Winter salad

I got out to the farmer’s market Saturday, for the first time since it turned cold. “No one’s going to be there!” Eric exclaimed. “Who’s going to go when it’s 25 degrees out?” I explained that the winter market is held in the covered area of the market where the walls can be put down. Apparently he doesn’t remember me going there last winter.

Plenty of people were there, actually–vendors as well as shoppers. I stopped to talk with a couple of friends for a few minutes in front of the honey lady. We probably stood there too long, but I got a big jar of honey and some whipped honey-with-blackberries, so I hope that made up for it. I also got some bay leaves, since my bay tree died a while ago, some sweet potatoes, apples, and kohlrabi. I’ve never tasted kohlrabi, much less prepared it myself, so this should be interesting. I’m not sure what to do with it. But I’m up for trying, and we need to start cooking more; we’ve been doing too many dinners that are a pot of pasta and nothing else, or Jimmy John’s, or pizza. (Homemade pizza, but still.)

It’s also time to think about winter-sowing some lettuce. The winter-sown lettuce I did the year before last was bigger and better than any I planted in the ground directly, and with the beds a mess I can’t do that right away anyway. Now that Chloe is able to be by herself for reasonable stretches (I made two kinds of bread this weekend, for example) I should be able to spare a few minutes to cut open a cider container and dunk in some dirt and seeds. Eventually I want to do gardening with her, but right now the dirt and seeds would go right in her mouth and that’s a situation best avoided, so she can play in her jumper while I start some salad.

A new gardening year

I’ve been in a bit of hibernation, I think, recovering from having a baby and then having postpartum depression and then having to figure out what life with a baby is supposed to be like. (Hint: frequent bouts of uncontrollable crying and wanting to give your baby away is not it.) (Further hint: Zoloft is awesome. So is a decent bedtime for the baby.) And of course the dying of the year didn’t help matters. But even though it’s still winter, I think I’m ready to rouse.

The current status of my garden: lousy. I got my pile of mulch (mostly grass clippings and leaves) and my newspapers, but I only managed to spread them over one corner of the vegetable garden–the corner that was recently dug up by the city to install new sewer lines and is therefore lousy as far as soil integrity. I cut down the wormwood and feverfew and some raspberries and cleared out the herb garden, but didn’t spread any mulch there either. The weed situation in the spring will be dire.

Inside, my papyrus is dying. I could say it’s a symbol that the previous incarnation of our marriage (this was a decoration at our wedding) is dead because the baby caused a new one to be born with her own birth, but actually it’s scale. I hate scale. It came into my house with what was the Meyer lemon, now whatever-kind-of-citrus-they-used-as-rootstock. It’s still out on my back porch, frozen to death. I let it die partly out of laziness and partly out of pique.

The seed catalogs have arrived, which is partly responsible for rousing me from my nature-starved slumber. I’m not planning on buying anything, because I have lots of seeds and we’re hoping to move out of the house before the main harvest hits, but I’m enjoying looking and thinking about I would buy, if. And there’s plenty of room for dreaming and planning and experimenting in my seed box already. So, despite my dark thoughts on the subject not long ago, I’m going to–slowly, because a baby really does cut into your free time–start preparing for a new gardening year.

Status update

So I finally pulled out the very last possible vegetable out of the garden–the cauliflower, which has quietly grown all year and was too yucky-looking to keep–and removed the stakes and trellises and yanked the big plants and prepared to spread newspaper and mulch. Of course I don’t have the newspaper. Or the mulch. The newspaper was supposed to come from the mothers, and they promised me lots and lots, but they told Eric last week that they only have half a bag. Maybe because I kept forgetting to bring it home with me. And the mulch was supposed to be partly the lawn clippings (and between the falling leaves and Eric not having mown for two months, it was going to be a lot) but he ran out of daylight and stamina and switched to the “mulch” function instead, which means all my lovely mulch is spread across the yard.

