So much to talk about … where to begin??? The last time I posted here was waaaay back at the end of June!! I know, I know, it’s unforgivable. “Bad Blogger ... Bad blogger!!”

So then, now that the self punishment has been doled out, what say I start trying to get you up to date? You may remember that I mentioned that my wife and I went through our local extension service’s Master Gardener program this Spring. It was a pretty long course that consisted of 40 hours of classroom instruction spread out over 10 weeks. But it didn’t stop there; the second part of the program, and one that must be finished if we were to actually be counted as “graduates” of the program was to provide 40 hours of garden-related service to our community. That took a surprisingly long time to do working on it only part time but was truly one of the most rewarding parts of the process as well.

One of the things that I did a lot of was to teach beginning gardening classes to different groups in my area. It was so fun to get to share my passion for the garden and the many fruits of that sort of labor with my neighbors and community groups. I can only hope that I was able to affect at least one person or family. We also spent a couple of afternoons at our county fair manning a Master Gardeners booth and worked together to answer phones at the extension service office; both times providing knowledge and “expertise” on some of the typical garden problems that arise in our area. They’re called diagnostic services and its amazing how much you can learn just by looking up information for others. I heartily encourage anyone who is seriously interested in gardening, of whatever sort, to check in with your local extension service to see if there is a Master Gardener class scheduled for your area. Now is the time to check too since they usually start at the beginning of the year.

And speaking of the garden, a lot of good things came out of it this year. This spring we added a new garden bed to the side-yard area of the front of our house. It’s not a common site in our suburban area but we hope it will be soon! You can see that new garden area in the bed below.

The low lying plants are the potatoes that I talked about planting earlier this year, but as you can see they weren’t the only thing that did well in this area. Let me take this opportunity to tell you about how many sun flowers of varied and prolific numbers that we had. The sunflowers you see here - both the large ones and the small - are naturally seeded ones that came up as volunteers from last year. I did thin them out quite a bit, but the ones I left did great and brought us lots and lots of bees and lady beetles. Of course we know that the lady beetles showed up because we had an abundance of aphids.

In the back yard we had some more positive developments. The Lasagna Garden Beds that I started at this time last year and planted for the first time this summer did better than I could have expected! (That’s it above.) Watermelons, tomatoes peppers and cukes all did awesome in the fertile, nutrient-rich humus. I’ve decided that this fall I’m ammending all my raised beds with my last clippings, leaves, coffee grounds and chicken bedding to break down over the winter and enrich the soil. I am sold!

Also in the back yard I finally got the rest of my side yard cleaned up and added four more 4-by-4 raised beds to it. That’s them all the way down at the end of the row. The soil is still a little bit neutral for my liking, being that it is just a basic soiless mix of peat, vermiculite and compost. I’m ammending it this fall and look forward to growing in it next year.

One of my big successes this year was with okra. (You can see the early growth in the picture above, it’s in the second bed from the right.) They are really an interesting plant. Before the familiar pods in the picture below form, this relative of the hibiscus and rose of sharon sports a quite beautiful flower. Better keep an eye out though, they’re only there for about a day. I’ve learned that they don’t like any cool weather, nor do they care to have wet feet. Otherwise a pretty easy plant to work with.

With all the talk of the good things going on you must be wondering how the harvest was. Quantity isn’t the sole measure of a successful garden mind you, but it sure does help an urban farmer to know how he’s doing. I’m glad to report that this was our best season yet! Of course that was bouyed by the added garden areas that we developed this year but I also felt a little more organized than I have been in years past.

Here’s one of only a few harvest pictures that I took this year. It was after we had pulled our mid season potatoes and a half bushel of tomatoes; along with some other stuff, too, of course.

Ever wonder what 135+ pounds of tomatoes looks like? OK, I never did either, but now I know ... and here it is. One of the things that we decided to do a little differently this year was to plant a good mix of indeterminate and determinate tomatoes. Of course wanted to have enough tomatoes trickling in to keep us in fresh ones (indeterminate), but this year we also wanted to have those big single harvests (determinate), too, so that we could can and put up more tomatoes for this winter. Mission accomplished.

After all was said and done we ended up with just barely shy of 810 pounds of food from our 0.25 acre suburban lot, not counting the eggs we got, which I stopped counting at somewhere past 750. To say I was pleased would be an understatement.

Of course all was not successfull, as is the way in the garden, or we would likely have topped 1000 pounds. Pumpkins, watermelon and some zucchini plants were completely decimated by an abnormally large number of squash bugs. Our green beans also did miserably, I think due to the long cool spring that we had this year, and were plagued by a rust not long after emerging. I had to plant them twice and still needed a fungicide. Time to rotate beds for a few years I’d say.

Well, I think that almost catches you up with me. Still a few more recent developments, but I think I’ll try to put those in another post. Hope all your gardens did well this year. For my part I’m looking forward to relaxing just a little and getting ready for the holidays.

