Contrary, or hopeful?

What is it about snow that makes me think about gardening? We got 4" of snow last night (the largest single snowfall this year, if you can believe that), and a little while ago I ordered seeds for my garden. En route shortly are lettuce, spinach, carrots, cucumbers, and Stevia. I'm expanding production of potatoes and onions, trying pinto beans for the first time, and of course I'll have a variety of culinary and medicinal herbs. I just have to decide how I'm going to fit everything into two raised beds. I have to rethink letting the flowerbeds go back to the wild; I might need the space for herbs.

One thing I will not be cultivating this year is tomatoes. I was unhappy with the performance of the larger variety last summer, and the cherry tomatoes are going to do whatever they please regardless of my preference. I'll just let them do their thing, and when I get a bunch ripe, I'll throw them in the crock pot and cook them down into sauce. (Thanks for that tip, Valerie!) If I decide I want to can whole tomatoes, the farmers market is a few miles from here. I'm pretty sure someone there will have some I can buy.

Stubborn

My garden has apparently not gotten the memo that it's November. The cherry tomatoes are still clustered like grapes around the top of the compost pile and happily producing like we're far enough south to avoid a killing frost. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised, at this point, to see this surrounded by snow:


Do you see the little yellow flowers? Baby tomatoes, y'all. In November. I have them in all stages--flowers, green, almost ripe. I had ripe ones, but I picked them before I took pictures. They went right into the oven for roasting. I was going to can them next, but I think I'll just make soup.





This is the rest of the garden. The bushy green on the left is the feverfew that managed to self-seed somehow. Just beside it is a little patch of purplish green; that's lettuce. The basil seems to have given up, but the sage and chocolate mint are going strong. They're hiding the potatoes I stuck in the ground a month or so ago, and the onion I must have missed earlier but is still going strong.

On one hand, I'm shaking my head that it's still going. On a deeper level, I think I'm supposed to learn that I should keep working and not worry about the frost that will be along to kill me any night.

Eeek!

We had our lawn aerated and seeded yesterday, which means I get to water each morning to keep the seed from dying. This morning I was chasing sprinklers when I noticed red patches in my garden. Turns out, half my tomatoes decided to ripen what seemed like overnight. Not a big deal under normal circumstances, but I'm heading out of town for a wedding tomorrow. I picked everything that looked like it was going to ripen over the weekend, and I have tomato sauce going in the crock pot. All that before I went to work! I'll get it done as much as possible tonight and store it in the fridge for a few days. I'll deal with canning it next week. I sure don't have time to do it now.

Heads' up for anyone in the area of eastern MI: I'll be in Lapeer next month on the 10th for a book signing at The Book Shelf, just in case you want to put off mowing the lawn to bring ten friends to see me! (Seriously, if you're coming and bringing ten friends, let me know so I can make sure to order enough books!)

Lift off

It's rained on and off for two days, and apparently our frost danger has passed because I have a couple hundred volunteer baby tomatoes taking over. Honestly, they're blowing my mind. These are third generation tomatoes. I don't even remember what variety they are, except that they're more than likely cherry. They might be Roma. Most of what is available around here are hybrids, but I can't imagine hybrid seeds coming up year after year. They're just not developed to do that.

None of these plants were up on Sunday. The rain started Monday and, as usual, everything in the earth exploded. A couple of the potatoes have not come up yet, but I'll give them a few more days. It might just be that I'll have four mounds instead of six. If that's the case, it's all good. I can plant extra beans or spinach there with no hardship.

We also have a bunny hanging around the house, just waiting for me to plant lettuce this week, I'm sure. Until I can get a picture of it, you'll have to settle for Baby Tomato pictures.

Here are some with a shallot,

and several more with a potato. I think the blob in the middle might be an egg shell. If I'd been paying attention I would have flicked it out before I took the picture.



This is the new bed, which I weeded last week. Obviously there is more to do. The tomatoes and green beans will go out here.

Friendly Neighborhood Tomato Wrangler

I put the garden to bed for the winter. I knew I would have a few tomatoes to pick, so I took a colander out with me when I took down the plastic. There were a few not-quite-ripe ones and a whole bunch of green ones--so many I had to go get a second colander. When they started rolling out of the second one I decided that was enough, took them in, and started pulling up the vines. Of course, the first vine I reached for had four beautiful, firm, green tomatoes.

