. It comes from the huge population centers that flourished along the rivers of the Amazon–terra preta. Dark earth. The tip? Make charcoal, young one. So Peter Hirst, a blacksmith from Cape Cod who discovered biochar last fall and has run with it, brought his charcoal retort to our house last week, fired it up and left us with a 30 pound pile of charcoal. (More later in the blog on Peter’s visit.) I ground up the stuff by rocking an 18 inch diameter grindstone back and forth across the pile. Got 5 gallons of worm casting tea from Hugh Wilkerson and soaked the biochar for a day, then mixed it with an equal amount of good compost. The theory is simple: the pulverized charcoal serves as habitat for soil microbes and fungus. And mixing it with worm tea and compost and leaving it to sit for three weeks allows the microbial life to colonize the charcoal, which, when spread on the garden, will serve as a permanent home for the bugs. And so I’ll put together 4 small test beds, two with and two without biochar, and find out if what was good enough for the Amazon Indians is good enough for us.

Sunday, June 28, 2009
During the past week my 20 cabbages turned into broccoli. Not happy about that. Joan noticed it first, and brought it to my attention. I didn’t want to hear about it. I’d bought the starts from Springledge Farm in New London. Somebody put the wrong stick in the flat. Now I’ve got no cabbages for the winter and even more broccoli, which isn’t exactly your first choice for a storage vegetable.

The other problem is cut worms. Nasty little buggers work like lumberjacks because, unlike caterpillars, they can’t climb the little plants. So they cut them down instead, by curling around the stem and sawing it through. When the plant is on the ground they eat it. I’ve now placed plastic collars cut from cups around all the little seedlings.

Yesterday was a good, full day in the garden. Built tripods with saplings, eight feet high over tomato rows, laid a sapling on top of the tripods, and ran twine down to each tomato plant. As they grow I’ll wind the twine around the plant, coaxing it ever upwards.

Thinking about getting some biochar culturing with compost to run a small experiment.

Sunday, June 21, 2009
This was not supposed to be a monthly record. It was supposed to be a quick, simple, baggage-free diary about what I did in the garden each day. But getting stuff done happens in a different universe from writing about what got done. It’s hard to be both a gardener and a reporter, I have discovered. Hard for me. But the good news is that the garden continues to grow, even if my notes do not.

Here’s the list: 20 beds: 4 varieties of beans/25 tomato plants, 30 potato plants/175 onions/6 eggplant/12 peppers/a bed of carrots/a bed of beets/basil/tarragon/6 cucumbers/20 cabbages/20 broccoli/30 lettuces/20 asian greens/15 winter squash/10 zucchini/arugula/coriander/50 corn plants/3 cantelope/and more going in today.

Saturday, May 27, 2009
Yes, three weeks have passed since the last entry here, but the garden, if not the blog, is coming right along. Those peas I planted, by the way, complete with innoculant, stayed mostly in the ground. No more than 6 ever came up. But I’ve raised 6 beds now from the grassy snarl of the old garden, and planted tomato plants, onion sets, lettuces, arugula, coriander, kale, cabbage, hungarian hot peppers, some volunteer butternut (I think) squash from the compost pile, pole beans, bush beans and small two-foot test plots of two varieties of dry beans. It’s these last that I’m most interested in, because 20 pounds of shell beans would be lovely to have in the pantry in the fall. If these germinate and look good, I’ll plant more. Digging the beds is laborious. I use a 4-tine spading fork, and shake each fork-full to separate the grass roots from the dirt. But it’s good and rewarding labor, because this old loam fluffs up 8 to 10 inches above the compacted soil surface. I’ve been putting video jobs aside, keeping my few clients a bit at arm’s length. The garden, it seems, is the most important work I have to do now. I notice in the H.H. Harriman diary (top right on this page) that HHH planted his white beans at the same time I planted mine. And that May 29 the thermometer hit 100 degrees in Warner.

Saturday, May, 5, 2009
Planted another 24 bush pea seeds in the new bed, tucked in with a bit of the new buffalo Power Plant Booster. Just in time for a rain storm. I notice in H.H. Harriman’s 1871 diary that on May 4-5 Warner was deluged with an intense northeaster, dumping buckets of rain. While H.H.H. may in fact have planted peas, I’ll bet he didn’t put three 4 foot oak logs into a trench to soak. Mushrooms don’t appear very often in the diaries or letters of the people of Warner in the latter part of the 19th century. My logs are home to four-year-old shitake mushroom mycelia. They produced some 4-5 pounds of ’shrooms last year, and a good 24 hour soak should wake them up. If things go well in the mushroom kingdom, we’ll have a pound or two of shitakes in two weeks.