Best to you all!

Paul Gardener~

Oh, my poor tomato plant. When I posted “My Garden” at the end of August the tomato plant was doing great. Just a few days later, it was an entirely different matter. The leaves near the base of the plant started turning yellow. So I consulted with our resident expert (GRIT Editor Hank Will), and he thought aphids.

I was still searching for diatomaceous earth when, a few days later, the entire plant was yellow! Another consult resulted in the diagnosis of tomato blight. Ouch!

With a heavy heart, I trimmed all the leaves off the plant, leaving the remaining tomatoes to, hopefully, ripen. No new tomatoes, although there were about 25 or so pieces of fruit in various sizes. I’ve harvested almost all of those, and my kitchen counter contains a pile of red. Unfortunately, a few tomatoes had to be tossed, with strange holes. And since I’m squeamish about that sort of thing, into the trash they went.

This weekend, the rest of the plant will follow, as will the soil. And I plan to rearrange the garage so all my gardening paraphernalia will fit. A problem I never thought I’d have, by the way.

Now armed with a homemade pesticide/fungicide, I have high hopes that this particular problem will not repeat next year.

And yes, I’m already planning for next year. What can I say? I’m hooked.

The basil and the oregano didn’t do too well together, so I’ll leave the oregano in the current pot (letting it winter in the garage) while I plant a new basil plant in a new pot next spring.

The red peppers are still going strong – new blossoms have appeared, and if all goes as I hope, I’ll pull the plant inside when Jack Frost comes calling and have fresh peppers in a month or two. And a second pot of peppers will undoubtedly be part of the container garden come spring. Those red peppers are delicious, if I do say so myself.

The tomato plant will have a larger pot – and I do believe I’ll add a second plant, probably one that ripens a bit earlier than Brandywine – and I’ll add the wire cage from the beginning, training and pruning each plant as the season progresses. As you can see from the photo, my re-tying efforts were a bit erratic, so I don’t want a repeat of that particular problem. The homemade pesticide will also be applied from the get-go.

Guess I’ve become a real gardener. The roller coaster set of emotions were mine from the beginning – the thrill of new growth and a great harvest, the sadness of a dying plant, the anticipation of next year – and I’ve begun to look at gardening equipment in a whole new light. Too bad I can’t quite get myself to be thrilled about working in the dirt when it comes to my front garden. Maybe next year?

For a first-time garden, my container tomato and pepper plants are growing great. In fact, I’m pretty amazed at how well things have gone.

The Brandywine tomato plant has already produced 10 beautiful pieces of fruit – and, believe me, I’ve enjoyed every bite! There have to be at least 30 green tomatoes still on the vine, and I’m pretty sure I saw a few more buds appearing just this week. My only problem is that the plant is not producing ripe fruit in a nice orderly fashion – I really don’t like the wait! I’m joking – well, a little bit anyway. It would be really great if the plant would ripen one or two tomatoes each day – I’d be in seventh heaven!

I definitely can’t complain about the quality of fruit. Although I do have a bit of a complaint about the monster plant in my container. I’ve been pruning, and it’s a bit more manageable these days. That wasn’t always the case.

One day I came home to find the tomato plant leaning against the table holding the pepper plant. The tomato’s container is an urn design, and the plant decided to put all its efforts into vines on one side, rather than a neat round bush. A slight wind that day caught the mass of growth like a sail, and the plant tilted to the side. It’s actually lucky that the pepper plant and its table were right there to catch the wandering tomato plant. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure the tomato plant would not be looking too good right about now.

The massive growth has necessitated quite a few re-ties over the summer. I started out with three stakes in a teepee configuration. That didn’t last long. Then the three stakes were untied at the top and replanted straight up and down. That lasted for a bit. The pepper plant about that time decided it needed a stake, and a week or two later, the extra two stakes were planted with the tomato. That makes five stakes and I still need more! I tried a wire cage for a while, but it seemed to be crowding the plant too much, and of course, at this late date, I wasn’t able to place the cage properly without damaging the plant. I’m still looking for more stakes, because the darn tomato just keeps growing!

The pepper plant had a bit of a problem earlier in the summer – a storm blew off a lot of blossoms. At the time, there were six or seven peppers beginning to form, and I thought I’d have a slew of them by now. Not the case. I’ve been forced to harvest two green peppers – one was knocked off by the tilting tomato plant – which were good. But I wanted red peppers as advertised! Yesterday, I picked the first red pepper. It’s a deep red color, and I have yet to sample its deliciousness. I have every reason to believe it will be as good as the green versions. (It was!)

So there you have it, the latest from this neophyte gardener. Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving every minute of this experiment (and every bite too!). I do have a confession to make, though. I’m already planning next year’s garden!

