Our Lady of Perpetual Parsley

. . . and kale, and, alas, Oxalis too.

It's true. If I never wanted to grow anything but kale, tomatoes, beans, parseley, cilantro, and oregano, I could dispense with all deliberate planting.

Missed dropped tomatoes, kale plants gone to flower, bean roots hibernating underground, my garden is full of potential. If the circumstances are right, as in the tiny kale forest below, up they pop.

I let the parsley go to seed because the bees like it. Bonus is I never have to deal with fiddly parsley seeds and their picky germination requirements. Apparently, benign neglect is the key.

There are downsides, I assume. I haven't figured out all of the succession keys yet, so I have either "all" or "none" as the settings. Remember the Tunnel of Cilantro?

I also can't really choose with any pinpoint accuracy where these plants will show up. True confession -- I may see parsley all over as I may have flailed some seedhead branches all around while singing a few weeks ago. . . "Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyyyyyyyyymmeee." Still, it's a generalized planting technique.

However, if you like serendipity, if you are lazy, and especially if you're willing to eat stuff when it feels like showing up -- I am still trying to force pint after pint of lovely Sungold cherry tomatoes on neighbors, and may hand them out as Halloween treats tomorrow -- I can heartily endorse it as a technique.

What pops up without effort in your garden?

Moving along

Life just keeps happening here.

The soil blocks are working enough that every single one has at least one tomato sprouted. Watering them is a challenge, because I haven't found a working spray bottle. That would help. Now I'm dribbling water carefully on each.

Handfuls of kale keep pouring out of the garden.

Morning sleepy children are doing pretty well with their schoolwork.

While still finding time to do things like create a "chimp nest" about 12' up in a tree. This is the view from my kitchen window. Dishes and danger are a common mix here.

Making do

Yesterday was a perfect day for catching up. I transplanted about 100 kale plants into a bed, soon to be known as the Bed O'Kale, or the BLD bed (for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which is how I would eat kale).

It was also (drum roll please) tomato-planting day, and I decided to try something new. I used to have a soil block maker, but I got rid of it for reasons that are unclear to me now. Maybe something having to do with selling my lovely, beloved Diamant grain mill *at a substantial loss, never dreaming how the price would triple. . . Sigh. The decisions we make.

So I wasn't about to let a simple matter of not owning the right equipment stop me -- soil blocks it was going to be.

The first step was to moisten soil. Then I tried using a small drinking cup.

That seemed to work okay initially, but eventually the soil stuck really badly and they fell apart, even though I used my favorite bench scraper to convey them. I had to cast about for a better mold. Ideally, it would have some "eject" feature. Ah ha! Paper cup!A simple hole poked in the bottom would let me push the soil out.

They weren't perfect, by any means, but I figured they'd do okay.

Each one got two tomato seeds, since I was sowing fairly old seed. I'm sure, given my luck, that they'll grow perfectly and abundantly and I'll either feel like a murderer with nail scissors or spend a lot of time pulling them apart and transplanting them, ending up with way more tomatoes than I can handle. I'm trying to learn from experience! I don't want 25 tomatoes. . . 12 is plenty.

Each "block" (really a cone) got a bit of moist soil drizzled on the seeds, then lightly tapped to make contact. I covered the whole thing with a humidity dome and tucked it back under the lights. I have a mist attachment to a hose I could use to water, but it's only one flat; I'll probably use a spray bottle at first and then bottom-water them. They're sitting on a nursery flat, hopefully providing some bottom aeration without letting them completely collapse. It's an adventure, at least.

So if all goes well, we'll have a dozen San Marzano, a half dozen Roma VF, and enough tomato products to make ketchup and spaghetti sauce in addition to the regular canned tomato stuff I generally make. Now I have to keep the additional plantings to only ONE Cherokee Purple and ONE Early Girl.

Oh, and maybe two Principe Borghese. We're running low on dried tomatoes.

Today should be Pepper Day, but I wonder if there's enough room under the lights.

*If anyone is considering grain mill buying, this blog has some lovely and current reviews. I probably wouldn't get another Diamant based on it.

Starting seeds makes me feel a bit less like a garden slacker. I know, I should have been doing it all along, but actually doing it counts.

