Snow and Amaryllis

Winter Storm 'Nemo' walloped us pretty hard here in southeastern Massachusetts -- 2 feet of snow and no power for 30 hours. Thanks to lots of insulation the temperature in the house only went down to the 40's when it was 15 outside, but still, when the power came back on at 3:30am I threw off the down quilt and yelled 'hallelujah', then lay awake for quite a while waiting for the pinging in the baseboard they would mean the furnace was up and running.
We have solar power, but it's tied into the grid, and doesn't work when the power is out.   And we didn't make any electricity until a day after power was back because there was a foot of snow covering the panels.
I was eating dinner and heard the whoosh and thud of snow sliding off the panels, and turned back to my meal much more cheerful.

Today Sol and I went out to dig
through the pile of snow that slid off. After two warm days it was still deep. Here's the path I cleared between the back gate and the deck:









I was worried the cold would kill my house plants, but they have survived, including my pink amaryllis, back for the third year.  It had been dormant so long I was losing hope, but last week a flower bud suddenly nosed it's way out of the bulb:

What a welcome sight in the midst of so much cold and snow!

My Miscanthus planting, aka the 'Septic Garden'

My new septic system was installed in 2003, and because of the high water table, the leach field is big.   Once the project was done I was faced with a large bare patch of soil, and I thought long and hard about what to plant over it.  The plants had to be shallow rooted, or they would damage the performance of the leach field. I also wanted low maintenance.
My solution was 60 plugs of Miscanthus grass and 20 blueberry bushes.  Although the Miscanthus in not native to this area and the blueberries are, they have grown together into an impressive 'septic garden', and need little care other than an annual haircut for the grass and some trimming for shape for the berries. And now that I have a vegetable garden, the Miscanthus cuttings are put to use as mulch over the paths. I know that Miscanthus is considered an invasive non-native in some parts of the US, but it has been a restrained and polite resident of my garden.
I wait until spring to cut them back because the  golden clumps of tall grass are a welcome sight against the  brown and gray of the winter garden. They are also Sol's favorite place to play - he loves to run through them and follow the rabbit trails:

Garbage can root cellar

The water table is very high in my neighborhood ( often a good thing during the summer, when most of the garden never needs watering). As a result, my house has a four foot high crawl space full of  sump pumps instead of a cellar.  So where do I store the crops that traditionally go in a root cellar?

For several winters I stored my potatoes in the garage, in racks draped with newspaper.  Until last winter this worked fine.  It took me a while to notice, but eventually I realized the piles of  potatoes were getting smaller every day, and moved the remaining tubers inside to under the kitchen sink.
In the spring I found a pile of half eaten, sprouting potatoes behind a row of storage bins, along with the carcass of a rat.  Did he die from eating green potatoes? I'll never know, but that's my guess.

We live in a farming community, and rats are a nasty reality around barns full of cows and feed. This year I came up with more secure, yet accessible root storage --  a steel garbage can with holes punched  in the lid for air flow.  It has worked great!

Besides the holes,  the  keys to the success of my garbage can root cellar are placement in the garage and using brown paper bags.  My furnace is located in the back of the garage in a small insulated room. By placing the can next to this room, it absorbs just enough heat to keep the contents from freezing, even during our recent ten degree weather.
The paper bags let the tubers (which are alive, although in a dormant state)  release and reabsorb moisture.  Unlike my winter squash, which likes the dry cool air of my back bedroom, most root crops need fairly high humidity to store well.
I've finished all the potatoes, but now the bin is full of sunchokes. They are storing better than I could have hoped, after reading (after I dug up thirty pounds) that they don't usually store well for more than a couple of weeks.  Here's a pic of  a bag of chokes:

And here's a choke I harvested before Christmas, still firm on January 27th:

Meanwhile, my garlic, hung above the root cellar, is sprouting despite the cold. That's because it is an extra cold hardy hardneck garlic, rather than the better storing softneck.  I am going to plant a crop of the hardiest softneck I can find this fall so I can have my own garlic year round.  The sprouting garlic is still good, but I need to eat it fast before the sprouts get too big.  Than means it's time to eat lots of oven roasted garlic and sunchokes!

Making paper pots

 Last night I spent some time sitting at the dining room table, watching a DVD and making paper pots.

 I don't use a wooden pot maker, just a glass from my cabinet. I've marked the glass on the side at the center with a sharpie.  Using this line as a rolling guide I make 4 inch tall pots.