We have had our gardening ups and downs this year. You may have heard that it has rained almost every day this summer in Massachusetts, so our poor waterlogged plants haven’t had much of a chance. But we are beginning to reap the benefits of our home garden. We’re getting a bowl full of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes every day. At first every ripe tomato went directly into Ella’s mouth, but finally there are enough to share. We have tons of other unripe tomatoes on the vine waiting for some sun to ripen. We have some yellow leaves, so we’re praying they don’t get hit by the late blight, which is wiping out whole fields of tomatoes around here.

We’re also getting quite a few zucchini, which seem to grow about four inches overnight. Fortunately, we are big fans of the secret placement of zucchini in everything from cookies to bread to smoothies, so we are happy. Ella has even rewritten the Raffi song, “I like to Eat Apples and Bananas” to be “I like to Eat Apples and Zucchinis.” Of course, she doesn’t really like to eat zucchini that much at all, but we’re hoping the song will sink in. We also started a whole host of other squash, pumpkin, and gourds, which we forgot to label, so now we are watching every day to see what they will turn out to be. 

Our bean crop had a few disadvantages going in. First we mixed up our beans and planted the pole beans in the garden and the bush beans by the fence. Next we actually followed the directions on the package that said to plant them 6 inches apart. So we only planted like 12 plants. We could have planted them a couple of inches apart and actually produced more than two servings of beans. Good to know for next year. The Royal Purple Pod Beans did win the most interesting vegetable from the garden though. We love the color combo of the dark purple with the vivid green when you break them. Of course, when you cook them, they turn just plain old green.

We’ve also got peppers, cucumbers, carrots, onions, our second planting of lettuce, tons of basil and other herbs including lemongrass.

Our biggest surprises were our berry crops. The good surprise is we actually have strawberries on the plants Brent grew from seed. Our friend who works on an organic farm said we should probably pick them off so the plants will produce next year, but we just couldn’t do it. Our first strawberries!

The less good surprise was that the very prolific huckleberry bushes we also started from seed are not the wild huckleberries that grew on LeAnna’s grandparents’ farm in Kentucky, but are actually garden huckleberries, which don’t actually taste very good. Any ideas for what we can do with them?

We’ve definitely learned a few things in our garden experiment. First, we need to plant a lot more to feed our family for the summer and be able to can. Second: it seems to benefit most anything to start it from seed before planting it in the ground. Third: We miss our CSA more than we thought we would, especially those giant u-pick fields. Depending on how the rest of the month goes, we’re thinking about joining a local college’s Fall Semester CSA and trying to take advantage of the u-pick and seeing what we can preserve. Until then we’re supplementing our diet with lots of free, foraged berries and local fruit and produce from farmstands. How has your garden been growing?

Things have been very busy here in our neck of the woods!

My little darlings, as I like to call them, are now permanent residents outside. Of course I am referring to the three baby squirrels that we rescued earlier this year when I found them fallen from their nest. They are looking for food on their own, but we still spoil them with corn and sunflower seeds.

On some days they greet us on the porch in the morning, and will still come running up my leg, or jump onto my shoulder. My husband, Jim, built a couple more squirrel boxes and hung them in trees near our house. The babies are all staying in one of those boxes overnight. They have been a great success, and it is a joy to have them around!

Our garden is growing beautifully! I have already picked sugar peas three times, and I have gotten quite a few Eight Ball zucchinis!

Our green beans are in blossom, and our potatoes just started to blossom.

Our cabbages seem to put size on every day, and my carrot tops are beautifully frilly!

The onions are big enough to start harvesting some to eat, and there are little green tomatoes hanging from the vine!

My peppers haven’t started to blossom yet, but I was a bit late getting them in the ground this year.

My flowers are starting to bloom beautiful too.

My Delphinium are opening, one of my favorite.

I’m a sucker for the cottage garden look!

On the fauna side of things, I have had lots of broody hens in the past month!

We now have four mother hens with peeps running around, and another that is still sitting, but not on chicken eggs! Our neighbor over the hill is a farmer, and farms the fields right next to ours. He came to our house a couple of Saturdays ago. He was mowing his field when he came across a turkey hen sitting on a nest. The hen took off without being hurt, and he just missed the eggs with the mower! He gathered up the clutch of eggs and came to our house. He knew we had chickens, and wondered if we had any broody hens we could stick the eggs under? It just so happens that we had a Welsummer hen that had just gone broody. It’s funny how things work out sometimes! So that hen is now sitting on ten turkey eggs. We don’t know how long it will take them to hatch, because we don’t know how long the turkey hen was sitting on them before she was disturbed. We also don’t know how they will do if they hatch. I know wild turkeys are very touchy. It is an experiment, and we’ll figure it out as we go! Our goal is to get them big enough to let them loose.

It is fun to watch all these mothers with their babies, and as they get bigger, we will start culling some of the older chickens from the flock and put them in the freezer. The first four babies that Mamma hatched for us back in December are now laying beautiful darker brown eggs.

