Preparing for Winter, Pt. 1

Confession: every year it gets harder for me to say goodbye to Summer. And right now I’m very much in denial about what season we’re now in so it’s challenging to look ahead and begin planning for Winter and Spring. Sadly, the season haven’t waited on me before so I probably won’t succeed in staving off winter this year either.

My garden isn’t looking as lush as it did a few months ago. The upside to this is that things don’t require regular attention when I come home at the end of the day. The obvious downside is that, with fewer thriving plants, there’s nothing to bring in and put on the table. And that means I’ve definitely noticed an increase in produce spending at the grocery store.

I pulled up all of the tomato plants (minus the stunted Beefsteak) two weekends ago. We’d experienced a stretch of rainy weather and they were looking well past their prime. I made sure to pick all of the fruit (ripe or not) and set the bowl on the counter. The green tomatoes are slowly ripening and tart cherry tomatoes can still make for a nice addition to a meal. All of my tomato plants were in pots (albeit large pots) so it didn’t free up much raised bed space, but it offer the opportunity to hose off and stack a lot of pots in the shed (read: motivation to tidy up the shed).

The weather was remarkably nice the last two weekends so I also pulled up my mini sweet bell peppers from the front bed. This south-facing location was a prime spot for peppers; I’ll continue with what works and plant peppers in the same location next year after I amend the soil. My Padrón pepper plants are still in this same bed. I’ve got my fingers crossed for one or two more peppers before I pull up those plants in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. My plan is to use this front bed for a variety of onions (and maybe garlic) so I will need to get those in the ground before our evening temperatures consistently drop below freezing.

My dahlias are in a raised bed on the other side of the front yard. Their vigor is fading (and the powdery mildew is thriving) so I’ll dig up the tubers in the next few weeks, store them, and put more onions in their place. Yes, we’re going to have lot of onions (fingers crossed!). Last year I bought onion starts which looked just like green onions but this year I opted for two bags I found at a local nursery. They were a fair price but, even after gifting a bunch to a friend, I still have a lot leftover!

I’ll wrap up this blog post now that I’ve outlined my plans for everything in the front yard. I’ll pick up with my plans for the backyard in a subsequent post. Tell me, what kinds of preparations are you making for your yard?

My Vow to Asparagus

In a previous post, I rattled off a list of the plants that I was planning on growing this year and I said one of those would be asparagus, assuming I hadn’t totally killed the crowns when I planted them. I would like to give you an update on those particular royals .(Get it? Crowns = royalty?)

I planted 10 Jersey Knight (male) crowns near the beginning of the year once we had returned from Australia. I bought them spontaneously while at my local nursery because they were there and I was there so naturally it happened. I did mull it over, there was lots of internal debate while my husband waited patiently, but in the end we walked out of there with a paper bag filled with asparagus crowns (and planting direction that left much to be desired). I had inquired with the nursery staff if I could wait a while before planting them because we had a brutally wet and cold winter and I hadn’t prepared the soil where I wanted to plant them. I was told that if I kept them in a cool, dark space they would last for a few weeks.

I will save you the details but, in short, it was more than a few weeks before I finally got them in the ground. Oops. As it was, I didn’t feel the ground was as prepared as it could have been. Now for those of you who have never seen an asparagus crown before, I have included a picture I found via Google. They look pretty unassuming and they look DEAD. I wasn’t filled with much confidence when I pulled them out of the bag on a dreary Sunday morning. The mostly unhelpful directions said that they should be soaked overnight before planting. @#$*@%?!? Soaked overnight??? I was peeved (here’s a lesson to always read the directions before doing anything) but proceeded to follow the directions. I filled up a large bucket, placed the crowns in the water, and let them sit overnight. I scrambled the next day when I came home from work – I didn’t have a whole lot of time to play in the backyard and it was starting to rain (again). I unceremoniously plopped each crown into a small whole I had dug for each, shoveled some dirt on top, and stared. I felt like a terrible plant-parent. I began a self-induced guilt trip in which I told myself that I shouldn’t have rushed this, I should have waited until I could have amended the soil more, and that this would probably fail and it would be my fault.

Did I mention that asparagus needs 3 years before you can begin harvesting? I didn’t? Oh, well there you go. 3 years. 1,095 days (or 1,096 if there’s a leap year). If this failed, I would have to start ALL OVER AGAIN. I spent the following weeks trying to read everything I could on growing asparagus. It didn’t encourage me, rather it made me feel even worse because:

1. The soil should have been amended more and I didn’t check the pH
2. Most sources only recommended soaking the crowns for 15 or 20 minutes (to avoid rot)
3. The crowns should only be under enough soil to cover them, then as they send up their first spears you should add a little more soil until you’ve completely filled in the hole.

Nope. Nope. Nope. I didn’t do any of these things. One of my gardening books said that over time, while waiting for the first spears to appear, you will lose all hope and completely forget that you planted asparagus. I never FORGOT about them, but I didn’t lose all hope.

The final nail in the asparagus coffin came when my well-meaning husband was digging up brambles and accidentally dug up one of the crowns. He turned to me to show me his prize, with a giant grin of satisfaction on his face, only to meet my horrified face when I saw that he had dug up one of my crowns! He felt terrible but not as terrible as I felt when I examined the mass of roots and saw no evidence of growth. I was heartbroken and tossed the crown into our yard waste bin. That was it, I thought. They’re all dead.

