Amaryllis Redux

  I'm sitting next to a small, dark wooden table with four pots on it. Three contain the bright green grassy foliage of paperwhite narcissus bulbs that bloomed a month ago. The fourth pot houses an amaryllis about to bloom.  I've grown winter bulbs for at least thirty years, but these pots are special- they reflect my new, less disposable view of the things in my world.

  One winter shortly after I graduated from college I gave paperwhites potted in mugs from a dime store as Christmas gifts to some of my friends. One of them was a recent art school grad, and several weeks later he showed me a vivid drawing of a sad, past prime narcissus.  I thought it was beautiful, but wondered why he didn't draw it at it's best.  'But it's about death' he said, going all art school on me.  

   He was wrong. The bulb was not dying, it was going dormant, just as it would every year in it's native climate.  But he was right that it would not bloom again, because once it dried up, he threw it away.  I did the same with my paperwhites and amaryllis for years. It seemed like too much work to try and coax another year of bloom out of these inexpensive bulbs. 

 But last year I changed my mind.  Money is tight, but not so much so that the cost of a few bulbs will break my budget. I think the amaryllis stands for a shift in how much work I feel should be expended to renew rather than discard.

I now have a complete sewing kit, with a range of colored thread to patch rips in clothing, and I use it.  I've also been organizing the tools I have scattered in drawers, closets and the garage, so that I don't keep buying the same screwdriver over and over again because I can't  find the last one....

  It turns out that tender bulbs are not that hard to keep alive from year to year.  I kept last year's amaryllis inside until all chance of a frost was past, then moved it to filtered light outside. I  watered and gave it some dilute fish fertilizer now and then until the foliage yellowed, and then stopped watering. 

  When the soil was dry I put it in the garage and ignored it for three months. In October I brought it in the house and started watering again.  Now it has five strap-like leaves and a tall flower stalk ready to open like a chrysalis to reveal it's scarlet blooms.  It's not an unmitigated success-- last year there were two stalks.  Maybe I'll try a bit more fertilizer this year. 

  The narcissus are the next experiment.  I'll give them about the same treatment, and we'll see what happens. Next winter I hope to be enjoying even more new blooms from old friends.

Going Amateur

  It's mid February and I'm getting excited about  the vegetable gardener's equivalent to Baseball's Spring Training-- starting my first seeds. They'll be peppers (which germinate slowly, and so get a couple of week's jump on the tomatoes). I'll plant the  'Jalapeno M' and 'Bulgarian Carrot' hot peppers I grew last year, as well as  'Hungarian Wax' and a sweet pepper called 'Big Red'.

  I'm still amazed that the tiny seeds I start in February will become sturdy plants heavy with peppers by July.  My selection is mostly hot peppers because I'm catering to the quirky and unique needs of just two people.  I have no roadside stand and I don't supply any restaurants. That's what being an amateur means to me as a vegetable gardener, and while it may not produce cash income, it gives me great freedom to garden by whim.

  This wasn't always so. I used to be a professional gardener. I began by weeding fields for minimum wage, got a degree in horticulture, and ended up helping to manage a retail grower of perennial flowers. For most of the years I was a pro I enjoyed it.  I loved being outside, touching the earth, being surrounded by birds, learning to read the needs of plants.  

  Then I became more of a manager, concerned with staffing,  profit and the current trends in shrubs and flowers.  I worked so much during the growing season that I neglected my own plantings, and I lost some of the joy I had found in the garden.

  When an opportunity arose to manage in a different industry, I left the farm and professional gardening.  I knew it was time for many reasons, most of which had nothing to do with my love for plants and the outdoors, and more to do with economics and personalities. 

  I moved on to my new job,  and for several years my home garden was only lightly tended. But soon the joy of gardening returned.  I grew for myself, creating a landscape that reflected my love of birds, native plants, and vegetables. Sure I still read the magazines, but not to anticipate my customer's needs, but to discover my own.

  My pro experience comes in handy sometimes.  I can dig, prune and divide perennials easily, having done each task thousands of times.  But vegetables are mostly annuals, and they grow at an amazing rate compared to perennials.  I'm still very much an amateur with vegetables, and enjoying every minute.