Another change with our chicken flock is they are now in a very large fenced area. I prefer them roaming free, but we couldn’t let them roam and have a nice garden and flower beds! They thought they had to remove all my flowers and replace them with large dusting holes for themselves! We bought 300 foot of chicken fence and made a large enclosure. We hope to add another 300 feet very soon. That fence also gives us a little more peace of mind as far as predators are concerned.

My husband and I just took a vacation to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in May.

The beach there is so nice. It is never crowded, and is within walking distance from the house we rented!

What a way to relax! We had a great time! As I said at the start … life is good!

In my area, spring has disappeared, and summer’s heat and humidity have taken its place. Being a complete indoors type, I’m not particularly thrilled with the changes. However, there is one outdoors arena in which I’m pleased to report a bit of success. OK, only if you don’t count my lack of weeding skills (or more accurately, weeding motivation).

You may remember a blog post from last November – Garden Headaches – in which I detailed my wonderful sister’s efforts in clearing out my front garden and dividing/transplanting hosta and sedum. (Do I have that right, folks? What variety of sedum do I have?) The before shot is above.

Check out what the spring brought! All of the transplants are flourishing, and a couple of the sedums are now almost as large as the two we divided last fall. Amazing!

I added the rock around the downspout, because the rain kept washing away the mulch, which is the same reason I added the border. And while both have helped, mulch continues to wash away. I think it’s going under the border, which I only placed on top of the ground. It probably needs to be installed properly. One of these days.

I smile every time I drive up to my house. It’s looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. Now if I can just get it weeded!

In the backyard, I actually started my container gardening. Yes, I actually did it. In Neophyte Gardener, I wrote about my intention of starting a container garden. I am proud to report that I am now the owner of three containers holding a Brandywine tomato plant, a red pepper plant, basil and oregano. The tomato plant has buds on it, so I am eagerly awaiting fruit. My mouth’s already watering.

The basil and oregano have yet to be used, and I’m struggling with ways to cook with both herbs. Once the peppers and tomatoes start arriving, though, that probably will no longer be an issue. I love tomatoes with oregano and mozzarella cheese. Yum!

So there you have it, and I promise I’ll keep you updated on my gardening adventures. I feel like a gardener; am I?

The garden project has moved a couple of steps forward. I worked pond muck, composted wood and leaves into the soil and we have built to first box for the raised beds. Our neighbors think we are nuts to assume that we’re going to keep the deer out. But at the same time, we have no shortage of advice on how to do it. And the solutions range from building a fortress to relying on scent alone.

The first person we talked to insisted that we need welded wire fencing to 4 feet, then 3 strands of electrical wire above, to a total height of 8 feet. He also told us to install 5-post corners. Wait a minute! We’re starting this year with about 600 square feet of garden! If we put in 5-post corners, plus a gate, all of the space would be filled with wire and wood, and that’s not what I was planning to eat this summer.

A friend of ours has a garden every year, and he lives pretty close. The difference in our parcels is that he is surrounded by cornfields and we are in a natural area, so deer already have some pretty good stuff to eat to keep them away from his garden. He just uses regular 5-foot metal posts and a 2-wire electrical fence and it works well for him. Actually, he has another line of defense as well. He lets his garden go “au natural”. I remember him trying to find me a zucchini and he couldn’t even find the plant in the midst of all the weeds, so it’s possible that deer get so tangled in the garden underbrush that they just give up trying to find the vegetables.

I was looking over a farm supply catalogue, and they were advertising the bright orange plastic mesh as deer fencing. Seems to me that if you wanted to protect some trees that this might be a deterrent, but it would surprise me if that would keep out any deer that really wanted to get into a garden. The other thing I’ve heard it if you use high test fishing line, it makes an invisible barrier, and since the deer can't see it but can feel it, it spooks them and they stay away.

Talking about invisible barriers, our neighbor just two lots away claims that all you have to do is mix a couple of eggs in water each week and pour it around the perimeter. According to him, this creates a scent barrier that will keep deer away. All I can say, is that I’ve spent a ton on bloodmeal in the past and it never stopped anything from munching on what was supposed to be the fruits of my labor.

Unless I hear differently from someone else, I’m going with the 2-wire electrical. If I have to let the weeds grow and just stay in my hammock all summer, well, it would be a sacrifice but I’m sure I’d be up to the task.

Most people who like to play in the dirt have probably had their gardens planned for a long time now. I suspect it’s actually a constant thing – a continual revising of the garden in one’s head, imagining the colors, the textures, the produce. How it will look and all work together. Even dreaming of the harvest to come, and the preserving of the wonderful treasures coming from your very own garden, I’m sure are part of mental gardening.

