May Flowers & Other Nice Things Around the Yard

Red Hawthorn –Crateagus iracunda

So I’ve become interested in learning the names of plants growing wild around me. I “blame” (in the best, most thankful way) this on a local herbalist/organic farmer, Cynthia, at Piper’s Knoll Farm just over the town line in neighboring Newfield, Maine. Cynthia has begun offering monthly foraging and identification walks, and after participating in the first one a week ago, I’ve been compulsively LOOKING.

A simple walk up the road now becomes a wild-things expedition. This week I was drawn to the white flowers on this shrub, and, looking more closely, I was captivated by the dark pink anthers clustered in five pairs of stamen on this red hawthorn. NOT that I knew it was a red hawthorn. I had to go home and look it up. Which is fabulous fun, kinda like a treasure hunt, so thank you, Cynthia!

I don’t even have to walk up the road to explore the wild things and not so wild things around me. So what else is growing around my yard right now?

Two days from Memorial Day, the garden boxes begged me to plant something even though it is risky here in Maine to jump the gun. At the Newfield Farmer’s Market this morning, I couldn’t resist purchasing the first few plants–a lavender perennial to go next to the French tarragon, three varieties of tomatoes (going into the box over the septic tank in hopes the heat will appeal to them), a green bell pepper, and a sage. Except for the lavender, they all went into that same box so I could cover them with a sheet last night. I may be impatient, but I’m not completely out of my mind.

Neighbor Debbie was kind enough to give me a lemon balm from her garden, so I stuck that in the garden box as well, right next to the chocolate mint. That mint will be watched, of course, as we all know how they like to spread and spread.

Now for Mother Nature’s garden beds. These plants live near or beneath the beech trees in front of my house. It’s a forest in miniature!

Wild Strawberries, Fragaria virginiana

Partridge Berry (Squaw Vine) Mitchella repens

Lady’s Slipper, Cypripedium acaule

Fringed Polygala, Polygala paucifolia

Starflower, Trientalis borealis

Canada Mayflower,Maianthemum canadense

False Solomon’s Seal, Maianthemum racemosum

It is so much fun to walk around the property now. I am determined to get myself a plant identification guidebook, though the internet is a great resource, as is Neighbor Debbie who has documented many of the native plants species over the past couple of years.

What do you have growing wild in your yard? When you find a minute to take off the gardening gloves and set down your trowel, drop me a line. Remember, it doesn’t get more local than your own back yard.

Presto Pesto!

and Other Ways of Preserving Your Bountiful Garden

Homemade herb-drying rack made from a stick and some yarn. From left to right: thyme, French tarragon, chocolate mint, and rosemary.

Dear Reader:

This year’s garden was a great success. One giant sunflower produced fifteen or twenty blossom/seed heads and provided the early autumn garden with a showy display. The straw bale gardens gave the tomato plants a much-needed boost of sunlight along with the nitrogen fertilizer and carbon from the straw, and we had plenty of Early Girl and heirloom tomatoes to slice for sandwiches, chop for salsa, and wedge for salads.

Black-eyed Susans are still blossoming out there along with the deepening pink of Autumn Joy sedum. Even the new female Winterberry is bejeweled with deep red berries!

Bread & Butter Pickles

Cucumbers were so abundant this year I was able to make a few pickles. Pickling was surprisingly easy and amounts to nothing much more than chopping and slicing veggies and herbs, making a brine out of salt, vinegar, sugar and spices, and pouring the brine over the veggies in glass containers. These Bread & Butter Pickles came out very crisp and white where I’d always been used to softer and more yellow, but the flavor was intense and delicious.

I found my recipe in a 1980’s Betty Crocker Cookbook, but Mother Earth News Magazine has a good starter article right here online plus a heads-up about a book outlining small-batch pickle production (say THAT ten times fast).

An excess of tomatoes from my parents’ excellent garden up n’oth became hot, spicy pasta sauce. The process for the sauce is simple. Boil water in a big pot. Dump in the tomatoes and wait 30-40 seconds. Lift tomatoes out with slotted spoon and dump into cold water in the sink. After a minute or two, slip skins off tomatoes and cut into fourths. Throw into large slow cooker pot with onions, garlic, chopped veggies like zucchini, hot peppers, green pepper. Add salt, dried herbs or fresh herbs to taste. Add cooked meat if desired. Let it simmer for about seven hours. You can also add tomato paste to thicken it if you like. The sauce can be frozen in freezer bags or containers.

Calendula in the Herb Garden

Perhaps the most successful of my garden experiments this years was the herb box. Along with the sunflower mentioned above, I planted fennel (see Grand Fennel-ly ), rosemary, and basil. In the front of one perennial bed, a French tarragon comes back and grows bigger every summer, and down at the end of the driveway beneath the forsythia bushes my friend Sandi kindly divided for me, a hardly little thyme comes back year after year after year.