So today, I used my new Haws can

to water in:
Drunken Woman Frizzy Head lettuce
Tom Thumb lettuce
Merlot lettuce
Territorial Seed's Heirloom Blend lettuce
a romaine whose name escapes me
Lacinato kale
Red Russian kale
Breadseed poppy
Indigo
Marigolds
Bloomsdale Long Standing spinach
Monstreux de Viroflay spinach
Hibiscus for tea
Italian flat-leaf parseley
sage.

Seems like a long list for only three flats. The pepper cuttings are hanging in there, so not obviously dead at least.

Before I start any more seeds, I'm going to have to either repair or replace the light fixtures and get new bulbs.

Instant garden

I broke today -- after a morning coffee with the eldest child, I headed for the local nursery to pick up an early birthday present for me. Seedlings! I got two six packs of leeks (with 2-8 leeks per pot), two six packs of lettuce mixes, two six packs of asparagus, and a single potted artichoke. The front yard artichoke was split but the transplanted half thrived and the original half dwindled to almost nothing, so I figured a jump start was in order.

I've been so behind with the seedlings downstairs that I wonder if I'll ever see seed-started lettuce! It's just been a bad winter, garden-wise.

So the jump start seemed to be all I needed. In a break in the rain, I raked smooth the bed infested with potato scab, and put in, with many incantations to the spring goddesses, a dozen feathery asparagus babies.


It strikes me that planting asparagus is a really optimistic gardening move. It says that you're going to be around for at least the next few years, just to coax the plants along. Since these were seedlings, not large crowns, it may be up to four years before I get to eat anything. Oh well, it keeps me busy!

The leeks filled a small bed and half a large bed. Before the lettuce could be sited, the rain opened up again and I headed inside. There a flat waited, so I seeded two kinds of kale and about eight different kinds of lettuce. My version of succession planting -- nursery seedlings AND home-seeded ones! Whatever gets you eating, I suppose.

In distressing news, the garden kale is going to seed, and I didn't succession seed well enough to have more at the right point. So I may end up (gasp) buying kale to eat. Now I wish I'd frozen some!

The price of direct-seeding

Growing from transplants is generally agreed to be not as cost-effective as starting your own.

That's not, alas, true for me this year.


That's right -- the birds. The birds are eating everything intentionally planted in my near-wasteland garden. Between the rain and the birds and the cold, I have just grumpily harvested the preexisting kale and ignored everything else, including my carrot bed which is either not germinating because it's cold or the birds have also pulled every teensy carrot I saw right out. I'm going with option two because I actually saw teensy carrots. And now. . . nothing.

So last weekend I hied me to the hardware store and bought a package of my most loathed outdoor product -- plastic bird netting. I figured I'd engineer a nice pvc box for each garden bed, zip-tie the netting down, and have something I could reuse year after year.

Unfortunately, I'm the Queen of the Jury-Rigged. The repurposed pvc is just curvy enough that the corners keep springing loose:


Although I was confident enough in that one to replant some carrots the other day.

I tried another box style in bamboo, and am not yet happy enough with it to drape netting over it.

But today, I found the least material-intensive design so far:


White tip is NOT a skunk; it's Mikey's tail. He had been lounging in that bed before I chased him off of it and then capped it with netting. If both he and the birds stay away, maybe I'll get some peas, spinach, and tat soi.

If it's warm enough.

Yesterday's harvest? 9 1/2 ounces of red kale and 1 pound 10 oz of Yukon Gold potatoes. The bed they came out of has a scab-type disease in it. No more grocery store potatoes; no more in that bed!

And check out the eggs! Three normal ones; one as though a chicken was channeling a hummingbird. We don't have a light in the coop, and I know we'd be getting a lot more eggs if we did! Maybe bigger ones, too. I should have taken a close-up of that wee egg, but I was tired.


Today, 14 pounds of Bearss limes which will be lime shred marmalade tomorrow. Only one egg today, but normal chicken-sized.


Maybe tomorrow I will weed!

Bees and tomatoes and beauty

Before the weather remembered that it was February, I did get over to my friend's beehive. She's been very patient with me, but would like to actually get some honey from her hive. If this hive doesn't step up, I may be reduced to sneaking filled frames over there to "find!"

One picture first -- this is how you can tell that a hive has been robbed of honey.See how the edges of the cells are rough, as though some little mandibles have nibbled the cappings away?


That was from one of my hives, the "dead" one.