Those of us who haven’t gardened much in the past (or none at all, as the case may be), are just now thinking of a semblance of a garden. In my case, it also helps that the six sedum my sister and I transplanted last fall are all, yes, count them, all, showing green. Still no word from the hostas (we split and transplanted eight) on how they survived the transplant and winter. Remember my Garden Headaches post?

So green showing in my front garden, houseplants that are doing well, a series of novels set in a greenhouse (lots of talk of flowers, seeds, propagation, grafting and the like) and a kitchen garden article in our May/June issue of Grit have all combined to start my mind whirling.

I’m going to container garden this year.

Well, that’s the plan anyway. I’d like to start with at least two containers on the back porch (it’s a slab of concrete outside my sliding glass doors, but I call it a patio) with one tomato plant, at least, and the other … Well, I haven’t made up my mind yet.

I miss homegrown tomatoes. A former neighbor planted almost half his backyard in tomato plants, and he was kind enough to keep me supplied with gorgeous fruit all summer long. I’d like that experience again, just with fewer numbers, I hope.

So I’ve decided. It’s time to get over my dislike of playing in the dirt. I can get my hands dirty, I can handle the bugs and the heat. I can do this.

Now all I have to do is decide on the containers!

Any suggestions for this neophyte gardener?

Photos from top: iStockphoto.com/pixonaut; dirkr; kkgas

A string of sunny days the first week in February had me itching to start working in my gardens. But with only two days with temperatures above freezing and everything still covered in snow, there was little gardening work to be done. I sat on the back porch with my chin in my hand, pondering what I could do to relieve my gardening itch. Then it hit me – though it was still winter outside and spring seemed far away, I could have it come early inside the house.

The pussy-willow in the ravine already had nice, big fat buds – perfect for bringing indoors to force. Pussy-willows (or any Salix species) and forsythia are natural choices for forcing; they will bloom indoors so easily it’s nearly foolproof. The only effort involved is cutting branches after they’ve gone through a sufficient period of dormancy – generally anytime after January is acceptable – and putting them in a vase of water. They’ll not only bloom, but often grow roots as well. With a little more effort though, the branches of nearly any dormant deciduous tree or shrub can be forced indoors.

Species such as magnolia, flowering quince, American spice bush, flowering dogwood, redbud, crabapple, vernal witch hazel, and lilac are just a handful of flowering trees and shrubs that make good candidates for early indoor blooming. But don’t discount non-flowering species either. Birch and willow provide catkins, and their slender branches make a graceful arrangement. Shrubs with variegated leaves have interest, as do those with dark leaves such as sand cherry or purple-leafed plum. Even those that just leaf out a bright green will brighten any room during the late days of winter.

I’ve been tempted to force branches from my fothergilla; I like the fluffy white, early flowers that Keith calls “bunny tails.” But the shrub is slow growing, and cutting branches to force would have ruined its structure aesthetically. It’s important when cutting branches for forcing not to go hog wild. Cuttings suitable for forcing should be at least a foot long, and consideration should be taken if removal of such branches would disfigure the tree or shrub’s overall appearance.

When making your selection, choose branches with well-developed plump buds. The plumper the bud, the better chance of success you’ll have in forcing it to bloom. Plants closer to their normal bloom or leafing out period outdoors will be quicker and easier to force indoors. The earliest flowering shrubs, such as forsythia, American spice bush, and quince, will generally only take one to three weeks to bloom. Later blooming species should be forced closer to their natural bloom – if brought indoors too early, the buds may dry out and wither before having a chance to open.

The trick to successful forcing is providing constant, sufficient moisture and humidity. If the buds become dry, you’ll end up with nothing but a vase full of dead branches. Your inside environment should mimic that of early spring outdoors. Keeping your cuttings out of direct sunlight and away from heating vents will minimize the chance that they become desiccated. Temperatures ranging from the low to mid-sixties are best.

There are different methods for forcing branches. The simplest method is to just put them in a vase of water – this is recommended for only the most easily forced species such as forsythia and willows. Other methods are more complex and involve completely submerging the branches in water for 24 hours, mashing the stems with a hammer, then wrapping the length of the branch in plastic wrap for another 24 hours to produce humidity before placing the stems in water. That may seem like a lot of effort to go through to have blooms just a few weeks earlier than nature would normally produce them; it seems so to me anyway.

But there is an easier method that works well on most species. Once you've chosen your branches and placed them in a vase, just make sure to change the water every two or three days, making a fresh cut on the bottom of the stems as you do so. Always use well-maintained pruners or a sharp knife to get a clean cut – those made with dull blades can inhibit the branch’s ability to take up water. Keeping the buds moist with daily misting helps to prevent drying. The forcing process can take from one to six weeks depending on the species and how close it is to its natural bloom period.