This year, I decided, I would preserve a bit of these herbs to see me through a winter season of cooking. The basil were huge. I grew weepy just thinking about pulling them and throwing them on the compost as I’d babied them through the first rough month of transplant shock, daily watering, and Japanese beetles. One night seemed to be threateningly cold, and so, fearing frost, I gently pulled up the basil and placed each one its own plastic grocery bag. These I crammed into the mudroom until I could figure out when and what to do with them.

Poor basil in the mudroom

Friends, let me tell you, basil fresh from the garden has a powerful odor! Neighbor Debbie stopped by and thought the mudroom smelled like old shoes. Hmmm. Hopefully the basil doesn’t taste like dear daughter’s gym sneakers. I rather thought the mudroom smelled wicked “herbal” and prayed no-one dropped over and came to a wrong conclusion about my gardening activities. All legal, I promise!

Ingredients for Presto Pesto

A week or so later, those basil plants were still sitting in my mudroom and beginning to look a little wilty. The predicted frost never materialized, and I gritted my teeth wishing I’d left my herbs in the dirt until I figured out what to do with it.

I knew I had to come up with something and fast, or else the poor plants would end up on the compost pile after all. A mid-week visit to my good friend, Donna D, prompted me to share some garden tomatoes and a large sprig of the basil. Donna D, in turn, gave me a cube of her homemade basil pesto and–bless her soul–a recipe to go with it. Voila! I had the answer to my herbal error.

The recipe calls for using a food processor and blending ingredients very slowly and deliberately. I don’t own a food processor. I do, however, own a blender. After trying with no success to puree basil leaves, garlic cloves and walnut in the blender with no liquid, I gave up and dumped in the olive oil and grated Parmesan and turned the blender on to puree for about three minutes. Presto Pesto! was born.

Pesto in ice cube trays

The trick to keeping the pesto for future use is simple: ice-cube trays. Empty your ice-cubes into a plastic container in the freezer so your family doesn’t throw a hissy-fit when they are looking to cool down their apple cider/workout water-bottle/iced coffee/red-wine-that-really- shouldn’t-be-chilled-but-whatever. Wash the ice-cube trays and dry them. Pour prepared Presto Pesto into the trays. Cover with plastic wrap and freeze. When frozen, pop out of trays and store in zippered freezer bags (or leave in the trays if you have extras for actual ice-production).

The pesto can be thawed and used later. I made four batches of Presto Pesto! with my starting-to-wilt-and-wither basil plants, and these batches filled two ice-cube trays. I think it must be fairly economical as those little jars in the grocery store are quite expensive (local big-box supermarket has a 4.5 oz jar for $3.29.) I used only a portion of a bag of walnuts and one wedge of Parmesan cheese. Pesto does take a bit of olive oil, but it is cheaper if you buy it in those big cans unless you are a stickler for extra-extra virgin fancy stuff.

Following is friend Donna D’s recipe just as she gave it to me. But to make it Presto Pesto! simply ignore the persnickety instructions about careful and slow blending at just the right moment and just dump the whole thing together in the blender and let’r go.

BASIL PESTO

1 1/2 c. basil leaves
2 cloves garlic
1/4 c. pine nuts or walnuts
3/4 c. thinly grated Parmesan cheese
3/4 c. olive oil

Puree first three ingredients in food processor until it forms a thick paste. Add the Parmesan cheese very slowly. Then add olive oil and mix until the consistency of creamed butter. Put a film of oil over top. Cover and refrigerate or freeze in ice-cube trays.

That’s it, Dear Reader! Whether you are preserving the garden by pickling, drying, canning or freezing, it is so much fun to go shopping in your own pantry during the winter months…Outside the Box.

Drop me a line and tell us about YOUR preserving projects this year. It’s always fun to hear someone else talk for a change.

Grand Fennel-y

Fennel Seed Head

Dear Reader:

September is here. It is the grand finale of summer, of the harvest. I’ve been picking tomatoes, cucumbers, red chili peppers, and the last of the lettuce and yellow summer squash. A couple of the garden boxes are looking a little thin now that the zucchini and squash plants have been pulled. My herb box, however, continues to delight. The basil is full and fragrant (time to make pesto before the frost hits!), the calendula finally blossomed, the sage and rosemary are holding their own . . . and then there is the fennel!

Rich in phytoestrogens,Fennel is often used for colic, wind, irritable bowel, kidneys, spleen, liver, lungs, suppressing appetite, breast enlargement, promoting menstruation, improving digestive system, milk flow and increasing urine flow. Fennel is also commonly used to treat amenhorrea, angina, asthma, anxiety, depression, heartburn, water retention, lower blood pressure, boost libido, respiratory congestion, coughs and has been indicated for high blood pressure and to boost sexual desire.–http://www.herbwisdom.com/herb-fennel.html

Honestly, I had no idea what a powerhouse of a plant I had growing in garden box #1! Fennel tasted like licorice, I knew that much. I wanted to grow some new-to-me herbs in that box, and the fennel looked interesting at the greenhouse. So four fennel plants found their way into the herb box.

And they grew.

And grew.

