late blight moves fast

When I got back from vacation on Sunday the garden looked all right; neglected after ten days, certainly, and my broccoli seedlings had been devoured, but overall everything was healthy. By Tuesday, two of the tomato plants had late blight on 75% of their leaves. Today all the rest of the plants had it too. I pruned them back to only a few stems, but don’t have high hopes of saving the plants unless we get a week of sun starting now. I haven’t even gotten to harvest any tomatoes yet- the Early Girls set fruit more than a month ago but nothing has ripened. Sad year, and I’m glad I’m not a farmer.

fall garden

We have two enormous pumpkins growing, but one of them seems to be rotting on the vine. There are several small ones too but I don't know if they'll ripen before the plant dies. Or if they’ll ripen off the vine. Really I don’t know anything about pumpkins, except that if I allow them in my garden next year they will be re-routed out through the fence as soon as they have more than three leaves. Dan says I was foolish not to know that they’d trample over all my other plants, but since our pumpkins last year were all stunted from being planted in 2” of gravel and munched on by the deer, I didn’t. I should have taken Pumpkin Circle more seriously.

I transplanted a few strawberries into the fenced-in garden so maybe next year we'll actually defy the mammals and get berries in June.* The everbearing plants are still producing but Dan is less-than-appreciative of the tiny berries. I cut up old jeans to use as mulch in the strawberry patch and they're working really well. I used large swaths of denim with slits cut in them for the plants to poke through- effective and stylish. Unfortunately, I fear that I'll need to re-do it in the spring because I doubt that all of the plants will find their way up through the same holes.

The broccoli plants are hanging on but look pretty pathetic and unlikely to produce. The tomatoes also look awful but have a lot of fruit on them; it's nice to see them surviving despite the toll a month of rain took on them.

We pulled up the basil and drafted potluck guests to pull the leaves off the stems. Dan has frozen pesto.

Cowering under the pumpkins is a plant which, despite its attack, has produced several hot peppers, which add good flavor to chili. They also, alas, burnt my hand on Sunday. Someday I’ll learn. The scarlet runner beans are still flowering. Next year I'm planting more- we like them better than green beans.

The fall carrots failed and I forgot to plant spinach. Soon I’ll put in some garlic. (I wonder if it would be safe from the mammals or if it needs to go inside the fence too. I think I’ll try outside; it’s used as a repellent after all.)

A demanded an apple yesterday so I filched a few from the ground below a neighbor’s tree. Luckily she, unlike C, is undeterred by mottled skin. We want to ask the owners of our local apple trees if we can bring ladders over to pick but haven’t had a chance yet. (There’s a public apple tree near my office with lots of good lookin’ apples on it, none of which I can reach. All the limbs within my reach have stunted fruit that look like crab apples. I’m baffled and ladderless.)

*Y’all can give me copper tape for Christmas to help me defy the invertebrates. The slugs annoy me, but as long as I consider them relatives to sandworms I can live with them. It’s when I start thinking of them as Hutts that they really piss me off. When I encountered one last week that was about the size of A’s hand, they became Hutts.

luckily no kudzu

Abandoning a garden for more than a week is a dangerous thing to do in July. We came home to three ripe cherry tomatoes, five sugar snap peas from the one plant that’s still hanging on through the heat, and a pumpkin plant trying to take over Earth. While we were gone it snaked five feet across the garden (putting down roots ever 18 inches or so) over the chives to an unsuspecting tomato plant, and pushed up another four feet through the tomato cage. It grew more than a foot a day. Now that’s scary.

Monday night I wrestled it down. The plan was for the pumpkins to grow along the fence abandoned by the sugar snap peas and I redirected it that way. Looks like I’m going to have to monitor it daily to keep it in check. The tomato plants are having enough trouble finding places to grow without intruders; they’re wending their way over their neighbors’ cages and one has made a dive for the basil.

Lots of little zucchinis also greeted us, and only one foot-long. We ate it yesterday and it was still incredibly sweet. I made a tabouli-ish salad, only with beans and raw zucchini and without tomatoes, utilizing the mint plants which three people donated to us following the mysterious demise of our patch. C was hungry a few hours later so I offered him a raw yellow squash and a knife to cut it up with. I’m so glad he has become willing to eat much of what we give him. This is the first year I’ve even considered serving raw summer squash to my family and no one’s complained yet. (I think Dan has been tempted to but he knows better.)