 

 

 

Bearing Gifts

  For twenty years I've grown a crop I never eat.  Every fall I harvest gallons of delicious fruit  from  my sixteen foot by four foot bed of 'Heritage' raspberries.  Delicious to everyone but me, that is. I've never liked the sweet, floral taste of raspberries.

  And yet I get great pleasure from the whole experience of growing raspberries, from cutting back the canes in spring, through top-dressing the bed with aged mature, then finally picking the abundant fruit. 

  Picking raspberries is a garden ritual that begins in late August and often lasts through mid-October.  The ritual starts in the morning, as part of my daily evaluation of the garden.  Each morning before work I spend a few minutes in the garden, watering seedlings, checking the undersides of leaves for pest eggs, and deciding what needs to be picked that night. 

  At dusk I select  containers from the kitchen based on my morning estimates and head out to the  garden.  I pick the vegetables first, then finish in the berry patch.  I  lift each arching cane to examine the cluster of heavy berries at it's end.  I gently tug at the darkest berries, more purple than red at full ripeness.  If they release easily, they are ready. I lose track of time and pick until the darkness makes it hard to tell purple from red, or my container is full. 

   Some berries go to my in-laws and my mother, others to friends.  But most of the harvest is for my husband of thirty two years, who has been ill for the last five.  His illness is chronic, and there is little I can do to ease his pain and sadness. But he has always loved raspberries, and now they are one of the enduring pleasures of his changed life.  Each day during the harvest he eats  my raspberries. When I ask him if he is sick of them after a month or so, he says 'never', and so I keep picking and he keeps eating.  

   This fall the berries just came and came.  The weather was right-- dry, not too hot, not too cold. My berry patch was like the fairy tale bag that was always full of food no matter how much was taken from it.  Finally, in mid October, a frost blackened the final berries. I came in that night and told my husband. 'Those were great raspberries' he said, smiling gently at the memory.

  This winter I ordered some blackberry plants to arrive in April. I don't like blackberries either, but he does. I've already got a nice pile of manure stockpiled under a tarp to for the planting holes.

Good Fences

  I let  my dog Sol out  yesterday morning, and he chased a squirrel across the backyard. Both of them slid along the crust on top of the  snow to the cedar fence that encloses my back yard.  The snow is two feet deep, but Sol is small, and neither of them broke through the shiny, hard crust.

  As I watched the squirrel scamper over the fence and away, I held my breath.  Would Sol jump the snow shortened fence and take off after the squirrel?  I did not relish running out and calling for him through our coyote filled woods.  Sol is nine years old now, and either because he is weaker or wiser, did not attempt the leap. He slid back across the snow and came into the warm house.  I sat drinking my coffee and thinking about fences.

  I came across a picture recently of a beautiful garden that integrated the flowers and vegetables together seamlessly-- banks of daylilies next to rows of red romaine, etcetera.  What were my thoughts?  Not 'how beautiful' or ' I want to do that', but 'where the heck are the fences?' and 'how do they keep the rabbits away?'.

  That garden must be in the city. When I lived in the city we had pigeons, but no rabbits.  Here in the country we have everything but pigeons.  I love being in the midst of all this wildlife, but the rabbits are hungry, and and they will eat the daylilies sometimes, and the romaine every time they can get to it.

  There are commercial fields of vegetables down the street, and they are not fenced. But they are also  so big that any chewing on the edges by rabbits or woodchucks has little effect on the total output.

  I want to protect every leaf of lettuce in my small garden.  I need fences around most of the vegetables, except the tomatoes, potatoes, and squash, which have distasteful (to the rabbits and woodchucks) fuzzy or thorny leaves.

   For several years I used cheap chicken wire and bamboo stakes, but these didn't last long, and looked lousy. They were also easy for Sol to get over, and he has an appetite for beans and peas.  Last spring I finally measured, planned, and installed a more substantial vegetable garden fence. It is a twenty foot square fence of green painted steel poles and  three foot high green metal fencing around  six raised beds. Then I laid newspaper, cardboard, and straw over the paths. 

  Now I can let myself into this enclosure and work on the garden while the hungry critters stay outside.  Including Sol, who has learned to lie nearby waiting  patiently for any  green beans tossed his way-- and there are always a few that are a bit too tough for my taste, but not for his.