And grew until they were huge white bulbs with offshoots springing from it looking somewhat like a white heart with ventricles and arteries and veins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventricle_%28heart%29

See . . .

Upside-down for comparison

When it became clear to me that I should cook the bulbs before they went to seed, I pulled up three of them, brought them inside, sliced them up, and roasted them with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and sea salt until they caramelized.

The fennel petals were a bit tough…I really did leave the plants in the ground too long. Still, the roasted fennel lent a mellow, buttery-licorice taste when added to the top of a bed of greens for a late-summer salad. The remaining plant will be allowed to go to seed. I’ve been snipping off fronds here and there to use in vinaigrette, on top of roasted meat, added to soups, for cucumber pickles, whatever I can think of.

Going All To Seed

When the flower heads turn to seed and begin to dry, I will harvest them, put them into a marked envelope, and wait until next spring to try my hand at starting new plants indoors.

I’ll also be trying to find some herbal teas that include fennel to help boost my heart, lungs, and digestive system over the fall and winter. Mmmmm, a soothing cup of licorice-tasting tea while the watching the leaves turn color outside the window. I’m almost ready for summer to be over. Almost.

How about you? Are you a fennel fan? Or fennel-finicky? Cast your vote . . . Outside the Box.

My Gardening Arsenal

Garden Arsenal

Dear Reader:

There have been so many cool local goings-on I hardly know where to start: do I finally blog about my incredible Goodwill fashion finds? Or the awesome certified organic farm stand up the road? Or my trip to the Portland Museum of Art plus dinner at locally-owned restaurant, Nosh? Or the wedding shower I went to recently for my cousin’s fiance (Hi, Holly:) where the presents were either local, organic, natural, homesteady (think canning jars and cookbooks, perennials and pot-holders) or… red wine?

With so many topics, I chose the most local of all: my front yard garden.

Straw bale in May

Remember this?

Now it looks like this!

Straw Bale in July

There is a real difference between the tomato plants on the house-end of the bales and the road-end. I think the house-end plants get just a smidge more sunlight…enough to make a huge difference, not just in tomatoes but also in the pumpkin plants on the very ends as well as the corn and beans on the ground below. (I couldn’t resist a Three-Sisters planting or four!) While the Early Girls are already ripening and the two German Striped heirlooms are setting on fruit, the large brandywine in the center back bale has an issue. There have been plenty of blossoms, but then, sadly, the blossoms break off at the stem-bend just where the plant should be pumping some energy to create a band of strong material to hold a big, plump, juicy fruit.

Thinking maybe I’d either over-nitrogened the thing and underfed it some other vital nutrient, I got down to Plummer’s Hardware to pick up some organic fertilizer specifically for tomatoes and veggies. This one has nitrogen, posphate, potash, calcium and sulfer made from feathers, poultry manure, cocoa meal, bone meal, alfalfa meal, greensand, humates, sulfate of potash, and gypsum. Ask for Espoma Organic Tomato-tone at your local garden center. I noticed a big difference right away in all the ‘matoes…they all grew even taller and lusher within the week. Now I’m waiting to see if old brandywine there actually sets on some more fruits other than the two bottom ones that popped out just after getting home from Snell’s greenhouses.

Healthy Bee Balm

Now, some of you long-time readers will remember my past gardening woes including powdery mildew and Japanese Beetles. (See Of Pests and Powdery Mildew from August 2010) I am sad to report that the beetles are back, along with new friends–aphids and ants. My poor crabapple tree is an infested mess!

It’s my own fault. People gave me advice about sprinkling some kind of powder underneath to kill the beetle larvae. Instead, I planted garlic around the tree, hoping it would somehow repel the pesky pests. No such luck, though I do hope to have some green garlic soup very soon. In the meantime, I continue with my usual methods of pest control: a jar of bleach water for the beetles and a quick pinch and pull to get rid of the aphids and the ants milking them. Yes, ants “raise” aphids and milk their secretions. Gross, except, well, think about us with cows and goats. By the time I get to the aphid farms, the little stem or branch of the tree is pretty sick and generally comes right off in my fingers. Then those ants get angry and bite me! I’m serious. They are NOT happy to lose their farm at all. I say, go west, young ant!

And then there is the powdery mildew. Now, you all know my thoughts on trying to be a food producer here on my wooded, exurban, one-acre lot. It’s pretty much an exercise in futility, really. I keep trying new things, but in the end I may be defeated. I thought I’d come to terms with the pine and beech tree shade and the sunny but tragically unusable leach field. The new garden boxes were to be my saving grace, my compromise with reality. I could practice vegetable gardening in the miniature, experiment with many types of plants, and treat said veggies like highly-irregular ornamentals…that I could nibble. They do look fabulous. See how the pink & black box has grown.

On May 30th

This was Memorial Day weekend.

July 18 garden box

Now, the cucumbers are running like crazy, and by that I mean they are flowing out of the box and onto the ground like leafy snakes. Tiny cuke-spikes grow behind the pretty yellow blossoms, fatten, and lengthen until they just aren’t pickling size anymore at which point I pluck them, peel them, and serve them on salad for dinner.