In front of my friend's hive, there were a couple of drones dead -- I couldn't tell if there was anything disease-wise wrong with them, but they didn't look right. Perhaps they'd been preemptively pulled due to Varroa mites.


Inside, the hive looked relatively quiet:


I found some really wonky comb, and cut it off, but then saw that most of it looked pretty good. This is comb that was tied in (you can see the remains of the rubber bands in the picture above) from the top-bar hive last summer. Flat caps are worker brood, raised ones are drone brood:


There was enough brood to make me think the queen is doing well. I would have liked to reverse the hive bodies, but right about then I felt what I was pretty sure was a bee in my bra. That's a phrase I've never really wanted to use! Anyhow, that took the starch all out of me, and all I wanted was to get inside and disrobe.

So we put a honey super on, and I'll go back another day and switch the lower boxes. After it warms up, that is.

(And yes, it was a bee, but she didn't sting me before I managed to get her out of me. I was very very pleased by that.)

Tomatoes in February?


A front-yard volunteer has decided that it's time to bloom. I hope the weather holds. It's going to be fun to find out what variety is lurking under the lime tree. (Cue horror movie music.)


Lastly, while I'm all about the edible (I sort of get pretty gardening, but not enough to want to do it), I don't think a garden is enough without flowers. These happen to be edible Johnny Jump-ups, but I'm still excited about them.


It's going to be a pretty spring.

Whoops

Last week, I tried to start seeding my winter garden. Since I scored some plastic mini-blinds on Freecycle, my new ideas about recordkeeping were easy to implement. With a few simple codes, I have variety, date seeded, number of seeds planted, number germinated, date germinated, and date transplanted all easy to see and keep track of. After that, the idea is that each plant would get its own tag, either ground-planted or tied on. Besides needing a thin-tipped Sharpie, it worked okay.


Unfortunately, I didn't get my entire act together. My seed-starting light setup has a short somewhere and if I forget and go down barefoot and touch it, I get a nasty shock. I dismantled it and began to look for the problem, but didn't get it found and the lights reassembled.

No problem, I thought, I have time.

Except, I didn't.


I now have a flat of salad sprouts, I guess. That new fancy potting soil and good seeds did the magic faster than I expected. Time to redo!

On the upside, those bricks in the background are half of our patio. I'm hunting for a source of free bricks to finish, too. I'm sure they'll sprout up in time.

Oh -- does anyone know how Denise and I can put an author line under the title of each post, so it's easy (without identifying the author style) to see who's writing what?

Keeping Count

One of the themes of this blog, and indeed, of our project together, is keeping track of what we're producing. Sometimes it's very little at a time, but even the small things can pack a wallop. For instance, these "Purple Royalty" rasperries, from the first year planting out front, nearly exploded in my mouth. I must keep paying attention to them, and learning all I can about bramble fruits.


Less exciting, probably because it was from a broken off stem, was the first "Fall Gold" berry. Still, tasty.


One of my favorite poems, "After Apple Picking," by Robert Frost, says in part:

"For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired."

I may never feel this way, without a "real" orchard, but I did another pass along the espaliered trees today and pulled extra fruit off. I did some research that seemed to suggest that thinning not only made bigger apples grow, it tended to even out the production, year to year, for the tree, so there's not a boom and bust cycle. That sounds healthier for both of us, but it still hurts, some, to see the results.


We agreed to keep count of something else -- visitors to the garden! I may skew the count with my hives, but since the seeds came for the Great Sunflower Project today, I dutifully followed through.


I put them right by the zinnias.


Cat asked me to put some in her garden, but I may have to assign her a bigger bed. I couldn't find any more room!

Nourish beginnings

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.
Muriel Rukeyser


Sometimes the beginning seed comes from the ending plant -- these are Lacinato Kale from last year.

And sometimes it's the promise of moving-around new life (notice how nicely the mama ladybugs placed their children near a buffet?).



We're going to have grapes, and this year, I've committed to regular watering, so they might be bigger than last year's quarter-inch ones.


The rasperries are so beloved that a strict set of protocol has grown up around the picking of them. One picks, then figures out how many people want them, then offers them around, making sure that mama gets some. At least that's the theory. Hopefully the new berries out front will spread out the joy.


I thought I'd have room for a zucchini in this section of the bed, but I had lazily snapped the True Siberian kale off instead of pulling it. Now it's resprouting. How could I rip it out now? We actually had kale for dinner last night.