Yes, I did go back in for a third colander. That was is only about a third full. And yes, the green ones are worth harvesting. They'll ripen in a paper bag and then go into the crock pot for sauce.

The vines were tenacious. I had better trellises this year, which made them harder to pull. I finally had to get out my gardening shears and start cutting because detangling would have taken all day. It took me the best part of two hours, but the tomatoes are down and the new raised bed is finished until spring. If these plants are as stubborn as their parents, I'll have baby tomatoes in both beds by May.

This is the first year I haven't bought dirt to put in for planting. I filled it with compost from last year, tomato vines, and dirt from the containers I grew potatoes in this year. They're growing in the old raised bed next year, so it was largely a matter of moving dirt. We did find a birds nest we hadn't seen (but the cats apparently had), and we evicted a mouse from the potato pot.

Now I've had my shower, my hands are dirt-free and smoothed with cocoa butter, and I have coffee and food in easy reach. Time to get some words in. I'll go down later, when I start to stiffen up, and sort out tomatoes.

Happy or confused? Or stubborn?

I haven't quite figured out which best describes my garden. We're supposed to have a freeze tonight, so I bundled up and went outside to harvest my sweet potatoes.




I was expecting this. I just thought I'd have a lot more of them.












I wasn't expecting this. They were coiled all around the bottom of the pot.

Lesson learned: Next year, all the potatoes go in a raised bed, not a pot.

At least the flowers were pretty.







This is a little more confusing: a tomato blossom. If my makeshift greenhouse remains standing, it will eventually become a tomato. They did this last year, too, by the way. That's a second generation plant.









This baffles me. It's a new zucchini blossom. The zucchini has not been sheltered at all, and it's been pretty cold at night. I'll have to go out tomorrow and see what happens here. BTW, this is also a second generation plant.

Would that I were as stubborn about my writing as my garden is.

The Great Experiment

Last year I still had tomato blossoms when the frost came. We may have a frost here this weekend, and sure enough, I still tomato blossoms. Last year I was relieved to sacrifice fetal tomatoes. This year I'm trying something different. We had a roll of plastic in the closet we'd originally bought to use as a drop cloth for painting. Not a great use, by the way; it's too easy to slide on when painting in stocking feet. It is good for covering a small raised bed to extend the growing season, though.


We draped the plastic over the trellises I'd trained the tomatoes up. We put a few staples in the bottom, but I also had a few nails in the boards to tie hemp twine to when I had to shore up the trellises against the wind and the weight of the plants. I pushed the nails through the plastic and ran more hemp twine over the top, tying onto the same nails. So far it looks good. It's retaining moisture and, presumably, heat. We have yet to see how it holds up in wind.





You can see at the bottom of this picture that it's not just the tomatoes still going strong. My volunteer zucchini isn't producing much, but it's very happy. The pots in the back are mint and echinacea, and the front left is sweet potatoes. The wire frame on the left is the old compost pile (from which originated the volunteer zucchini) and the trellis to the right is the new, bigger, moved away from the house compost pile.




I was surprised to find sweet potato flowers on my way back inside. They didn't flower at all this summer and I didn't think much about it, but now that I have some I almost don't want to harvest them! They have to come out to be cured soon, but I might wait a little longer and see what the weather does. I'll push it as close to the frost as I can.

It's been an interesting gardening year, I'll give it that much.

Attack of the Killer Zucchini

This is what I found when I got back from the rendezvous. They look rather innocuous, really, but they all took both hands to pick and were all at least a foot long. The zucchini vines were threatening to take over the yard and had to be tamed.

The irony: the past few summers have been hot and dry, and there was no sign of drought relief, so early last spring, I bought and installed two 60-gallon rain barrels so my garden could have rain water. They were full to overflowing within a week or so, although that was by design. I kept them in the garage until several days of rain were predicted so they would fill quickly. They have been full ever since because this is the wettest year we've had since we moved here four years ago. Apparently I need to plan for contingencies better, so my next house will have a large basement with a well-stocked tornado/fallout shelter, I'll keep my rain barrels, and plan to store several snow shovels near the front of the garage.

And I think I won't plant zucchini.

Volunteering

I started "organic" gardening last year. I figured if I was going to put in the effort to grow food, I might as well make it as healthy as possible, and using alternatives to pesticides is easy on a scale as small as mine. I'd love to be able to say that I spent the previous winter reading everything I could put my hands on about organic gardening, and that I did extensive research about what to plant and where. I can't; I'm a trial-and-error girl. Lucky for me, gardening is a forgiving hobby, and my tomato plants were still setting blossoms when the frost killed them.