Beautiful Cuke

I’ve picked six of these babies so far…and there are more to come as long as nothing happens to them. The zucchini are blossoming. The summer squash are already beginning to fruit. All looks well until…

I notice the big patch of bee balm in my front perennial bed, just beside the cuke and squash boxes, is covered in powdery mildew! Now, we’ve had so much heat and humidity that I shouldn’t have been surprised. A little more research, and I learned that overcrowded conditions also contribute to the mold problem. That bed was looking a little crowded this year. Looking back at previous photos, I see that some of the old plants in the bed had powdery mildew in previous years, so the spores were probably there in the ground just waiting to bloom.

No matter. What mattered was that if I did nothing, that mold would spread to the just-about-to-produce squash and cukes and kill all my hopes and dreams for fresh garden salads and zucchini cooked over the grill and summer squash casserole. I got out my gardening blades and chopped that darn bee balm right off and buried it in a pile of leaves in the woods far from the boxes. Now my perennial bed looks like a second-grade boy with a summer buzz-cut and I’ve pretty much decided to plant shrubs in that spot this fall (rhododendron? azalea? winterberry?).

Squash Blossoms

In the meantime, my cucurbits are in grave danger. I noticed one small summer squash had already turned brownish on the blossom end and had gone soft and limp. It was dying, if not already dead. And this was before one sign of mildew on the leaves! I did moreresearch and learned that while you can’t reverse an infestation of mold, you can prevent it with anti-fungal sprays. There are commercial products, but I was intrigued by the remedy recommended on a number of organic gardening sites: baking soda, vegetable oil, and water.

Now, the baking soda is supposed to change the pH of the leaves, making them inhospitable to the powdery mildew. The oil helps the solution cling to the leaves. I made mine with 1 tablespoon soda, 1 tablespoon Maine sunflower oil, and 1 quart of water. I mixed it in a pitcher, poured it into a plastic spray bottle, and sprayed all the leaves on top and underneath after fertilizing and watering this morning. A healthy plant is much less susceptible to any sort of pest or problem.

Why do I have powdery mildew problems, anyway? Simple. Mold likes moisture and heat. We’ve had high humidity and high temperatures. In addition, my lot is surrounded by tall trees acting very effectively as windbreaks. Nice in the winter (except when said trees fall over), but in the summer that means the tops of the trees across the road may be tossing in the wind, but in my garden the pretty little set of chimes Hubby gave me doesn’t even let out a single cling…or clang, for that matter. In other words, we get no air circulation thanks once again to the trees.

I pulled the peas up today to give the zucchini and summer squash in that box a little more breathing room. Hopefully that will help. But to be honest, I may not do veggies again. Or else, forget the cucurbits. I can buy plenty at the local farm stands and farmer’s markets.

On a happy note, an application of tomato food to the greens boxes has made a huge difference. Take a look!

Romaine and Greenleaf and Chard

Small cukes, green beans, spinach, lettuce

Out of the micro micro-greens that refused to grow, I decided to pluck up everything but the spinach which looked somehow…different, as if it had potential. My instincts appear to be correct as it is now growing nicely behind the shade of the green beans. Perhaps the greens boxes get more sun than they need? Maybe I should grow a sheltering row of flowers or something in the front squares next year? The last-ditch planting of kale seeds in all the squares where nothing grew has produced some sprouts, so perhaps a fall crop of greens will be forthcoming after all.

What I’ve learned? Fertilizer helps. I love the idea of using only home-produced or at least locally-produced compost, but I’m beginning to suspect that in order to get all the nutrients needed for a really good crop in a box, a balanced fertilizer is a necessity. In a double-dug bed, some of those nutrients would be present in the soil, and perhaps a yearly application of good, home-grown compost from the remains of plants grown in those beds would suffice. Or maybe growing a cover crop of some nitrogen-dense plant would work. But in these self-contained garden boxes? I think a little extra additive is a necessity.

Which brings me back around to my other point. Do I continue to play with vegetables? Or do I simply work with ornamentals and use my money to support the local farmers? Imagine what they could have done with the $200 plus I spent on straw bales, boxes, compost, additives, seedlings, seeds, etc. Probably fed a couple of families, while I get few handfuls of peas, some pickling-size cucumbers, thirty or forty tomatoes (please, oh please!), some basil, some squashes…

It all depends on what happens with those squashes, people! If they don’t work out, I will cast around for another direction for my one-acre “homestead.” I still have this idea about growing shiitake mushrooms…

Stay tuned for more … Outside the Box.

Beware the Iris!

Grape Kool-Aid Iris (at least that’s what I call it!)

I love the way these irises smell…just like their color. Grape Kool-Aid.

Their blooms blossom and fade quickly, two or three to a stem, but oh the heavenly scent while they are open and beckoning to the fat bumble bees that crawl into and out of them spreading pollen from plant to plant in that glorious symbiosis of nature. Sometimes the bee’s buzzing grows alarmed, higher-pitched, as she struggles to escape the perfumed interior of the flower.