This may be the truest indicator that spring is really here. Tomatoes. . . yummm. Even now I'm amazed at how much plant comes out of such tiny seeds.


Speaking of dinner last night, yesterday was one of those cheery "make lots of food" days. A new pan of granola:


The artichokes are from the front yard. With pine nuts and parmesan, they ended up stuffing the chicken breasts for the dinner party. They're so young that they were butter-tender.


More seeds and seedlings await downstairs. The fun just never ends. As I was pulling weeds by the garden bed today, and taking them to the chickens, I realized that I'll be doing this next year, and the year after that, and so on, unless something terrifically unexpected happens. That makes me happy. I always thought that you'd (I'd?) have to move to the country to feel linked to any land, but it's apparently the working of the land that causes connection.

Cows have calves, horses have foals, beehives have swarms

Got a call yesterday from a friend at whose house I maintain the last of my top bar beehives. I'm not a fan of that style of beehive any longer, although I totally see the appeal. The hive had swarmed -- it's a normal reaction to spring. This is how honeybees make new bees, not just by laying eggs and rearing brood. So far, I've not been able to manage hives without them swarming, even if I'm doing my level best. Still more to learn, obviously.

Yesterday I popped that swarm in a box, and picked them up early this morning, when they were all inside. When I got home, I suited up and dumped them right into the hive that the other swarm had vacated. It was while I was putting in the final foundation frames that I noticed little legs on my ankle; someone had crawled up my pant leg. Since I'd just rolled out of bed into my jeans, I hadn't even bothered putting on socks. I was only in loafers. Carefully, I lifted the pant leg to shake her out, but boom! I got stung right above the ankle. Drat, drat, drat, I thought. Instead of finishing, I put the lid on and got out of there.

Then I put a package of frozen peas on my leg. It helped -- I'm nowhere near as swollen as last time. Yay.


Bees leave the hive full of honey, and they have to make wax -- the pressure just pushes wax right out of them. Over night, this is the wax left in the box from that swarm. Amazing. They are just ready to go.

Today, my sister and her family came over for a meal, in which we feasted on salad from her garden Afterwards, I wandered around the yard with her and her boyfriend. We talked tomatoes, and discussed ideas about caging and amending and planting corn with squashes. . . and then one of them said, "What about this big bunch of bees in your tree?"


Huh?

Another swarm, probably from my more active hive. Oh dear. I was all out of boxes in which to put bees, and my middle daughter had just said today, "You need to stop collecting bees." It's true. Three hives is my limit for my yard. So I put out a call to the association, and someone who really wanted them came right over to pick them up.

If you've never hived a swarm or seen someone do it, there are many good videos on Youtube. In this case, they were in a nice, tight cluster because it was getting cool. After spreading a sheet below them on the ground, and readying his cardboard box, John sprayed them with sugar water. This both calms them (oooh, sugar), and sticks their wings together so they can't fly until they get licked clean.


One good shake of the limb, and the majority of the clump falls right into the box. Whoomp. He set the box down on the sheet, propped the lid over it, and we waited. The queen was in there because they were fanning nicely. After about a half an hour, they were calm enough to scrape the stragglers we could find off of the limb,


brush the box top clean, cap and wrap the cardboard box, and they were off! I'm so glad they're going to a nice new home.


So the bees were sorted, and while I'd been outside talking to the new keepers, I planted out about eight peppers: Anaheim, Jalapeno, Ancho, red ruffled pimiento, Firecracker piquin, and something -- a frying variety? and an Ichiban egglant, and pulled some cauliflower and kale that had gone to seed. The chickens got those, although I don't count that as part of the harvest! The pole beans and bush beans are beginning to sprout, and nine zinnias are ready to transplant along with six Japanese indigo plants. As the straw mulch marches across the garden -- I'm putting it in as I transplant or plant summer crops -- I think I still have room for everything that's under lights downstairs. Soon I'll settle into my favorite garden rhythm -- the growing before harvesting season.

Still, my to-do list keeps growing right along with the garden, and it's important to keep in mind that while the broccoli still has a few weeks to go, I'm going to want to follow it with something, so it's smart to be thinking of a replacement crop for that section, even if it's a cover crop. Always a new thought, a new task. Gardening has enough interest for a few lifetimes.