Category Archive for ‘gardening’ at Beside the Stream

Archive for the 'gardening' Category

The best laid plans

Published on September 9, 2008 in gardening. 4 Comments

I wasn’t planning on processing food today, but I got a call from a neighbor: Do you want peaches? Of course I said yes.

The peaches are ripe today… not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, but today. They have to be peeled, pitted and popped in the freezer.

She asked, do you want any more plums?

I surely do.

I brought back ten pounds of plums and twenty of peaches that have to be taken care of before dark. Which is to say,

… The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley, …

“To A Mouse” by Robert Burns, 1785.

often paraphrased as ‘The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry’

or, plans change.

Things that don’t look alike

Published on September 3, 2008 in Appearances and gardening. 1 Comment

My neighbor grew yellow squash and green zucchini.

She grew unremarkable dozens, and then one day she found this strange cross:

It has raised yellow areas on a green matrix. Some busy bee brought together a yellow squash and a green zucchini, and this was the result. (There were cucumbers around too, but I think they’re too different to cross.)

When Judy cut it open it looked like dinner, and she fried it up that night.

I don’t know if it was a squcchini or a zuash.

We should have kept it for seeds, but didn’t think to… and you know it wasn’t the first time. People must have eaten up agricultural innovations throughout history.

How fitting that a bumblebee probably made the squcchini–it bumbled into existence–while our bumbling ensured that we won’t be planting any of those next year.

bum·bling /ˈbʌmblɪŋ/ [buhm-bling]

–adjective

1.	liable to make awkward blunders: a bumbling mechanic.

2.	clumsily incompetent or ineffectual: bumbling diplomacy.

–noun

3.	the act or practice of making blunders: The bumbling of their officers cost them the battle.

[Origin: 1525–35; bumble¹ + -ing²]

Potato and garlic harvest

Published on August 31, 2008 in Colorado women and gardening. 1 Comment

Barb asked what else was growing along with the pet Romaine. This is from the same small plot: a hundred pounds of potatoes and almost 200 garlic bulbs.

Peg is proud of her root crops, and grows between 600 and 800 pounds of potatoes and perhaps 400 garlic bulbs.

This year, she grew Russian Bananas, red Sangria potatoes, blue potatoes, and German butterballs. Here’s she’s toughening their skins: when they first come out of the soil, the potatoes are thin-skinned and easily scraped. After a week of air, their skins toughen up and they can be handled without damaging them.

When garlic comes out of the soil, it is also thin skinned and liable to bruise. Here the bulbs are air drying and forming their papery skin. Peg has been refining her strain of garlic for eight years, growing each successive crop from her biggest most successful plants. Her bulbs are beautiful, and they’re specially selected for these conditions. I’m planning on 80 garlic plants this fall, so I bought 10 bulbs for October.

She said that each bulb has six to ten large cloves around the outside, and those are what you plant (you eat the small ones inside).

Garlic and potatoes are both ancient plants. Here is an illustrated manuscript of garlic harvesting.

Harvesting garlic, Tacuinum sanitatis, 15th century. (Paris, Biblioteque Nationale, Département des manuscrits, Latin 9333, folio 23.)

Since potatoes were developed in South America, their harvest art from the 1400s is less familiar

but the solemn pride that comes from bringing in the winter’s food is just the same.

Gratuitous photos of flower beds

Published on August 29, 2008 in gardening. 2 Comments

There are a lot of flowers at Clearwater Farm. Some of them are in beds,

and some of them are in meadows.

These flowers have that high altitude, short summer glow.

It surely is a lovely scene, but there’s a dark underside:

let’s just say that you can’t believe how those ladies can weed.

Steve’s green tomatoes

Published on August 28, 2008 in gardening. 3 Comments

Steve grew a hoop house of heirloom tomatoes this summer. It’s a bold move to grow tomatoes at 8200 feet, but it seemed like a good idea at the time: he was given the greenhouse and there were a whole lot of extra tomato starts.

This is the hoop house on June 15, when the tomatoes were about 6 inches tall. The skinny black tubes are the irrigation lines, and the thick black hoses going down the middle of the hoop house hold water. The water absorbs heat during the day, and it lets the heat out at night.

Last week, those same plants were nearly six feet tall. There are thousands of pounds of tomatoes hanging on these plants, and local tomatoes fetch a fancy price.

But they’re all green, and the temperature is already dropping. It’s an agricultural nightmare.

He tried a propane tank and a fan.

The red tape is a nod to studies that show red mulch increases tomato yields–he put a roll of DO NOT ENTER tape to good use. He is now heating the water in the big tubes. He pumps the water out of the black tubes into that white garbage can, and then he pumps it into a hose that goes outside

where it gets a big boost of solar energy. The water is hot when it comes back into the greenhouse, but it’s doubtful that’s enough to do the trick. Steve ordered another roll of plastic, and with two layers of plastic over the hoops he’d have a layer of air for insulation. That should be a big help.

If the soil temperature drops too low, Steve’s summer project is going to be a bust. He’s handy, and he’s willing to try anything.

It’s not clear right now if Steve’s going to be the Tomato King or a tomato pauper. But regardless of how the tomatoes come out, this guy’s a prince.

I asked him, Is it OK if I say you’re single?

He said, Why not? You never know …

He wasn’t talking about tomatoes, of course, but he could have been.