Today, I crawled out of a similar enticing trap, and I’m hopeful I will make a clean getaway. A year or so ago, in order to enter a contest, I wrote a short-short story and published it on an e-publisher. What I didn’t consider at the time was that the story was “out there” forever. Published but not doing anything. Just sitting there. I couldn’t revise it and submit it anywhere, and the thing was, I wanted to revise it. I’d grown attached to the storyline and the character. It could have been so much more!

So, today I canceled my account with the e-publisher and tried to “retire” the story. It is still coming up when I type the title and my name into a search engine…the image for it anyway. The content is unavailable.

Now the question is…am I free to revise and resubmit? I don’t know. I think I will revise it for my own pleasure, and if it is worthy, I will send it out with full disclosure of its checkered, e-pubbed past.

Lesson? Be careful when you enter contests. Sometimes a contest isn’t a contest. Sometimes it is a marketing tool to lure potential “clients” close–like the sweet smell of the iris, luring bees into her velvety, purple petals for her own purposes.

A Time to Sow

Pink & Black Ornamental Garden Box

Dear Reader:

There I was yesterday, crouched down next to the garden boxes, dropping miniscule seeds into warm compost, patting a covering of compost over the “babies,” and dreaming of how the boxes will look when the seedlings emerge and begin to grow.

Moth & Chive in the “sunny” perennial bed

Giant bumblebees buzzed around and into the self-propagated purple and pink columbine. Moths and monarch butterflies visited the puffy heads of chives. Birds called. My fingernails turned black, and I didn’t care. I just kept dreaming of the months to come when I could sit and watch the plants grow.

Heirloom tomatoes in straw bale

The day before, after a $100 trip through the greenhouses at Snell’s Family Farm, I had all the starter plants on my list, plus more.

First, the tomatoes. I went with three Early Girl tomatoes, one brandywine called “Mortgage Lifter,” and two green-striped German heirloom tomatoes to go in the straw bales.

Digging out spaces in the bales was tough work. My father was visiting and helped with this chore while Mom watered and carted the extra straw to the compost pile for recycling. The bales were moist and beginning to break down inside nicely, creating some heat that I hope will make for happy tomato plants. After digging into the bales, I put in a couple handfuls of compost, stuck the plant in, and filled in with more compost. Following directions from my straw-bale gardening booklet, I then pressed on a layer of potting soil along the tops of each bale and planted spinach to grow in the shade beneath the toms.

Straw Bale with Front Garden Boxes

On the ends, a circle of pumpkin seeds will hopefully produce a few orange globes come fall. To go along with the “fall harvest” theme of my bales, I took a chance and planted a few corns seeds and some beans on the ground beside the bales. This is now a Three Sisters garden: corn, beans, squash. I’m not expecting much in the way of corn, but the stalks will look festive with the bales and the pumpkins if it all works out.

Inside the Garden Box

As for the boxes, I squished as many varieties into them as I could, intermixing veggies and flowers for visual appeal and maybe to also attract beneficial insects like bees. Already the hummingbird zipped down for a look-see yesterday.

Here is a list of what I planted this weekend:

Herb Box–basil, camomile, calendula, dill, rosemary, fennel, sage, pole beans.
Pink & Black Box–red cabbage, chocolate mint, geranium, Japanese shiso, cucumber, sweet potato vine, petunias.

Salvia & Red Cabbage

Diamond Design Box–salvia, red cabbages, cucumber (and I think something else but I can’t quite remember so it will be a mystery until something comes up between the cabbages.)

Sungold cherry tomato in a pot.

Root crop Box–small onions, carrots, parsnips, radishes, eggplant, geranium.

Peas & Pepper Box–peas, chili peppers, zucchini, summer squash.

Four Greens Boxes–Green leaf, arugula, romaine, greens mix, spinach, a leftover red cabbage, a cherry tomato, a zucchini, a few small onion is a square, and green beans and leftover cukes.

Phew! I spent the better part of two days planting and then sat outside to drink a glass of tea and enjoy the view. I took a shower and went to bed.

After midnight, around 1 a.m., the light show started…a tremendous thunderstorm that ripped through the sky for four hours, dropping torrential rains and some hail. All I could think was, “What about my itty-bitty seeds? What about my tomato plants?”

Luckily, the plants seem fine this morning. Now I have to chose: dig up the soil and replant the seeds or wait for ten or twelve days to see what, if anything, emerges from the compost. I think I’ll wait.

The weather forecast is calling for more t-storms, and I have to go to work at the library today—unlike this luna moth who has been literally hanging around all over my house for a week.

Luna Moth

What is she doing, I wonder? Resting? Waiting to take the next stage in her journey? Maybe that is the lesson for today. It’s all about timing. Rest when you need to. Look forward to the next stage in your journey. Soar when the time is right.

If there ever was a time to sow the seeds of change, it is now. What kind of future do you envision for yourself, your community, the world? What can you plant now for a better tomorrow…in your garden or Outside the Box?