The pussy-willows opened in a little under two weeks. I added some yellow-twig dogwood branches, boxwood, and variegated euonymus to the bouquet for color-contrast and interest. It’s not the most flowery of displays; the flowers of viburnum, chokeberry, and lilac branches will come later. But with a fresh layer of new snow outside, it’s nice to see a bit of springtime from my gardens inside.

I noticed this morning that the yellow-twig dogwood branches have started to break bud! It’s a pleasant surprise – though I brought them in at the same time as the pussy-willows, I really didn’t expect it to bloom, thinking it was it too early. The open buds reveal two tiny leaves on either side of a lime-green composite flower. The flowers will change to creamy white about the same time the pussy-willow catkins turn fuzzy yellow with pollen. Maybe in the meantime, I’ll start forcing forsythia to add in the vase too, for a whole new look. Experimenting is half the fun.

I’m not sure whether she’s bragging or complaining, but Sue’s favorite expression has become, “Now even our projects have projects!”. Here we are in the dead of winter and we are in the midst of planning and preparing for our first garden together. Actually, we started planning it when we moved into the new house last summer, because despite the fact that the lot is 2 acres, it’s in the glacial terrain of Michigan, so there probably 20 feet of relief from the pond surface to the ridge along the back of the property. The lower areas are flat, but they are also in muck soil without much structural integrity, and riddled with moles and some pesky muskrats. The upper soils are very sandy without much organic material, and there’s not a flat spot to be found. And we have quite a few trees. 

After a few discussions and sessions of standing outside and staring around, we finally settled on a reasonably flat area northwest of the house. It works because it’s out back where we added a water spigot and it’s close to the house and the compost pile. Other than the slight slope and the sandy soil, there were only three problems with it. 

First problem: a mature tree smack dab in the middle on the south side of the plot. Second problem: the east edge of the garden area butts up against the woodpile which was cut into the hill. The current vertical, wooden retaining wall is falling down and will need to be rebuilt before we can expand the garden that far east. Third problem: Since we connect through forested land with the Waterloo Recreation area, which at 30,000 acres is the largest State recreation area in the Lower Peninsula, we get a lot of deer. Although we don’t see huge herds of them, they are a constant presence. The story goes that when the previous owner used to “feed” them, one winter day he counted 65 out on the frozen pond in the front yard. Since the nearest farm is half a mile down the road, our garden would quickly become the salad bar of choice for venison on the hoof. 

So at that point, the project sprouted four preparatory projects- cut down the tree, fix the retaining wall, build an electric fence and of course plan the garden itself. After I paced off the area, Sue got to work on the plot plan, which will result in some raised beds on the southwest corner of the area, and slowly expanding the garden to fill the whole area. I figure that gives me at least one summer, if not two, to get the retaining wall fixed. 

Then when we got a little break in the weather a week ago, I started on cutting the tree down. Well, I got part of the way done with that, noting that all 3 of my saw chains are dull as butter knives, when the chain started jumping off the saw. I’d put it back on and it would jump off again. As it turns out, the chain tightener and brake assembly was broken, so I had to order a new one. Since I had to wait until it got shipped in, I decided to go ahead and get the chains sharpened. That, of course, was project number 5. 

Finally, I got the chain saw fixed and went to work on it today. All I have to do is haul all the stacked wood down to the woodpile and project number 6 will be done. I plan to chip up the smaller limbs and branches and mix it in with a tiller to start building up the organic content in the soil. 

So project number 7 will be to rent a chipper.

My garden is not big, at least not by most standards. I’ve estimated it to be about 400 square feet this year and will be expanding it to nearly double of that next year. Even at that though, it’s still not a big area that I grow on. I take a lot of care and time to look into and try out many different methods of growing in that space from using cages, to trellising, to companion plantings and all have helped in one way or another.

Still, even with all the trickery and good use of space and planning, there’s really still only one thing that has the most impact on the small scale growers productivity in my opinion: soil. I need to make sure that I not only use my soil with care in not over using it with the same nutrient loving crops over and over again in one place, but also that I give them the right amount of off time to recoup, rest and regenerate before the next season. And one thing comes to mind when I think of regenerating my garden. Can you guess?

Ever walked through what is normally a lush and fertile summer forest in the fall? What do you see? Leaves. Barren trees, and lots and lots of leaves. They cover the ground, insulating it from the extremes of winter weather and snow and provide shelter and food through the winter for the worms. Worms that will, through the winter and spring, gradually bring all of that wonderful organic material back into the ground to compost and rot and become food for the plants to grown there the next year.  That’s the basis of my plan for my autumn garden beds this year, to try and mimic (albeit very loosely) the way that a natural ecosystem would function. Although I took it a little further.

This year I have at my disposal something that I didn’t have last fall … chickens, or more to the point, chicken manure. As I cleaned and tucked the beds in for the winter, I not only added a lot of very carbon rich leaves to them, I added a few healthy scoops of nitrogen rich chicken manure. It takes a few months for fresh manure to age and compost to the point where it’s no longer so HOT that it will burn young plants, and tucking it in during the fall is a perfect time for that. Come early spring I’ll do a pH test of the soil to determine where I stand, and adjust as necessary.