So yeah. I’m considering going around on recycling day and collecting people’s newspapers, but you know I really won’t. Same with collecting leaves (though we have leaf pickup by the city here, and I stayed home one morning with a fever and left for work around eleven, and had to drive around an eight-foot-tall pile of leaves at the end of the road) to use in place of mulch. I’m so…so…indifferent. I even got the first seed catalogs a couple of days ago and was only vaguely interested. Partly it’s the baby and related changes in my day, partly it’s the fact that we’re planning to move next year, but still: ugh!

The root of the problem

Chloe and I went out today to pick the last tomatoes and dig up roots. I intended to harvest the elecampane roots (for dyeing) but gave up after I leaned against the shovel to try to get leverage to get one out of the ground and took a tumble amidst a pile of bricks. The bruises already hurt, which is a bad sign.

So I stuck to the carrots and beets. Somehow the white/yellow/red/purple carrot mix I planted ended up almost entirely white, which means my carrots look like radishes or parsnips. I planned to get the parsnips, too, but my ankles and back were hurting (I was wearing Chloe in the sling and I’m not used to crouching in it) so I gave up and went inside.

But not before getting a handful more of dried beans from the dried-bean edifice. I left the plants up when I picked them over and now a bunch of them have new, green pods hanging there. They’re trying to tempt me to leave them up! Evil, evil plants.

Baby steps

The little one is sleeping. We went into the garden together today, she and I, with the help of a sling that I’m still getting the hang of. (We decided to try a sling because our friends recommended one, but couldn’t find a satisfactory way to put the baby in it. Now that she can mostly support her own head, it’s becoming much easier.) I picked coriander and a few surprise heads of nigella sativa–I thought I’d seen those flowers earlier in the year, but they disappeared under the cover of the cilantro and sage and weeds in that area–while she looked around at the giant wormwood and the sprawling volunteer tomato plant that my dad unfortunately didn’t pull while he was here.

I’ve requested newspaper and shall be receiving it shortly. The next couple of weeks will be devoted to closing down the garden, which mainly means harvesting what I can of what’s there. That means picking a last round or two of green beans, digging the carrots and parsnips and potatoes (if there are any), cutting herbs for drying and freezing, gathering basil for the summer’s single batch of pesto, making tabbouleh with the parsley. Then pulling out the stakes and trellises, and deciding whether to move the unruly raspberry whose berries don’t seem as good as the ones on the plants in the actual raspberry patch, and then a lot of digging and stomping and spreading and watering and spreading again. The little one and I will also be taking an exploratory trip to Home Depot sometime soon, to price mulch. And then the little one will be spending a weekend at grandma’s while I put this garden into its winter crib.

Bring on the mozzarella

I picked green beans today. My recommendation for anyone who wants to plant a garden while having a baby is don’t, but as a second option, plant beans. The dry beans did well and these green beans (Kentucky Wonders) are going strong despite zero maintenance on my part–I’ve already got some in the freezer. Admittedly some were a bit stringy because they’d grown so much, but you can’t have everything.

Along with plenty of beans and a couple of carrots, I pulled a bunch of weeds out of the bean patch. If weed-grass seeds were edible (are they?) I’d be feeling guilty about all the grain I’ve wasted this year. In places it seriously looks like I seeded for a new lawn. There are also squashed tomatoes from the volunteers that grew everywhere, and ruined peppers and rotted bean pods. And oh my gods all the weeds.

What this all adds up to is that I’m going to try lasagna gardening this fall. There’s no way to clean up the weed seeds and there’s no way I’ll weed them all out next year and it’s too late to spread black plastic and bake them; the only way out is to bury them. So I’m going to start begging newspaper from the mothers and start thinking about where to buy mulch–I know the city offers it but there’s a five-cubic-yard minimum and a $25 delivery fee and I don’t know how much that would work out to spread over both gardens. Fall leaves will be coming soon, and Eric desperately needs to mow the lawn, so if I keep this in mind I should be able to amend the soil a little, since I can’t currently reach the actual humus at the bottom of my compost pile and I don’t trust it anyway, after this spring’s bumper crop of weeds.