Eggsellent Spring Supper

Spring Herbs

Dear Reader:

It may be hard to believe, but the garden, thanks to perennial herbs, produced ingredients for a wonderful, fresh-tasting spring supper before I even sent in my order to Johnny’s Seeds yesterday.

Perennial herbs are a gift of spring. Nestled up beside the first little feather fronds of yarrow and the recently divided rudbekia are the healthy clumps of reliable chives. The first grayish-purple flower heads poke up through the succulent spikes, and a few snips of the cooking shears yield a small handful of spicy, slightly oniony flavor.

Chives

Another unassuming, grassy-looking clump perfumes my fingers with the slight scent of liquorice when I roll a blade between thumb and finger. This is French tarragon–useful in soups, sprinkled on roasting chicken or vegetables with olive oil, or stuffed into a bottle of vinegar where it will impart its Mediterranean essence to that humblest of condiments.

French Tarragon

A short walk down to the perennial bed beneath the beech trees, my tiny but refuses-to-die thyme plant has put out new green leaves. I snip a few sprigs, roll a leaf between my fingers to inhale the woody aroma. Thyme is good, of course, in chicken soups and other stews. It is also remarkably yummy with eggs…and this is what I’m intending for this night’s supper.

Fresh Thyme

Bouquet in hand, I stroll to the house. From my ‘fridge comes a carton of locally-raised eggs; delicate shells in various hues indicate a mixed flock. The chickens that produced these eggs get plenty of protein from insects and plenty of fresh air and grass to scratch in. Their beaks haven’t been clipped. They have room to move. The yokes inside the eggs are golden-orange and plump, healthy, reassuring.

If only I’d thought ahead and purchased some local chevre, I think as I whisk a couple of eggs in a bowl and pour them into a buttered skillet on the stove. Instead I make do with some sharp cheddar and feta from the Limerick Market. I vow to try making my own mozzarella soon.

Sprinkling on the chopped herbs, I flip over one side of the set egg mixture. I pop a slice of my homemade bread into the toaster, tuck a handful of organic spring mix (Note to self: next year, use cold frames and start greens early!) onto a large plate, and slide the omelet next to the greens. A little butter on the toast and bon appetit!

Simple Dinner

If I’d started an asparagus bed, could I have added that to my meal, I wonder? Is Maine asparagus ready this early? Another note to self: create asparagus bed this year.

As for greens, I could have harvested all the dandelion any girl could want…wild food is even better than perennial food. (See “Not Your Grandmother’s Dandelion Greens.”) I have the store-bought greens, though, and the dandelions aren’t going anywhere.

Dandelions

Now, imagine some homemade hard apple cider to go along with this meal. Or some home-fries from local or backyard potatoes instead of the toast. Rhubarb pie for dessert. I wanted a quick meal, but the possibility for something more substantial is all right there–inspired by the fresh flavors of perennial spring greens. If you have even a small area in which to plant, these hardy and versatile herbs would serve you well.

Turkey in the Straw-Bale

Straw Bale Garden Rows

Dear Reader:

Since I live in an HOA (homeowner’s association) that does not allow “livestock,” you may have already guessed that the only turkey in my straw bale garden is me.

In the future, anyone who is interested in self-sufficiency, sustainable living, growing/raising of backyard food will avoid these HOA’s like a nuclear testing field. Not that HOA’s aren’t pleasant places to live. And not that they couldn’t be designed ON PURPOSE to support sustainability and community and nice things like backyard poultry that loves to eat up nasty ticks while providing delicious, nutritious eggs with deep-gold yokes. The tragedy of my particular HOA is the squandering of so much potential for self-sufficiency, learning, discovery, and…extremely tasty eggs!

The other problem I’ve discovered is the lack of sunlight due to so many tall, skinny, 100-yr-old pine trees that have sprung up from the old, deserted pastures of a time not so long ago when we were agrarian and proud of it. Don’t talk to me about “old-growth forest.” (See the stand of pines in the background of the photo above).

Old-growth forest does not have fieldstone walls running through it, people! This is old farm land. Pasture. Probably dairy cows. Whether we like to admit it or not, our HOA is built on livestock droppings now covered over with the pines and with the hardwood saplings struggling and finding bright pockets of sunlight in which to stretch now that the pine forest is beginning to break down.

Stumped

This is the stump from a pine that fell (tipped) not 30 ft from our house. The pine forest is crumbling around us, but not quickly enough to give me adequate sunlight for a full-scale kitchen garden. The only spot with enough sunlight for things like tomatoes and peppers and other sun-loving plants is directly over the septic field–where I’m not convinced I should create a conventional garden.

Faux Homestead

Now that nine years have gone by, my house is just starting to feel settled-into. The area directly in front, past the beech trees and the remnant of stone wall is the leach field. Here, I get six to seven hours of sunlight, but I was at a loss as to how to plant on it. One day, while bopping around the cyber world of Facebook, I saw on a friend’s wall the answer to my problem: straw bale gardening.