Peg’s pet Romaine

Published on August 27, 2008 in Colorado women and gardening. 1 Comment

I asked Peg, what’s that giant red thing in your garden?

It’s my pet romaine, she said.

I’ve watched it since it was a tiny sprout,

and I’ll save its seeds when they’re ready.

Lettuce seeds are famously small, and I wasn’t surprised to see that the flower spikes were covered with tiny yellow insignificant blossoms. With leaves like this, a fancy flower would really be gilding the lily.

Time: Farmer’s Market, 23 hours

Published on August 21, 2008 in gardening and time. 0 Comments

Friday is a big work day for people who sell at the Farmer’s Market. It’s best to pick while it’s cool, so when I stop by at noon to take pictures Suzy already has banks of flowers and piles of produce assembled.

These are market flowers, cut and waiting in the shade.

I help for a bit, wash the kale and basil, the leeks,

beets and cabbages, the broccoli and the radishes, and bundle them. I’m not a fan of beets, but these are just bursting with life.

The next day at 11 AM, there isn’t much left.

Time: 23 hours.

Apricot season

Published on August 20, 2008 in gardening. 3 Comments

On April 21, apricot trees throughout the valley were in bloom.

Four months later, they’re ready to pick. The apricots on these old trees are tiny–they’re barely bigger than an inch–so they’re left for the birds.

Our neighbor’s apricot tree bears enormous fruit. Pickers for a local jam company stripped this tree of a hundred pounds of fruit last week, and the rest were left to ripen for another week. Judy called and said that if I wanted any more, I’d better pick them soon.

So I did. (Weight: 20 pounds).

Miss Roberta’s raspberry patch

Published on August 17, 2008 in Colorado women, Old-timers and gardening. 5 Comments

At 95, Miss Roberta has been working on her raspberry patch for over 60 years. It is enormous. Raspberries were her only cash crop back when she was a school principal and her husband raised bees. She is still proud of keeping her raspberry customers happy, but for the last few years she has done very little picking and this year she stopped entirely. At 95, she’s not very steady. So the way she keeps her raspberry customers happy is that two other ladies and I pick the berries for her.

Roberta has, without a doubt, the best raspberry patch in the valley. She doesn’t let anyone near this patch except the three of us, and it’s an honor to be able to help. (Roberta’s raspberry patch is like Tom Sawyer’s fence. A neighbor asked me, How come you get to pick them? I’ve been trying to get in there for years.) Ruth picks with a lard bucket belted to her waist, which leaves both hands free. I use a belt from Roberta’s dead husband to strap on my bucket (gone these past sixteen years but still helping out) and we start picking around 8AM every Tuesday and Friday morning. It takes a few hours for us to clear the patch, and we take home half of what we pick.

At peak production the patch was producing over 30 pints a picking, but today we picked 15. Since we get half and Roberta sells berries at $5/pint, we earned about $10/hour in berries for two hours work. We pretend that we do this because Miss Roberta’s raspberries are beyond compare… and they are. But the real reason we pick her berries is because she’s too old to do it herself. It’s a mitzvah. She was once the fastest picker around, and it’d make her crazy to let them rot.

When we finish up, Roberta is down the road irrigating her vegetable garden. (She won’t take her cane and everyone clucks, but so be it.) I stop by to report how many pints we picked and where I left her share, and we discuss the state of the walnut crop, the virtues of sheepnose apples vs. strawberry apples, and her raspberry customers.

They’re not like you and me, she said. They don’t eat bowls of berries with cream. They just sprinkle a few on their cereal for breakfast. Can you imagine? Mixing berries with cereal? And she laughs as I shake my head in dismay.

At 95, she knows that life is much too short to mix berries with anything but cream.

EM•1, the latest form of pixie dust

Published on August 11, 2008 in gardening. 3 Comments

I routinely buy dried blood, bat guano, kelp, volcanic dust, and worm castings for the garden… and I’m not the only one. Many gardeners believe in the possibility of a perfect supplement. The latest and greatest supplement, though, is so far-fetched that people are keeping quiet about it around here. It’s the commercial growers who bought it first, at $250 for five gallons. Home growers could get the $23 size–still a lot for a supplement–and I see that they now have a $15 size for the house. The garden club split a bottle 8 ways, so I’ve been using it for a month.

EM•1 includes ”enzymes, bio-available trace minerals, vitamins, and live naturally occurring beneficial microorganisms” (it’s EM for Effective Microorganisms). It is classic pixie dust: you don’t know quite what it is; it doesn’t look like anything interesting; and it takes care of everything. (The pixie dust graphic is from here.)

You use a few drops at a time. EM•1 keeps the water in vases sweet, so cut flowers last much longer. A drop in the water for houseplants makes them much happier. Plants don’t shock during transplant if you dip their roots in a bucket of treated water. The vegetable garden looks more bodacious. The garden pond is more vibrant. I think I’m using it everywhere, and then Suzy asked, have you tried it in the toilet? It cleans the toilet bowl.

So I tried it, and it’s absolutely true: when you let a few drops sit in the toilet bowl for a few hours, it ends up clean. It’s a probiotic cleaner that, according to their literature, also works on the septic tank and the stove.

But the best cleaning trick is that EM•1 removes all odor from a wet dog. My dog keeps cool in the summer by dipping into the ditch, so by August she can get pretty ripe. I rubbed a few drops in water into the dog’s coat, and she became–and stayed–odor free.

Now that’s pixie dust.

Beside the Stream