At the end of last season, I pulled up my plants, laid them out in my raised bed, and covered them with dirt rather than tossing them all in the compost bin. (That's called sheet composting, if anyone cares.) This spring, as soon as the ground thawed, the tomatoes started sprouting. Apparently, cherry and roma tomatoes are tenacious little buggers! The strong ones were moved to the center of my raised bed to be trained up the trellis. I gave a few away. The rest, I'm afraid, were weeded out. I couple weeks later, I noticed leaves coming out of my compost bin. I tried to find where they were coming from; I thought they were zucchini, and I was going to transplant them, but I couldn't find the base of the plant, so I just let them stay where they were and didn't think too much more about them until the leaves started getting bigger and bigger. The other day, Vicky pointed out the flowers, and that's when I remembered the watermelon I composted last summer. Here's what I've got:

Sorry for the lousy quality; my camera is a piece of crap, and the close-ups of the flowers looked like something by Andy Warhol in a drunken stupor. There are four flowers now, and a few more buds. Everyone I've told has asked if the melons will be safe to eat. Since there is nothing toxic in the compost, I can't imagine that they wouldn't be. Now that I think about it, it's good that I didn't transplant them because the spot in the raised bed would have been WAY too small for a watermelon. I'd need the whole raised bed for that, whereas zucchini can be done in a large pot.

The garden hasn't been all easy-peasy this year. I had terrible luck with herbs; the only ones that came up were the sage, chocolate mint and cilantro that self-seeded last year. Everything I planted, with the exception of some borage, failed, and I had to go buy basil, lemon balm and mint plants. Can't win them all, I guess. Maybe next year I'll sheet compost the herbs where I want them to grow, and start a few inside for good measure.

Rain delay

We had thunderstorms most of yesterday. The sun did come out for a couple of hours, and I thought we were done with rain for the day. I was going to knock out the gardening after dinner but put it off too long. Today I got home from work a little early, had a cup of tea, and got right outside. Not only did I get my herbs, cucumbers, and blueberries planted, I also managed to pot some volunteer tomatoes to take to Mom. I have tomato seedlings in the house still; I'll get those transplanted this weekend. I'm dirty and sweaty now, but I feel like I've gotten something done. Finally. If I did it right, this will also have lasting results, which is more than I can say for almost everything inside the house.

I just looked over the last couple of entries

I did indeed mail the manuscript on Tuesday. I solved a big chunk of the season hopping by changing the Spring Solstice to a harvest festival. After that, it was mostly mopping up. I was too close to see it at the time--I'd been working on the thing for about five hours at that point. I got most of the bugs worked out, but I'm still looking for one scene I accidentally deleted. I've searched two computers and three flash drives to no avail, so if Scott doesn't have it (and he should--he wrote it) I'll just re-write it. He's supposed to be here in a couple of weeks to hash out the rest.

Today I worked a couple of hours on character development for a new project. Tomorrow it's on to the Rogue Pawn edit. I still have to finish Collateral Casualties, too.

Other than that, we're plugging along. I've got one rain barrel installed and one left to go. I'm getting ready to start planting spring crops; potatoes and lettuce will go in next week. My tomato seedlings are still alive. The weather is finally warming up and I'm in the market for a good deal on a bike to ride to work. Gas is getting ridiculous, and work is only two miles away. The exercise surely won't hurt!

That's pretty much all the news that's fit to print. What's new where you are?

God's Green Earth

I thought I'd mentioned it here already, but looking back it appears I haven't. One of the families in our homeschool group lives on a farm. They gave some space to the group last fall to start an organic garden. Even though I'm no longer homeschooling, they still let me come and play! We started off small and planted zucchini, tomatoes, pumpkins, watermelon, cauliflower, and onions.

I've just come from the garden. Apparently I'm not the only gardener who's been slacking in the heat, but there's been activity in the garden. God's green earth took it over. Squash bugs got our zucchini, pumpkins, and watermelon. We lost the cauliflower to moths earlier in the summer, and the onions got over watered. That leaves the tomatoes, crab grass, weeds, and the morning glories that have taken up residence since my last visit.

Fortunately, the garden at home has faired better. I had squash bugs out here, too, but when the zucchini died, the pepper plant beside them burst into bloom. I have to read up on companion planting over the winter, I guess. Maybe I better start a list...