It wasn’t until months later (May 20) to be exact when things began to turn around. I was wandering the premises of our back and side yard, looking for weeds, when something caught my eye. No, it couldn’t be, I thought. But yes! There, camouflaged by the surrounding weeds was a thin, little asparagus spear. EUREKA! I began to look in the other spots where I had planted crowns and found a second one. HOLY COW! Over the next few weeks, I watched with pride as every single crown sent up spears. Chances are good that if the tenth spear hadn’t been dug up (and then discarded) it would have sprouted as well. Seeing the spears grow and unfold was one of the proudest moments in my (young) life. We don’t have any pets or children yet so…yeah this is my life.

TIL asparagus (at least when it’s young) is very difficult to photograph

Now I check on them daily. They were each given their own dripper when I hooked up my customized irrigation system and I give them fish emulsion every 3-4 weeks so they stay nourished. They’ll spend the rest of the summer storing up nutrients in preparation for winter. Once the fronds turn brown and brittle, I will cut them back and cover everything with some compost and/or straw mulch to keep them warm when our temperature start to dip below freezing.

For now, I’ll take comfort in knowing that I didn’t kill them in the first year and I’ll eagerly await the arrival of new spears in the spring. Once that happens, it will only be one more year before they’ll be robust enough to harvest the following spring (2019).

Have you ever grown asparagus? Do you have any tips or tricks that you think I should be aware of? Please share them in the comments!

The Taste of Success

Summer can fast and hard. The weather has normalized a bit but before that we had a record-breaking dry streak and quite a few days in the high 80s and 90s. That meant two things: #1 my husband bought a portable A/C unit and #2 my tomatoes and peppers flourished! However, I quickly realized that I was in quite the predicament when, day after day, I would return from the yard with a bowl full of golden cherry tomatoes. They are sweet and delicious and, as you may know, you can’t beat a fresh, homegrown tomato. We ate them by the handful; we tossed them in our salads; we had a lot of tomatoes.

 

 

Here’s the “calm before the storm” when I picked the first tomato of the season on July 6.

 

 

 

 

 

Here are “a few more” from the end of July, complete with some of the last peas and beans and one of the first padrón peppers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh look! More beautiful tomatoes from just a few weeks ago. At this point, my husband and I were starting to wonder what we were going to do with all of these. We wanted to find a new way to eat them that didn’t make their incredible flavor.

That’s when we looked at the tomatoes, the peppers, and some onion sitting on the counter and thought: SALSA! Now I am a total sucker for fresh salsa or pico de gallo. I border on the mindset that you should just eat the stuff straight instead of wasting precious stomach-space on chips. So we threw everything into the food processor (as well as some garlic), added a touch of salt and pepper, and PRESTO! The freshest golden cherry tomato salsa EVER. So simple. So good. I was impressed with the way the sweetness of the tomatoes blended with the hot peppers and produced some of the best darn salsa I’ve ever eaten. It didn’t taste like a traditional red salsa but I was certainly sorry to see when it was gone.

Beyond the beautiful salsa (I’m sorry I don’t have a picture but that just proves how excited we were to eat it all) is something that I am even more proud of. Nearly everything (with the exception of the salt & pepper and garlic which came from Costco) was grown in my backyard. I actually have some homegrown garlic as well so we could have used that if it wasn’t for the bushel that we got from Costco. I was so proud to produce things that went directly into a delicious dish that my husband and I enjoyed one evening.

When we were at services last Friday night, the Rabbi asked the congregation to think about a blessing in your life. It could be something personal, something you did for a loved one, or something you did for the community. I am a little embarrassed to say that my husband and I looked at each other with the mutual thought of “uhhh what have we done that has been a blessing?” Then we had to share with someone we didn’t know sitting next to us. We politely asked the woman to my right to go first. She had a wonderful example of how she is hoping to write a book on her family’s history in the southern US. Wow! Cool! I was still at a loss. My husband finally said that he is a “fixer” – he helps people at work when their devices (computer, phone, etc.) aren’t working properly. He does quite a lot people. Fantastic! People love you! Maybe now we can be done, I thought. Nope. Nada. No dice. They turned to me with expectant looks. I got very nervous and the social anxiety started to creep in. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to brag about something that someone else wouldn’t think was worthy of being considered a “blessing.” I didn’t want to seem like I thought I was the greatest thing since sliced challah (a type of bread).

Finally I timidly said “Well, I guess my garden is a blessing…?” I explained to the woman next to me that I love to grow things and I try to work towards being a little bit more sustainable every year. She thought that was wonderful and my husband agreed. Thank goodness; bullet dodged. Perhaps I should spend a little more time thinking about what my addiction to growing fruits and vegetables means for the bigger picture. Yes, it does help to calm my inner self and it brings me joy. But it also makes my husband happy to see me happy and to have fresh food on the table. And it also helps out the planet a little as well: more food for bees, hummingbirds, and other pollinators (not to mention the critters that enjoy taking bites out of things…) and maybe it decreases my carbon footprint by a smidge. That seems like a success in my book.