Saturday, May, 4, 2009
Catching up: I forgot to mention that the soil test we got from International Ag Labs in Minnesota turned out to be less than helpful. I should have spent the $50 on seeds. Will send a soil sample to another lab today for a second (far cheaper) opinion. However, on the upside, I planted several flats with the shiny new seeds that arrived from Fedco a few days ago (broccoli, cantalope…other veggies with long growing seasons that need early starts). And the three foot tall pile of buffalo manure looks really stylish, at least from a novice gardner’s POV, sitting there at the edge of the garden. Still, we’ve got to dig 5 20′x5′ beds here in the next week or so, and start more seeds indoors, and plant the frost tolerant ones outside. It’s a huge amount of work. I’m trying to remember why we decided to grow our own rather than simply buying what we need from our friends.

Saturday, May, 2, 2009

Yes, it’s true. No entry in the garden diary means essentially no action in the garden. We left Waterloo April 19 to go to Texas to make a little money doing some filming, and didn’t get back until April 29. The day before we left, April 18, I planted 30 snap pea seeds in a bed that I dug up as fast as a guy can dig a bed. Mixed some compost into it, poked in the seeds and walked away. Returned from Texas to find that fewer than 10 of the seeds have sprouted. Those sprouts look good, but where are the others? At this rate, I am harboring strong doubts that we will make it through the winter on our own vegetables. Joan and I did manage to gather about 4 pounds of fiddleheads yesterday, enough for maybe 10 meals, and Joan put them in the freezer. But 4 pounds of fiddleheads doth not a winter’s food supply make. Today we are going over the results of the soil test, and deciding that we need a second opion, so we’ll send off a sample to the University of Vermont. And today, as well, we are planting some flats. All the good intentions of 3 months ago seem to be dissolving in front of the old problem of not enough time. Time. Time.

Friday, April 12, 2009
Easter Sunday. Didn’t go out to the garden today. Sunday after all. Went instead to Hope Zane’s rambling old farmhouse where we have more or less standing Easter Dinner invitation due to our long friendship with the family. Hope keeps bees. Make a note to check in with her in May to see how the bees are doing. Ordered seeds yesterday from Fedco. About 30 varieties; total price $45. So now I’ve got an investment. I’m going to plant about five 5×20 foot beds, which are not, of course, dug yet. And I’m going to plant those bed according to the Grow Biointensive strategy. No rows. The plants are put in the beds in thick groups and patches. Ordered bush, pole and dry beans, winter and summer squash, beets, carrots, turnips, several lettuces and asian greens, chard, arugula, parsely, cabbage, kale, basil, cilantro, lavender, melons, parsnips, broccoli, and half a dozen flower varieties. Doesn’t look like much to really store away and live on there. Will grow potatoes from a variety of Yukon Gold we’ve been eating all winter from Steven Paquin’s Musterfield Farm in Sutton. We’ll pick up seedlings from friends in a month…eggplants, other stuff. But John Jeavons (How to Grow More Vegetables, Ten Speed Press) says you can grow all the vegetables you need for one person for a year on 200 square feet. Hmmm. I’m a little worried.

Friday, April 10, 2009

This past week I did some clean-up, pulling up old stakes, pushing compost into a pile, ripping the old black plastic out of the rows where we’d used it last year to hold down the weeds. I will admit that I did a more careful job than I’ve done in 40 years of making a compost pile…making layers of dryer, high-carbon tomato and beans stalks, kitchen waste and soil. A regular wedding cake of a compost pile. And all the time trying not to think that I’m promising myself to make not just the best garden I’ve ever done, but a garden so much better and more productive than anything I’ve ever dreamed I would do that I am actually setting myself up for disappointment and failure. Uh-oh. And this morning Joan and I rose at an early hour, and discovered the temp dipped to 28 degrees last nite. That’s coming close to the “last frost” milestone which marks that moment when the good gardener is ready to go. And the novice gardener suddenly realizes he has not even ordered seeds. So we began to make a list of what we’d order from Fedco, the seed co-op in Maine.

And then I noticed that Henry Harriman back in 1871 on this date (see “Today’s weather in 1871″ in the sidebar) went out and planted 3/4 bushel of wheat. Sheesh.

Haven’t set the order off. Gotta do it tomorrow.