Rainy Sunday

It’s been quiet around here, although spring is definitely on the way. We had some gorgeous weather for most of last week. The temps reached nearly 60 degrees last weekend and through Wednesday. As I write this on Sunday afternoon, we are in the midst of a nor’easter-the wind howled all of last night and the rain is still coming down-it’s raw. But there is a feel of spring to the air. A pair of red tailed hawks has taken up residence in our backyard and there is a pair of ducks in the pond across the street. The hawks have been pretty noisy and on Friday morning, I was walking around the garden when I heard the cry and saw what was probably the male hawk fly overhead presumably back to the nest. He was absolutely beautiful and silent-what a wonderful sight! The turkeys continue to make their way through our yard each morning and evening. At last count there were about 25-30. They are beginning their mating season so the males can be aggressive. I had a scary experience with a group of aggressive toms a few years ago and am a little leery of being near them in the spring. This involves sticking my head out the door, peeking around and making a run to my car each morning and reversing the process in the afternoon! We love the turkeys-just not in the spring. A few years ago on an early June morning, right at dawn, we heard a soft clucking and looked outside and saw a hen leading her babies across the yard. They were tiny balls of fluff on two legs-adorable, we affectionately call them cutlets! We saw another mom and her babies the year after, but none last year. We will be watching and listening as summer approaches, it is quite the sight and we look forward to it each spring. .
I am in a lull with garden activities. The end of March through the middle/end of June is one of our busiest times of the year. We have a lot of clearing and yard pick up and then burning-which is one of my least favorite activities but it has to be done. At the beginning of April or at about that time, the peas will get planted and then spinach and lettuce a little later and then onion sets and seed potatoes. I planted potatoes in big buckets last summer and I actually ended up with a fair amount. I will pick up a couple more buckets and do the same again this year. I love new potatoes. Half of the fun is digging through the dirt and discovering these little nuggets and then steaming them up for dinner with butter and chives! . I am also going to try growing sweet potatoes. I will need to place black plastic on the soil to warm it before planting the slips. The rest of the warm weather vegetables-tomatoes, peppers, egg plant, tomatillos, beans and summer and winter squashes will go in around Memorial Day.
I have 85 seedlings under fluorescent lights in our dining room. They seem to be flourishing-a bit leggy but that’s ok for now. I will give them a little more time and then transplant into much bigger containers. I didn’t have a great germination rate this year-not sure why as I planted seeds twice and only had a few more germinate. Oh well, I am happy with what I have and so far they are doing beautifully! . I really need to be thinking about a green house which would give me a place to start all of the seedlings and would be out of the house. I could heat by propane and run a heavy duty extension cord from the garden to the green house to provide electricity for heating mats. The CBEN* wants simple and of course I want the real thing! This week there is a show on PBS about building green houses and we will watch this to get some ideas. Poor CBEN, he never knew what he was signing on for when we met. Last weekend, we went to a small spring flower show at the South Shore Natural Science Center in Norwell. The show it’s self was ok. I have been interested in bee keeping for a long time and went to a beekeeping workshop which was informative. I am hoping to take the beekeeping course in Hanson next January and then maybe I will try a couple hives next spring. I am pretty comfortable with bees and have good common sense but we will see.
Well, I guess that’s it for now, not much else to say right now. . I thought I heard a robin singing about an hour ago, so I guess spring is almost here!
MG

* Chief Beneficial Nematode

Trasplanting and Other Ramblings....

Our Kitchen finally resembles a kitchen once again, although the dining room now resembles a green house with a big rack against the sliding door and fluorescent lights hanging from the top of the rack. I transplanted off and on last week. Gardening is such a leap of faith, some of the seedlings I started two weeks ago germinated quickly and became leggy, so last Tuesday night I began transplanting them into larger peat pots and again on Friday night. Many of the seeds simply did not germinate at all, so I am not sure what happened. But I had an extra packet of Roma VF tomato seeds as well as some extra pepper and egg plant seeds so I started more seedling-try try again! So at this point I have transplanted 60 very new and fragile tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, and a couple egg plants. Technically they are not suppose to be transplanted until they acquire a second set of leaves, so I had to gamble between letting them grow like Jack and the Beanstalk or transplanting them deeply. I decided to transplant. The Tuesday night transplants are a bit leggy but seem to be doing well-I will transplant again when they have developed a few sets of leaves. The most recently transplanted seedlings are buried deeply, so they should have some time to go before they have to be uprooted once again. I think that I keep the people who make peat pellets and pots in business as well as potting soil. During the late winter, spring and early summer I must buy at least a couple hundred pounds of this stuff. I would really like to make my own potting soil this is done by mixing compost and garden soil and then baking it for some time. I have not tried this as it is suppose to STINK and there are limits to what I will do and to how much the CBEN* will tolerate so no organic potting soil for our seedlings. But they are resting comfortably in their new quarters and appear to be growing quite well.

*CBEN-Chief Beneficial Nematode-the other partner in this grand gardening activity (My husband) He chose the name-not me. . If you are so inclined, you can wikipedia Beneficial Nematode. He tends to do much of the heavy work and has been known to grow beautiful peas, lettuce, spinach, cilantro, and basil. He is a very precise and careful gardener. His seeds are always planted very straight and along a string-unlike mine. In past years, he has been spotted at midnight, chasing bunnies out of the garden with a baseball bat! They threw the bat back to him! 