At least I think the bales will be the answer. The Facebook page led me to a website called Introduction to Straw Bale Gardening. I ordered the pdf version of Joel Karsten’s book/let. This weekend I moseyed on down to the farm supply store for straw bales and 24-0-0 fertilizer and then over to Plummer’s Hardware for stakes and string. In a couple of hours, my garden rows were ready for “conditioning.”

The process is pretty simple. Take some straw, sprinkle on some nitrogen, soak it with water, repeat, and wait for the composting to break down the straw into a growing medium. The stakes hold the ends of the rows tight while the string (or wire) between the stakes provides a trellis for growing plants.

An unidentified flowering shrub in my back yard

Once I set these up, I observed the sunlight beaming down on these bales from 8 a.m. until almost 4 p.m. yesterday. My hope for a bumper crop of tomatoes is almost as bright as that Flower Moon the other night.

The beauty of straw bale gardening is the ability to place a garden on any surface–not unlike container gardening. Theoretically, it is cheaper as containers can be expensive. However, I will warn you that this may be a bit of a marketing ploy. Containers will last for years, while a straw bale will only be good for a year, two at most. Of course, the spent straw, now composted quite a bit, will then be perfect for creating “lasagna gardens” or for use as nutritious mulch on other garden beds. Also, the bales I bought were expensive–$5.99 each! The 50lb. bag of fertilizer was $30.00, but it should last me a good while. I’ve since discovered that the fertilizer was probably not necessary. I could have put on a layer of the $30/TRUCKLOAD of Tibbett’s compost and maybe started the process a bit earlier.

Delilah by the Woodpile

There are also organic fertilizers that could be used. Bloodmeal. Urine.

Yes, you read that right. Urine is full of nitrogen and is completely sterile. I haven’t quite become that brave yet–not brave enough or obsessed enough about sustainability to pee in a bottle for feeding the perennials, let alone the tomatoes. But there is something poetic, I think, about completing the cycle in the same way that using composted cow manure completes the cycle.

So, my little front-yard experimental garden is almost ready for planting. I have the four old boxes for greens. I have the five new boxes for peas and string beans and squashes and carrots and herbs. I have the two rows of straw bales for tomatoes and peppers and maybe some greens or something in between. My perennial beds have been divided now. I’ll be putting some more herbs in the sunny perennial bed to go along with the rudbeckia and echinacea and the lilac shrub and chives.

Partly Sunny Side

Next year I may create a big perennial flower bed on part of that leach field–the kinds of flowers for bouquets and for dying homespun skeins of yarn, perhaps. And I still want to create an apple tree guild between the beeches and the compost bins.

But this year, oh this year, I’m longing for tomatoes. Big, fat, juicy, red tomatoes.

Remember Community Gardens?

Rhubarb

Dear Reader:

In recent posts I have strayed from my original plans for this blog–advocating “going local” in place of spending hard-earned dollars at big-box retail stores with questionable business ethics and negative impact on community economics.

One of my passionate causes a few years back was the attempt to create a community garden in my, er, planned neighborhood which I will nickname The Contrammunity. If you have been following Outside the Box for awhile, you will remember that the struggle ended in defeat . . . mostly because some members of The Contrammunity thought that a run-down, unusable tennis court was preferable to a garden in their neighborhood.

But who am I to say what is or isn’t more valuable? I gave up the fight, deciding that if a community garden stirred up so much controversy and bad feelings, it wasn’t anything I wanted to pursue further.

Anyway, I still have a soft spot in my heart for community gardens. In the right kind of neighborhood, a shared garden space can be an oasis, a gathering place, a teaching/learning tool for newbies and kids, and (I truly believe this) a positive selling point for real estate nearby (unlike a broken, unused, cracked tennis court, for example.)

Waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . for spring!

So when I read “If Every Community Had a Garden” in the Significato Journal this morning, my heart warmed. I was especially interested in the rainwater-catching system used for irrigation. Click to take a look at this short piece about a community garden started in Norway, Maine . . . incidentally, a town I lived in, worked in, owned a home in before moving further south. Norway is a wonderful, small, Maine town with a vibrant Main Street of small, locally-owned businesses including an impressive co-op store/space called the Fare-Share Co-op.

This video says it all!! Click Alan Day Community Garden Video. (Honestly, I’m watching this, and I can’t believe I moved away from this place!)

I don’t see myself ramping up the necessary energy to try to create a community garden again here The Contrammunity again. Sometimes you just have to admit you are living in the wrong place, make the best of your own backyard, and find a good co-op group and/or CSA farm–by looking at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) website.

Wild Plant with Old Leaves in Background

Spring is just around the corner, and I’m looking forward to getting new garden boxes set up, ordering seeds, and planting–just as soon as the snow melts and I’ve raked up the leaves I left moldering on the lawn over the winter.

What about you? Does your community have a shared-garden space? Do you have plans for spring planting? Drop me a line . . . Outside the Box.