Oh, and raw beets are pretty fantastic too. The first recipe listed here http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mini.html (but we don’t have fancy ingredients on hand so ours had walnuts instead of pistachios and no goat cheese). A mistook it for our Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. I feared she would burst into tears when she took a bite and the taste didn’t match but she didn’t bat an eye.

more raspberries

I have at least 16 quarts of whole black raspberries frozen now. As the season winds down it’s getting hard to find freezer-quality berries (there are still some that are firm and of perfect ripeness out there but they’re few and far-between) so I relaxed my standards yesterday and picked a batch to make jam with. We now have two quarts of very tasty preserves. I was too lazy to can them (it was HOT yesterday) so they’re in the freezer, but we’ll still be able to enjoy it all winter if I can keep people from eating it with spoons.

Raspberry season will likely just be beginning in North River while we’re there next week. Alas, I don’t think I’ll be able to convince my family to maintain their enthusiasm for long picking expeditions any longer. Especially amongst blackflies.

watched pots

We keep staring at the green cherry tomatoes but it doesn’t seem to make them ripen any faster.

kismet

I took the first step in trying to encourage fireflies to colonize our property. Strolling past A's preschool around 10 last night, I spied a presumably female firefly blinking hopefully on the ground. I relocated her to our garden and hope that the ones we've previously seen in our yard are males of her species.

natural selection in action

I seem to have cleared the garden of just about all the slugs that come out before 9 p.m. and all the slugs that are foolish enough to drown in beer. I picked off dozens surrounding the plants and beer the first couple of nights, but now I'm rarely getting more than four. I know they're out there since they're still doing damage, but apparently only the late-night teetotaling slugs remain. I'll have to go out there with a lantern sometime. And maybe some margaritas- perhaps it's just the IPA they're uninterested in? I can relate to that.

Word of advice: Unless there's no reasonable alternative, I advise against picking up slugs with your bare hands. I've been collecting enough that it's been the best option, but the secretions of a frightened slug are the stickiest, nastiest ectoplasm that I've ever encountered. They don't wash off with soap and water either.

I looked into the edibility of slugs, figuring that in an emergency there's enough of them to provide a significant amount of food. Even if they eat all our plants, we'd still have a highly productive slug farm, and people eat snails after all. Alas, I wasn't able to get a clear answer, but I suspect they're as nutritious if not as palatable as escargot. And easier to catch than squirrel.

why I'm not a farmer

In addition to another large batch of lettuce and mystery greens, our CSA today provided us with strawberries, basil, broccoli, and several summer squash. I just remembered to PLANT zucchini last week, and they're harvesting. I did just pick a pint of sugar snap peas, which is exciting, but apparently they're the only thing I should trouble to grow.

(Off to hunt more slugs, who are intent on munching up the zucchini, pumpkin, and scarlet runners moments after they've emerged from the soil. I got a dozen about half an hour ago- let's see if there's more. Another reason I'm no farmer- I can't even bring myself to kill the slugs I pick off. I relocate them across the yard to the Japanese knotweed.)

bits

June 1st, the annual date when we commit to only buying local produce, crept up without our notice. Perhaps this is a good thing, since my first thought when I realized was “damn, I should have bought more grapes and stocked up on some canned tomatoes.” Now I can’t cheat. Dan’s birthday celebration on Saturday led to multiple transgressions anyway (lemons and limes for drinks, which we agreed last year to make exceptions for; a bottle of rum, though I suppose we allow molasses anyway; and potato chips, the status of which remains uncertain- I say they’re against the rules, Dan says they’re not).

Our first CSA pickup provided us with radishes (which C suddenly likes), lettuce, spinach, bok choy, cilantro, and a mystery green (smells like broccoli, has a bit of a radish-like bite when raw that it loses when cooked). The first sugar snap peas are ripening in the garden, and we’ve harvested all of six tiny strawberries so far. We’re finishing up the last of our frozen black raspberries while eagerly tracking the status of this year’s crop (currently blossoming, as are the blackberries).

I’ve put tomatoes, scarlet runner beans, and pumpkins in the garden; basil and zucchini will go in tonight or tomorrow. Dan sacrificed the pale ale from the mixed case he was given for his birthday so our slugs can drown in organic beer.

A wanted her hair in braids on Saturday and was incredibly cute. One of these days I’ll invest in a comb so I can actually part her hair, rather than tie it into random clumps.

C used string to set up a spiderweb in his room. He hung matchbox cars from it too. I’m not sure if they were intended as decorative or to warn us of our fate if we dared to enter. Some things I'm afraid to ask.