Leaves are also being used as a final layer to a new bedding area that we just added this fall. It’s a lasagna garden – a garden bed built with different layers of organic materials designed to break down over the winter into a rich humus for planting in – and I gave it a final turn to break up the layers a little before the snow flies, and am covering the entire bed with leaves as a final step. The leaves will help insulate the bed from freezing too hard over the winter I hope, giving it a better chance at completely breaking down before I plant in it next year.

I don’t think there’s a better friend to the small scale farmer, or in my case large scale suburban gardener, than good healthy soil that is rich in nutrients and organic material. It nourishes the earth, helps retain moisture in the heat of the summer, and provides the building blocks for strong plants the next season. And of all the ingredients that I can think of to put to the most useful purposes in building that healthy soil, few can compare to leaves.

P~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse. 

Folks at the local garden center in Osage City know that garlic is typically planted in the fall, but they don’t stock garlic-for-growing in autumn because most people in Kansas plant it in the spring. Undeterred by that bit of news, Kate decided it was time to try a few different varieties of garlic next year, and so she spent way too much time on the Nichols Garden Nursery website and ordered too many different garlic varieties to count. The box of garlic has been around for a while … I finally got some of it planted on Thanksgiving Day.

My first task was to till up part of the garden for the garlic. I chose to turn the ground that had been lettuce, spinach and peas earlier this year. The soil was already pretty mellow, but I wanted to turn the chicken-scratched straw into the top few inches. Since I was working a relatively small part of the garden, I used our trusty old BCS tiller. This 8-horsepower Kohler-powered machine is as heavy-duty as they get. It has an all-gear transmission and automotive-type dry clutch. Kate thinks it is hard to start … I will tweak the carburetor some day.

After the tillage, I used a little four-tine hand cultivating tool to create shallow furrows … my lines are only relatively straight. I next placed individual garlic cloves pointy side up in the bottom of the furrows. After I had four rows of garlic cloves placed, I gently pulled and pushed soil into the furrows until the garlic was covered. By then, another daughter and her husband had arrived for the holiday, and it was time to take a tour of the farm and have some fun.

I hope that November 27 is the right time for garlic planting in Kansas. It was about 45 degrees and the soil was still warm. I guess we’ll know come spring whether this effort was worth it.

When I was in college and graduate school in Chicago, I managed to pull off some kind of a vegetable garden in vacant lots here and there. Gardening was good for my soul, and it seriously stretched our meager food budget.

One summer we were blessed with a bumper crop of Roma tomatoes and several dozen scrounged, bail-type glass-lid canning jars. After processing one batch of tomato sauce by hand with a cone-shaped colander, I figured there had to be a better way.

I was a subscriber to Mother Earth News at the time and was aware of many expensive, and therefore unobtainable, machines that would have made making tomato sauce and paste a piece of cake. One of the more affordable pieces of equipment advertised in Mother was the Squeezo Strainer. As luck would have it for us, we were regulars at the once famous Maxwell Street Market on Chicago’s near South Side, and before I spent the money on a new Squeezo, we found a used one at the market. It was all metal including the hopper, as I recall, and it looked like it hadn’t been worked hard at all. Using the Squeezo, we actually had fun processing that bushel of remaining Romas.

Our Squeezo Strainer processed hundreds of pounds … perhaps thousands of pounds … of tomatoes, grapes, apples and other fruit before it was retired many years later. We replaced it with a strainer attachment on our first KitchenAid Mixer … one of the last to wear the Hobart brand. I can tell you that we stripped the main drive gear in that mixer twice … we never stripped anything in the Squeezo. But for the life of me, I can’t remember what we did with it … perhaps it was a casualty of some yard sale or another.

Earlier this year, I learned that the Squeezo Strainer is still being produced … built in the U.S.A, in fact. The good folks at All Seasons Homestead Helpers, Inc. in Vermont have kept the Squeezo alive, and they were gracious enough to send me a new one. What I discovered about the Squeezo this year is that it is still every bit as hard core as that old model was. And even though our tomato harvest this year was pretty slim, running some of the fruit through the strainer was a delightful blast from the past.

If you are looking for a high-quality juicer/strainer that has relatively few moving parts, requires no electricity to operate, and will serve your children, and perhaps even your children’s children well, then I suggest you make the $250 investment in the deluxe model. It comes with three strainer screens (different perforation sizes), a 2-plus quart hopper, wooden plunger, brush and recipe/instructions booklet.

 If you are looking for other useful low-impact stuff to help around the homestead, be sure to spend some time exploring the All Seasons Homestead Helpers website.

As far as I’m concerned, gardening is hard work!