The beans are still producing, and there are still carrots and beets and parsnips in the ground, and some kale and some herbs and one cauliflower plant that sailed right through spring and summer and is only now perking up. But it’s time for things to wind down anyway, and most of the rest of the garden can be tramped down and buried. I’m not sure whether I should start doing so in patches now, or wait and do everything at once–advice would be appreciated. But either way, I’m going to try to bake myself a brand new garden for next year.

Spreading the seed

“You save your own seed?” said my cousin Bev, who’s recently discovered the joys of home vegetable gardening and has informed her husband that they’re eventually going to be keeping chickens. “Will you save something right now and show me how?”

I looked, I’m sure, dubious. Bev and her family came to stay with us for a week, and while I knew she wouldn’t blame me for having a jungle instead of a garden, since she’s had a six-week-old herself, I wasn’t sure there was anything out there I could really show her without scaring her off of gardening for life. However, the gardening bug has bit her hard, and I did have a few things out there. “Do you like parsnips?” I said, deciding.

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll go collect some parsnip seeds for you.”

We walked out to the backyard. “Tell me about all the food plants you have,” Bev said, so we talked about my bank of raspberries, about the garlic patch and the carrots and the tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers and dill. I showed her the parsnip plants (all quite brown now, and full of seeds though I’ve been snipping them off for a few different people now) and described how to save the seed–plant them one year, let them winter over and grow, cut the seeds when dry. I told her about online seed trading and winnowing. We looked at my poor tomato plants with tomatoes rotting on the vine, at the green beans that sorely need picking. “Weeds or no, your garden is so productive compared to mine!” she said.

Considering this has been a lousy year for produce, I was pleased, and a bit startled. I’ll be sharing my seeds with her this winter (especially since I hope not to be around to harvest next year’s garden and so won’t be devoting a huge amount of energy to it), and I’m looking forward to hearing more about her plans to reclaim her husband’s rose bed for vegetables next year. Maybe by the time I move out to the West Coast, where they live, she’ll be able to share seeds with me.

Learning from history

It’s storming outside, has been for a while. It’s ridiculously late and I’m almost contemplating waiting for the next feeding rather than go to bed (though not really), but what I’m really thinking about is: I wish I’d picked more of the dry beans when I was out in the garden over the weekend. I got some, but there were lots more, and I’m afraid the rain is going to spoil them the way my Hutterites were spoiled their first year. Apparently the baby fog is starting to lift a little.

August’s rainbow

Two white eggplant. One green bell pepper, three red Giant Marconi (I think) peppers. Lots of tomatoes, some deep red, some the ones that Dad didn’t pick because he thought they weren’t ripe yet: Persimmon and Tiger-Like and a black one and one with yellow shoulders  (I do have them written down, somewhere). Dried Mitla Black bean husks hiding small, svelte beans. Purple Trionfo Violetto beans, swollen with ripe seeds because I didn’t ask anyone to pick them. I’m leaving them to become seed because I have Kentucky Wonders growing elsewhere, on a later schedule. Even a neglected garden is a rainbow in August.

The littlest gardener

Meet Chloe, who will someday help me in the garden, but is currently taking nearly all my attention and energy (such as they were) away from it. She was born on July 23, 8 lb., 3. oz,. 21″ (supposedly–at her first pediatrician checkup they measured her at 19.75″). She developed some pretty severe jaundice so we spend the weekend in the NICU with her under phototherapy lights, but she’s pinker and better now, though not completely rid of it–that wouldn’t normally have happened for another few weeks anyway, so it’s not a real issue. I think I have a garden outside somewhere. My parents are in town and are picking cucumbers and squash for me, and have offered to weed if I’ll show them what plants are to be saved. I’m currently okay with letting everything run wild, or alternately harvesting what we can and destroying the rest. (Dad already dug up the garlic for me, and since we’re too occupied to make pickles we have a nice braid of it in the pantry.) Whatever. For the moment, I have an entirely different little seedling to tend.