As part of my job, I spend my time driving in the Dedham area and on the Endicott Estate are community gardens and a lovely old greenhouse. They sell plants in the spring and mums in the fall. Anyway, I stopped by last spring to pick up a couple plants and watched for a few minutes as they were as they were transplanting seedlings. They have this thingamajig where the potting soil comes down a chute and onto a large table so it can be scooped out from the table or chute-I thought it was pretty cool and mentioned it to the CBEN. We started talking about all of the local greenhouses that use to be within a couple miles of our house-Russo’s-Randolph-where the mega cinemaplex now stands, Meglarini’s-Holbrook and another huge greenhouse that is being disassembled in Holbrook. It is kind of sad, and I have to wonder if people are aware of what we have lost- not only the greenhouses and plants but mostly the knowledge that went along with them. . I have been going up to CN Smith’s in East Bridgewater for years and I vividly remember the second year when I had just put my plants in and within a couple days they were gone- I mean completely gone. I went up to Smiths to get more plants and was talking to one of the owners and I remember him explaining the differences between how mice/voles and rabbits destroy plants-there were other occasions when I had questions and he was always willing to share his knowledge and dispense advice. But as I write this, I realize that those people and places still exist-just not in great numbers. and they tend to be out a little further south- towards Bridgewater, Hanson, and Halifax. So it takes a bit more effort, but definitely worth the trip down Routes 18, 104, or 106. A couple of years ago, I was looking for local peaches to can and happened to find an orchard in Bridgewater. I had to make a couple phone calls and trips to pick them when they were exactly ripe-I quickly found out that a day or two can make a HUGE difference! But I was able to pick enough to can a few jars so it was worth the effort but more importantly I got to know the couple who lived in the house with the peach, apple, and blueberry orchards and bee hives. He was a former plumber who started the farm after retiring. On one trip, I mentioned that I was having difficulty getting the blueberries on my property to produce. He dragged out several notebooks on growing blueberries and as I sat in his driveway and read everything there was to know about growing blueberries and listened as he made suggestions. I dropped by the following summer but his son told me know that he had passed away that spring. I have met so many people who are willing to share their experiences and at times their plants. I have to wonder what these connections are all about- it’s much more than just gardening/farming and growing and then selling plants and food. It’s about loving the feel of dirt squeezed in one’s hands, and watching tomatoes as they begin to blossom and then develop into tiny green tomatoes and then burying one’s nose in a tomato plant and smelling the deep musky aroma. It’s also about watching a bumble bee fly from flower to flower and listening to crickets on a warm summer night, and watching a garden snake as it slithers away. It’s about washing sweat and dirt and off of our faces, hands, and feet at the end of a day spent working in the garden. Those connections are deep, very deep and I think that they bind us together as human beings, plants, insects, and animals and yes, even bunnies and deer!
Happy Gardening! MG

Beginning a Blog and Starting a Garden

February 22, 2010


Why start a blog? But I didn’t really think about it until last Monday afternoon when I was starting a new garden journal for 2010. I had just finished planting 108 individual containers of tomatoes, tomatillios, peppers, and egg plants. (To be more specific I planted four different varieties of tomatoes Roma VF which I will use to make sauce for next year. Brandywine-a large heirloom eating tomato, Siberian-an earlier mid sized eating tomato and Isis Cherry-a cherry tomato. I also planted three different varieties of peppers-.California wonder, a carnival mix, and an Italian sweet pepper called the Godfather! I also started several flats of egg plant seeds-in hopes that after two years of wet and soggy weather, we will have a warm, dry summer with just the right amount of rain. Anyway, every year, I start seeds around Presidents day, stick them on heat mats until they germinate and then transplant them at least three times into increasingly larger containers and place under fluorescent lights before they go into the garden on Memorial Day. It is a long, loving, and messy process that helps us survive the rest of winter and turns our dining room and kitchen into a temporary greenhouse. Back to the blog…the idea came to me as I was writing. Every year, I buy a cheap notebook from the local dollar store and write down plans for the year’s garden. I write one page, and then drag the book out to the garden in April or May and make sketches of our raised beds and plan for what will go into each bed. I do this in some way every year but that’s as far as the journal gets. I have tried keeping a journal on the computer-have two entries from 2006 “Weather wet and cold”. “Asparagus roots and other seeds arrived today.” So keeping an online journal in the form of a blog seems like a great idea. I love to garden more than anything and I love to share my knowledge and experience about gardening. Ask anyone who lives and gardens/farms in Southeastern Massachusetts and they will tell you about the climate and how easily we grow a lovely crop of rocks of all shapes and sizes. They magically appear and reappear each year -even in the course of a week or two. They have formed many a stone wall-more about that later. Those of us who are blessed to live in this area-(yes it can be lovely- wonderful sea breezes, tremendous storms, and gorgeous foliage) often stand in the middle of our gardens shaking our fist at the cold and rainy June skies which will surely cause our newly forming tomatoes to develop blossom rot or a fungus or conversely complaining about the heat and humidity! But no matter the weather, we love our gardens and farms. My plan for this blog is to keep it going until the middle or end of October-give or take a month or so. This is when my gardening season really ends-until the week after Christmas and the beginning of January when seed catalogues begin to arrive in the mail and then the entire process begins once again! Here’s to dreaming of warm and sunny June days and to red, ripe tomatoes and peppers in July and August! Happy dreaming- MG