Ephemeral Spring

Crabapple Blossoms

Dear Reader:

So we’ve had one of those kind of springs. An overcast, rainy, drizzly, foggy, chilly, turn-on-the-furnace, will-the-sun-ever-come-out, I’m-gonna-stick-my-head-in-an-oven-if-it-doesn’t-clear-up-soon spring. Despite the lack of sunlight, I fell in love with Spring this year. The beauty overwhelmed me.

The budding leaves on the trees glowed neon green. Every window in my house framed dazzling squares of bright, yellowy-green glaze, and every trip into town offered views of wide, verdant expanses from the ridges overlooking lush valleys of oak and maple and birch and beech trees budding out after a long, snowy winter.

My Reiki instructor reminded me that green is the color of the heart chakra, the energy center that corresponds with compassion, unconditional love, forgiveness, faith, receptivity, and acceptance. Either all that green was feeding my heart chakra, or my heart chakra was so energized I was drawn to all that green, or perhaps the energy and the color and the season were all just aligned for me this year so that despite the rain and gloom I was able to feel hope and love and faith for a brighter future.

Later in the season, the light color will deepen into emerald and forest and moss, but this early spring . . . well, it was all golden-green, the color Robert Frost wrote about in his short poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Award-winning poet, Dana Gioia, wrote an excellent essay about Frost’s 1923 poem. In the essay,“On Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Gioia contrasts this type of short poem with more the formalized forms of sonnets and epigrams. He talks about the construction of the poem, simplicity of the words Frost chose to use, and the movement from nature themes to philosophical observation about the passage of time.

Exuberant Rhubarb

This poem could be depressing, like the rainy weather, a note on the ephemeral qualities of youth giving way to duller attributes. Okay, true, but here’s the thing about life–it goes in cycles. Yes, this rainy yet somehow bright green spring will yield to summer and heat and dust and shady spots beneath the mature leaves of the trees. And, yes, the leaves will dry up and fall in autumn, and the branches will seem bare and dead through another long winter, but then . . . Spring, once again!

Lamium Maculatum

Nowhere is this more apparent than in my perennial flower beds. Year after year, these plants die back in the fall and then come back to life once again in the spring, bursting out of the cold wet ground and spreading themselves up and out to catch the fall of rain and (theoretically this year) the rays of sunlight.

Most of these plants are divisions from friends’ and my mother’s flower beds, and because I’ve never been too interested in the science of horticulture (I’m more interested in having pretty gardens) I rarely even bother to find out the names of the plants. A quick search this morning for “purple flowers ground covers” brought up pictures that seemed to match my bunchy cluster of purple flowers with heart-shaped leaves that grows on the north-east side of my front steps. If I’m right, this is Lamium maculatum, a ground-cover than does well in partial shade. It has come back bigger and better than ever each year. I highly recommend this hardy perennial if you are more of a putterer and less of a horticulturalist in the garden.

Another Lamium

This is another Lamium, with the more characteristic dark-rimmed silvery foliage and pink flowers. I love the way it looks against the rock, so delicate and pretty.

Trillium erectum

Meanwhile, out in Nature’s garden, otherwise known as “the woods” or “the side of the road,” this red Trillium briefly blazed like the red star she is. My friend Sandi (check out her Waughtercolors artwork on deviantART) and I noticed these beautiful ephemerals while on an early-morning bike ride one cloudy-but-not-quite-rainy spring day. Spring ephemerals are woodland plants that bloom and go to seed very quickly. Like Frost’s spring gold, they quickly fade to something less spectacular, but while they are here, oh boy! Beautiful. And maybe all the more appreciated because of their ephemeral quality?

Like youth and poetry. For me, a poem is an ephemeral thing, capturing a brief moment in time, a fleeting feeling, an impression.

When I was newly graduated from the University of Maine at Farmington, I got it into my head to write a sonnet sequence. I was inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE.
I was young. I was in love, newly married. I wanted to chronicle that time in my life. So I wrote 48 poems. Three are lost. I think I sent them to a magazine and when they were returned in my SASE, I failed to put them back in the pile. I didn’t know back then that my urge to create poetry would fade, like the browning blossoms I wrote about that spring in 1992. Lately, though, that poetic part of me has regenerated, perhaps part of a creative cycle like Gaia’s seasons?

Anyway, most of the sonnets are horrible (I keep them for sentimental reasons), but I’ll share one not so horrible one that seems appropriate to the season. Enjoy this brief season, Dear Reader. Summer is right around the corner.

A FEW BLOOMS BROWNING

I

I used to climb into the apple trees,
their white-pink blossoms browning in the heat
of waning spring, and dangling dusty feet
and toes in childish peace among the leaves,
I began to dream of love. The breeze
that swayed the branch was new and sweet
with whispers I would blow to meet
the wind. How easily it was to please
the innocence of me until I sighed
another moment at the solitary sound
a songbird made upon an upper bough.
Weighted with the song, I sat and cried
because that sad and sudden beauty tore
from me the child that I had been before.