Garden Thread

It's never too early to start a new year's garden thread!  Or, if you're in the southern hemisphere, I guess too late?  How are all your gardens growing, or planning to be growing?

We've ordered all our seeds for Garden 2016 and they're starting to trickle in.  We'll be planting some old friends and some new faces, but the one I'm most excited about right now is a Mikado tomato -- check out the picture from the seed catalog.  Good grief, but I want it to be summer right now so I can taste that tomato!  Of course, it always turns out that the tomato variety I get most excited about in the winter ends up being the one that does the poorest, so maybe we should all have a moment of silence now to mourn what could have been for the Mikado tomato.  

The plan for this year is to do shelling peas, garlic, yellow and red onions, eight types of tomatoes, eight types of peppers (more sweet than hot; we learned the hard way last year that you can have far too many hot peppers), tomatillo, and regular pickling cucumbers and gherkins for sweet pickles.  Last year we tried gherkins and regular picklers in the same bed, but didn't get enough yield of the gherkins to try pickling them.  So this year we'll dedicate more space and put in more vines of the gherkins.  I'm still not 100% sure where we'll dedicate that space, but we'll find a way.

While seed shopping I also impulse-bought an heirloom crabapple tree that won't be shipped until spring of 2017, so I have plenty of time for one of the existing baby fruit trees to fail and leave an empty spot in the orchard.  If one doesn't fail, we, uh, totally have room for another tree... somewhere.  ::shifty eyes::

With our deceptively warm fall and December (I found a fully-headed cauliflower in the garden when we were taking down the outdoor Christmas lights), I'd gotten ideas about starting onions now and being able to transplant them outside in, like, four or five weeks.  Alas, here's the garden yesterday:


Back to dreaming.

Well, I did cut some green onions from the side of the house a week ago before they got covered with snow. Not much else is being planned this early; I'm about to reserve our same garden plots from the county ($30 each for two 25'x30' plots, can't beat it).

It's a tough call, choosing between a tree and sunlight.  A container lemon tree, though, is a nice compromise, especially if you're like me and enjoy a good Regency romance/mystery novel, so the potted lemon tree is evocative of a conservatory where secret assignations and murders happen.  (Yes, I've always had far loftier notions about our pathetic potted lemons than they could ever support.   )  Does your tree yield much?  We keep killing lemon trees, but occasionally get an encouraging (and heavenly fragrant) flowering before they kick off.  

Okay, are you sure that's it now?  

I'm seethingly envious of your grape arbor; we keep planting grapes and they keep not doing anything.  Like, I don't think the deer even give them a chance to die.  They're there for a day or two, then utterly eradicated.  

And a large-scale corn operation sounds so fantastic!  That's something we contemplated doing with the abandoned property next door, but I suspect someone would notice and report us to the police...  Corn is such an amazing thing to eat immediately fresh off the stalk, but takes up so much space.  Horning in on your brother's neighboring vacant area is a genius move.

"Corn...it's a volume game" *chomps pipe*

And yeah, my grape vine is just wildly growing all over the three-sided wire-fence structure that was my old compost heap. I'd imagine 'more or less growing on the compost pile' helped it along because I gave it *zero* care and we get enough grapes to make a batch of jelly each year. With my luck, the new arbor will probably kill it...

I have an heirloom crabapple tree. It's so old, when it was planted, it was just a crabapple tree. It dropped squishy rotten fruit all over our vehicles, but then a flock of robins came and ate all the fermented ones and got drunk, so it was kinda worth it.

I have no idea what I'm going to do this year. Despite having an acre, the only sunny spot big enough to put a garden is over the septic field (of course, right?). I'm going to have to put some smallish raised beds and then get rid of some unhealthy trees for a future garden plot. I fear it would all be for naught anyway, since there are enough deer around here that I could sit on my deck during bow season and bag my limit in an hour. I may have to limit myself to deer-resistant flowering plants.

There is a 8' x 16'-ish greenhouse foundation and attendant piping for hot-water radiant heat in the yard. Attending to that will probably be a priority, since there really isn't enough room inside the house for my pineapple plants and 15 citrus trees.

I caught a buck and doe in my backyard last night, where I usually only see poop and prints.  I chucked some snow at them, but they'll be back.  No house veggies for me.

The fearless way semi-urban deer lurk around would be terrifying if they were carnivorous.

Rain barrels are the best! Not only do you not have to pay for water in the garden, but rain water is better for the plants. I also use it to wash the car and for tasks like rinsing out paintbrushes. Our Alderman just gave out free ones (not that it will make me vote for her), so if anybody within driving distance of Chicago wants my spare, they are welcome to it :-)

I should note that stately Dick n Hisses Manor did give up on rain barrels a few years ago, because we had too much garden to water by hand.  And none of our barrels had sturdy foundations, so as the years passed they all sank into the dirt at haphazard angles and started to topple over.  It wasn't the barrels' fault -- it was all user error, so I don't blame them.    But during the rain barrel era, I really loved them!

Yeah, you definitely have to find a balance - if you disconnect all your downspouts, you'll have too much water to use. I have five spouts total: two go into the city sewer, one drains out to a flowerbed and down a sloped sidewalk, and two are connected to rain barrels (one in front, one in back). The front rain barrel has a small hose attached to ensure that the overflow waters a hydrangea and then runs off downhill (rather than sinking the barrel's foundation, which is some leftover concrete patio tile stacked up). I'm trying to be more diligent about connecting the soaker hose during dry spells to empty the barrels as much as possible before storms. I also bottle up water whenever I have an empty receptacle to reuse for various winter household applications: watering indoor plants, setting out on trays as a lo-fi humidifier, keeping a broken toilet running, melting patches of ice when I don't want to waste salt, etc. 

I haven't gotten a pineapple yet.  Most of what I have read says it's at least 2-3 years before they flower, and mine are just a little over 2 years old.  They're super easy to propagate from a fresh, whole pineapple, so I'd highly recommend giving it a shot.  They're pretty neat plants, and super easy to care for (pest-free too!).

I gotta start cruising around more on trash day, looking for people putting in replacement windows.  I used to see stacks of old windows on the curb all the time when I didn't have a greenhouse to build, but now that I do....

Tomorrow is Imbolc!  The days theoretically officially get longer than the nights!  We'll be celebrating by starting onion seeds.  Have I shared here the story of our famous first attempt at Imbolc lettuce?  We'd first read about Imbolc on the Hudson Valley Seed Library's blog, where they said something about this date being noted by the Celts as the point when a plant could start growing outside in a sheltered spot.  So we were all, "We know!  We'll put a grow frame out in the garden, so that will be sheltered and warm in the sun!  And we'll set out some trays of lettuce seeds, and then in a few weeks we'll have fresh, delicious, Imbolc lettuce to eat!"  This is what happened:

That was Hugs going out mid-snow storm to clear off the top of the grow frame.  It... didn't help.  (I love this picture.  I was standing in our front door with the camera, and she trudged out there, wrestled open the gate, then was all hunched over doing something I couldn't see clearly.  "What are you doing?" I shouted.  She stood up, put up her mittens like this, and beamed, "I'm gardening!")

Two years later, though, we did our Imbolc lettuces under the grow lights, and this is how they looked a month later:


So... yeah.  Imbolc.  You win some, you lose some.