I start with half sheets of newspaper roughly torn at the middle seam,  then folded double.  Next I roll each sheet around the glass with the extra paper sticking out above the open top of the glass.

Then I tuck the overflow into the glass and slide the paper off the glass. Reaching inside, I fold down the extra paper , then push it flat with the bottom of the glass. It doesn't have to be neat, just tight enough to stay in place.

Finally, I put a small piece of tape in the overlap seam (this time I used free address labels) and fold the rim back a half inch.

After 3 years I'm getting pretty good at these pots!

Then I made labels by cutting up christmas cards. They are usually tough enough to survive until my seedlings go outside, yet because they are paper they breakdown in the garden by the end of the season.   

Sol also likes to steal and chew labels, so I prefer the paper because it is more digestible as well as compostable!

Winter dreams-- catalog orders

It's catalog time again, and I got a bumper crop in the mail this year. I don't feel terribly guilty about the  paper used for all my catalogs, because I keep them for reference for a full year at least.

Here's a pic:

before I order  I inventory my left over seeds, sorting them by season:

Next I read over the catalogs I'm most likely to order from, and make a list of the seeds I want this year.
Then I head to the local discount stores that carry seed. Ocean State Job Lot has Burpee Seeds at 40% off, and by shopping early I make sure that nothing is sold out.

Here's what I got at Job Lot this year --annual flowers:

And vegetables:

I will go to Anne and Hope next, to see what seeds they have.  In past years they have had a good selection of specialty seeds, including European selections.

  Finally, I will order anything on my list  I can't find locally.  Seeds I buy locally are taxed, but with the discounts they all cost less than $1.50.

 My budget for this year is tight-- $50 total.  So far I've spent about $10 at Job Lot. Updates to follow!

Xmas dinner from the garden

We ate many things from our garden on Christmas day. The menu featured lentil soup and oven roasted root vegetables.
I headed out to the frosty garden for kale and parsley to put in the soup:

The leaves at the center of this patch of kale and parsley were still fresh and green even without a row cover:

The soup also contained home grown onions and garlic -- here's the pot simmering:

The roasted vegetables were all mine except for the addition of two store bought sweet potatoes. I added our own delicata squash, fingerling potatoes, sunchokes, garlic and rosemary. Here they are prepped for  the oven:

I parboiled the pots so that the vegetables would all be done about the same time. Here's the final result just before I devoured it:

I also used a warm hour midday to check for any overlooked sunchokes in the bed I cleared the week before-- and I dug out another pail full! There were lots of broken pieces, so I've been eating fried sunchokes and scrambled eggs for breakfast almost every day, and I'm not tired of them yet.

Sunchoke Harvest part 1

It was a beautiful day - sunny, no wind, temps in the high forties. I headed out into the garden after lunch, pitchfork in hand, to harvest sunchokes. The other common name, Jerusalem Artichoke, is a mispronunciation of the native American name for these perennial sunflowers.
I knew the harvest would be substantial, because the flower stalks were lushly leaved and shot up to eight feet before blooming in late September.
But I was amazed by the masses of giant tubers I uncovered in a two foot square bed. Rabbits love sunchoke foliage, and for the past three years I'd fought a losing battle to keep them from gnawing the plants to the ground. I finally realized they were planted too close to the fence line. My basenji Sol keeps the bunnies on the run near his doghouse at the center of the yard, but out on the perimeter of the garden they can sneak in and out under the fence.
After eight months behind a fence, the tubers were, as the British say,  'chock a block'
Here's a pic of the first clump I pulled up:

And here's the final pile of tubers next to the bed they came out of:

Here they are washed-- at least 30 pounds-- I had trouble lifting this tub:

I took a big broken tuber in and fried it up in butter and olive oil with a bit of onion, and it was delicious, with a gentle sweet flavor, and a nice textural contrast between the soft center and crunchy exterior.
Then I waited for the gas. Sunchokes have a nickname - 'fartichokes'. The inulin in them can cause a lot of gas in people without the right probiotic gut bacteria.
Do I have the right stuff, intestinally speaking? It appears so. This modest portion caused no more that some mild 'wind'. Apparently sunchokes dug later in the winter cause less distress because they gradually change chemically in the cold soil. After all the dire warnings on the internet -'do not grow these', 'I put them all on the compost pile'- I am optimistic that I can eat my way through my harvest of sunchokes this winter.  Did I mention there is another big patch of them elsewhere in the garden? Hmm.. any one want some sunchokes? Updates to follow.....