Dan goes to Seattle this week and after that will be cutting his hours in half. Which is great because it solves child care problems and will give him a chance to do more work locally and actually see people, but a little sad because it was cool to be making so much money. Not that we were doing anything too exciting with it, but I was just getting used to the idea that buying prepackaged crackers didn’t have to be a special event. We’ll still have plenty (though less to throw at the mortgage) but we should take the time to look at the numbers and decide how much we have to play with.

garden update, because I know you care

We had a week or so of summer, but now we're back to spring. The summer weather did make it easier to get the peas in our garden. This year we added a layer of horse manure in the fall and then put leaves on top; not the same depth of leaves as the previous year, but hopefully enough to keep most of the weeds down. (Though I have been shocked at the number that have already managed to work their way up through the 2-3" left of the leaves that were there all last season plus the 4 or so inches we put on top this year.) The only problem I had with the leaves last year was the slugs, and I have a few ideas for limiting their damage this year.

We plan on relying on a CSA for most of our produce this year since our gardening time is limited, so I didn't bother planting any greens. All we have in so far are sugar snap peas, which are coming up nicely. I'm putting in another row every week, which is supposed to extend our harvest; in the past I've found that the later plantings catch up to the first ones by the time the plants flower, but it's worth another try.

I harvested the few dried scarlet runner beans that managed to survive the deer last year. I'm not sure where to plant them since they obviously need to be inside the fence- I will sprout them first to make sure they're viable before devoting space to them.

Some of the strawberries' roots miraculously survived despite the damage inflicted by the deer last year. I'm not sure how best to maintain the plot (I'm not good at weeding, but don't want to use a heavy mulch because I don't want to drown out the strawberry plants) or prevent a recurrence of their annihilation. With Paco gone, we can only expect more trouble with wildlife.

We're clearing out our chest freezer to defrost it before we have greens to freeze, and discovered a forgotten bag of farmer's market broccoli that I used in dinner last night. Despite being thawed and refrozen when the freezer was accidentally unplugged, it was still amazing- much more tender and flavorful than commercially frozen broccoli. Maybe it's a different variety that's not chosen for its toughness? I wonder if it's too late to plant a spring crop.

more signs of spring

A couple of the bulbs I planted in 2002 are sending up shoots

I'm losing consistent reception for my preferred radio stations (based in Manchester and Amsterdam I believe; they only reliably make it to Delmar in the winter)

The maple trees along Delaware Avenue are budding

A wants to dawdle on walks, instead of hopping in the stroller for a quicker ride

Traffic at the fitness center around the corner has increased, presumably as people remember they're going to be wearing fewer clothes soon (usually, the New Year's resolution uptick lasts about a month; the warmer-weather jump lasts two or three)

The varieties of birds we're seeing (and especially hearing) are increasing- it's been several weeks since we saw our first robin, and last weekend we saw a V of geese

It's time to start planning the garden in earnest- somewhat trickier this year because we've joined a CSA, and we might want to focus on growing stuff we're less likely to get lots of through there. We do know that we can not have enough sugar snap peas, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, or basil to satisfy everyone so I can start there.

benefit of insomnia

Changing the clocks makes no difference! I'm no more tired than usual!

But loving the later daylight-
and signs of spring-
like the neighbor's lilacs budding-
Paco spending hours in the yard-
our basement flooding-
I'm going to try planting some peas this week; they probably won't make it but it's worth a shot.

I was wrong about the garden being finished- the warm weather over the past week set the zucchini going again, and we have five more. Glad I was too lazy to pull out any plants yet.

Our garden is mostly done for the year; my two attempts to put in broccoli for the fall were foiled by the slugs, and I didn’t take the time to plant greens because none of us really LIKE them- we’ll usually eat them (though much of our spring spinach went to seed), but we don’t especially enjoy it. We still have tomatoes and peppers, which I’ll leave out for a couple weeks, and then we’ll hang up cherry tomato vines from our kitchen windows and spread the bigger green tomatoes out on trays to ripen. The past few years we’ve eaten the last of our tomatoes right around Thanksgiving. I don’t think they’ll last so long this year- the cherries ripen more quickly, and the larger tomatoes were mostly determinants this year, so they’re pretty much gone. We’ll see what the Romas do, though.

I planted the Romas for drying, but didn’t get to do a lot of that. They tended to drop before they were ripe, and then the bugs damaged them on the ground before I collected them- not sure whether we were supposed to pick them when they were green or if the plants were unhealthy or what. We still got to use a lot of them in cooking, but since they were not perfectly ripe I didn’t take the time to dry them.