My garden area is between the house and the sidewalk to the front door, and it’s always been a sore spot. When I first moved in, it looked like a jungle. I finally cleared it out, and then the grass took over.

There’s a beautiful Japanese maple that keeps getting better every year near the front window. A huge hosta huddled next to the house, and it just kept getting larger. Two sedems also managed to survive the jungle, and they too were huge, leggy and unmanageable. All three plants were constantly being hit by the lawn mower, as we tried to keep the grass under control.

So after more years than I care to count, I decided something needed to be done. My sister volunteered to help (I’m sure she regretted that offer at some point during our adventure), and we set a date.

That Saturday morning, I headed to the garden supply store and bought mulch. Soon the bags were stacked in the garage, and I was trimming back the sedems and the hosta.

When Mary arrived with her two youngsters and a set of garden tools, we got down to business. Within an hour, the three plants were dug out, setting on another section of lawn, and a large section of sod was gone.

There were, of course, problems from the get go. Neither of us thought about how wet it had been recently, so we had mounds of mud to contend with, and the soil was much more clay than dirt. Both factors made digging difficult. Mary took it as a personal challenge and declared she was going to kick that grass to the curb before she was finished.

And she did.

About four hours later, Mary was dividing the hosta into eight pieces, and the two sedems into three each. I tried to envision the plants in full summer green, and pointed to spots I thought would work. (The placement is marked on the photograph at the end of this post.) We dropped in the divided plants, pushed the muddy clay around the roots, with our hopes high that they would all survive.

Once the 14 transplants were in the ground, the mulching began. I tried to be dainty (hah!) about it, raking carefully. Mary soon convinced me the only way to garden and mulch was down on my knees, close to the ground, pushing those cedar chips around. My 10 bags of mulch didn’t last long, but we put it down around the plants. My Sunday task was to find more mulch, and finish around the maple. (I added another six bags of mulch!)

After a great deal of effort, we had eight bags of sod at the curb for the city to pick up Monday morning. A neighbor gave me recyclable bags so it all went to the city compost pile. The bags were so heavy, we placed each on an empty plastic mulch bag and dragged it to the curb, a task that took both of us to accomplish. Whew!

Then it was cleanup time. What a mess! It may take me a while to get that sidewalk clean, but it was definitely worth it.

My niece Maura wanted to help with it all, and she did – bringing us water and watching her little brother. My nephew Thomas was fascinated by the earthworms, and more than a few glasses of water had to be thrown out after the worms were given baths. It was fun to spend time with Mary, Maura and Thomas. I’m not physically able to do as much in the garden as others, so Mary did the lion’s share of the work, for which I am eternally grateful.

Do you have any suggestions for my hosta/sedem garden? Any tips for a non-gardener? How do I keep it user friendly?

On this long Saturday, I learned a few things. One, my sister Mary is amazing!

Two, I learned that I am definitely not a gardener. Mary and her husband Mike, our sister Tricia and her husband Mike (who has a degree in horticulture, and they have always had great outside gardens and lots of indoor plants) are the gardeners in the family. I’ll stick to my few house plants, thank you very much!

Slowing down in a fast paced world is not easy for those of us who have been programmed all their lives to achieve and become successful.  You become wrapped so tight, you forget how to loosen up and enjoy.  Nature’s beauty goes unnoticed and you can easily become a robot in a make believe world.

But then … you reach milestones in your life and they scream for your attention.  Ours came when we prepared to send our first child to college and we realized that the status of becoming empty nesters was only a few years down the road.  Our second child leaves for college next year; we have taken notice.

As we prepare our children for independence, we are also preparing ourselves for the same.  How ironic that as the next generation heads into the high-pressure world, we are preparing to leave it all behind.

Our children face many challenges as they enter this new phase of their lives; so do we.  The children will have many trained teachers to show them the path. We will have one – a piece of land, in the country.

We purchased our country home last year and we are slowly learning to adjust.  Although Stan has already proven that the pond is full of healthy fish! The pond has also taught us a tough lesson: ponds don’t maintain themselves! This fact was recently proven over the course of a weekend when we pulled 3,000 lbs. of algae and weeds from the pond – Stan in the canoe with me on land, rake in hand.  We prevented our pond from becoming a swamp, and have since purchased an aerator to oxygenate and circulate the water (not yet installed).  Our country property consists of 18 acres, 8 of which a local farmer plants for us – this year soybeans. 

As an Illinois native (47 years) I feel most comfortable here; however, traveling back and forth between our current home in St. Charles and our place in the country (a 5 hour trip one way) gives us plenty of time to reflect on the diverse beauty along the way.  Even though the two locations are in the same state, the differences (soil, weather, towns, people and lifestyle) are profound. Click here to see my farm-diversity slideshow.

I am focusing my passion for gardening on our new property.  As I learn, I will share my experiences and I hope others will join me with their knowledge and own experiences!