Potato Futures

   Yesterday I checked my seed potatoes to see how they were surviving the winter. To do this I opened the fridge, pulled out the vegetable crisper, and took out a brown paper bag.  I put the bag on the kitchen counter and unrolled the top, then looked in at my 40 or so 'Rose Finn Apple' fingerling and 'Yellow Finn' potatoes.  Except for a couple of shriveled 'Rose Finn' tubers that I removed and threw in the compost,  they all looked plump and healthy. I put them back in their winter home in the crisper.

This is the first year I've saved my own potatoes to plant, though I've grown them for four years.  I was going to save some last year (2009) but  held off because of the chance they'd be infected with late blight.

   It is hard to raise potatoes profitably in my kitchen garden, especially if  have to buy mail order seed pots every year-- the shipping for a pound or two (all I have room for) costs as much or more than the potatoes.  So I hope to continue collecting my own seed potatoes, and this fall start saving seeds as well.

But first I'd like to buy some blue seed potatoes. Blue potatoes are expensive in the market, highly nutritious, and they look really cool! I've come up with a plan to avoid the costly shipping.  Late in February I'll be volunteering as a docent for several hours a a local Flower Show.  Last year I bought my 'Rose Finn Apple' seed potatoes from a booth at the show for less than $5. This year, if my luck is good, that vendor will return, and I'll leave the show with blue potatoes for my kitchen garden.

I swear it will be the last seed potatoes I buy.... maybe.

Winter moths and the benefits of cold

It snowed again today.  Like many gardens across the country, mine is buried deep under several feet of snow.  While I was shoveling my long driveway this morning I made up a mental list of the benefits of a snowy, cold winter for the garden.

There should be plenty of water in my well, as the aquifer under my property will be filled by snowmelt.

Also, I won't lose topsoil in the garden from wind and rain-- the snow will hold it in place.  My strawberries are well insulated by that snow pack, too, and should not be hurt by the deep cold we've also experienced.

And maybe, just maybe, the cold will reduce the population of Winter Moth caterpillars this May.

If you live outside of the East coast of North America from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts you may not know about the Winter Moth.  It is an invasive pest (originating in Europe), similar to the Gypsy Moth in it's potential for defoliation of some tree and shrub species.  The adult moths hatch out in November and December to mate and lay eggs. Because this is after most birds migrate, they have a high survival rate.

In May the tiny green caterpillars crawl into buds and eat from the inside.  if the spring is hot, the leaves open fast and there is a chance of birds eating some of them. If it is cool the leaves are stripped to the ribs.  I had very bad infestation on my blueberries last year, resulting in few berries, though I fertilized and got new leaves at least.

I searched on the web, but found no certain info that a winter to 0 degrees will kill the eggs on tree bark, but I can hope.  There's got to be something positive in this brutal weather.  Excuse me, I've got to go shovel my roof.

Birthday present and dumpster diving

So here's an example of how I garden now. 
My favorite birthday present  this year was a pair of old storm windows  (complete with screens) that my friend Steve saved for me from a house he was renovating. They'll make great cold frames over some cinder blocks or hay bales.  I began asking friends to watch for windows three months ago, and my patience was rewarded last week.  The screens  are a real bonus- I can use them to vent the coldframes and keep insects out!

Last year I drove by a construction site a dozen times eyeing the dumpster full of big pieces of scrap lumber.  One day I saw that the dumpster was full, and I knew it would be emptied soon.  I got up the courage to ask the work crew if I could dumpster dive. They said yes, and I made four raised beds out of the lumber.

I didn't use to be so patient.  I once bought a second pair of Felco pruners because I couldn't find the first pair in the clutter of my garage.  I still lose things in the garage, but I take a break and then search again the next day-- and things usually turn up. 

Nowadays my budget is tight, and that is certainly part of the reason why I'm more patient and frugal. But there's more to it.  My mother is a yard sale shopper, and has been for 50 years. She loves finding beautiful things that others don't value and bringing them home to be loved.  I also enjoy the challenge of recycling and repurposing materials in my garden.

All of this goes back to the change in my attitude towards the garden. I once gardened to create a place of beauty and peace I could retreat to.  Now I feel like I need to do something more assertive than  retreating to the garden.  I need to have some control over my future.  I can at least use my hands and my mind to feed my family, and  be a bit green as well.  Bring on the dumpster diving!