So far, the local produce experiment has gone well, though Dan and I have had some disagreement about what qualifies. I didn’t think we should be buying processed potato products, like fries and chip, but I was overruled. This weekend I felt a sore throat coming on and bought orange juice to fend it off- though maybe I could have found local cranberries instead? The kids demand bananas whenever they see someone else eating one; we let them know we’d be buying them in the winter. We’ve been less able to obtain organic fruit, but we knew that would be the case. I’ve been trying to keep everyone away from apples while we have other options- the peach and blueberry seasons just ended, and we can still get pears- but I’ve pretty much given in now. (Good local apples are available until early spring, so I don’t want everyone to get sick of them now- they’re our main winter fruit.)

I should itemize what’s in our freezer; we’ve been putting in small quantities whenever we have a chance. We have a lot of black raspberries, pesto, and tomatoes in there, my lone jar of pear butter, and several quarts of blueberries. Nowhere near as much as we’d originally planned, but this pesky job wasn’t on my radar then.

pear butter

We obtained large quantities of pears from my parents' tree yesterday, and while the kids are eating all the fruit they can as fast as they can, we figured we should save at least some for the winter. So I decided to make pear butter. Pulling ideas from various Internet-derived pear butter recipes, I peeled and cored the pears (a time-consuming process, because most of these pears are only about two inches across, and they're bruised and twisted and generally look like wild fruit usually does), tossed them in the crockpot for a few hours on high with some sugar and cinnamon, pureed them with the stick blender once they were soft, and then cooked them on low overnight with the lid ajar to let the steam escape. It worked beautifully, and produced delicious pear butter, but is perhaps too efficient a space-saver- I used a gallon-sized bowl of pears, and ended up with an 8-ounce jar of pear butter. When the rest of them ripen, I think I'll make pie filling instead, just so I feel like I got more out of it!

I've been drowning slugs in beer (Dan says it wouldn't be too bad a way to go), catching and releasing about 10 more a night, and replanting zucchini. I'm covering the strawberry plants with a tarp at night, but there's really nothing I can do about the scarlet runner beans. (Neither human nor dog hair has worked in the past.)

We're still getting one strawberry per person each day, plenty of lettuce, and enough radishes for Dan (since no one else wants to eat them-- I planted them because they look so cool. The "Easter egg" variety ranges in color from pale pink to deep purple.) The carrots never sprouted, so I'll replant as soon as I can.

The peas have blossomed and are begining to produce; a couple of our still-tiny tomato plants have also blossomed.

Still no food at the local farmer's market- maybe next week?

Last night, slugs ate much of what was growing in the fenced-in part of the garden, and deer ate more than half of the leaves of the strawberry and scarlet runner bean plants from outside the fence. I did manage to harvest four miniature strawberries, so at least we had a tiny drop of sweetness after Noah's funeral.

Dozens of strawberry blossoms-

but still no strawberries!

We have harvested chives and lettuce, but I'm really wanting berry season to begin....

I finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and am really inspired to make more of a point to eat local foods. The book focused very much on the pleasure and joy of eating mostly-local foods, rather than the difficulties and hardships. We're starting small, and Dan isn't completely on board, but my personal goals are to:

1) Only buy locally-grown fruits and vegetables from June 1st through November 1st. Exceptions: frozen peas (major convenience food for the kids that we don't want to commit to giving up) and lemons and limes in small quantities (I want lemon juice in my tabouli and Dan wants limes in his beer).
2) Process for the winter at least one vegetable/ fruit that we've never done before. Maybe we'll can tomatoes or pickle squash.
3) Learn to extend our growing season further into the fall, through cold-weather crops and good use of our cold frame.

The one chapter of the book I found disappointing was, not surprisingly, the one focused on meat-eating. Kingsolver and her family only eat animals that are treated humanely, and even raise and butcher some of their own. While I disagree with that choice, it is one I can respect as an ethical decision, even though it's following a different set of ethics than my own. (Eating factory-farmed meat, on the other hand, I can only view as an ethical decision if someone truly believes animals have no emotional needs and feel no pain- which of course would mean they are very stupid.)

So it wasn't so much her choice to eat free-range meat that bothered me, but the justifications that she used for it. She equates animal-harvesting with plant-harvesting, ignoring the obvious difference (sentience that we can recognize). She discusses how humans evolved to eat omnivorously (but doesn't mention how humans also originally evolved doing all sorts of things we now eschew, such as commit infanticide). She asserts that non-Westerners living in harsh environments require animals for food (irrelevant to most Americans' situations). She points out that farm animals can't live in the wild (the potential extinction of turkeys whose feet cannot support their weight is one that we should applaud). She fails to discuss hunting, arguably the most ecologically friendly and least cruel method of obtaining dead animals. She even contemplates the huge cultural void we'd suffer if there were no farm-animal-based nursery rhymes. Overall it felt like she was trying a bit too hard.