Category Archives: Kitchen Garden

Garden Update: one agapanthus down and tomatoes in!

Much progress has been made on the front garden. First of all – those red flowers are ones that Max picked out for me on a trip to Harmony Farms with his Aunt Tara. I put them in the walk so everyone can see them as they walk up the path. Those two containers have bay laurels in them. It’s considered (by pagans and maybe ancient Romans) good luck to plant bay laurel at the entrance to your house. It keeps bad luck and witches from coming in.

I honestly don’t think it’s working that well. But I still like the way it looks and the bay is great in soup.

Let’s revisit the before. Spider condo, aggressively evil agapanthus, lots of pea gravel in the soil.

Spider condo went first, then I started hacking away at the evil. In the end it was hurting my feet (I have very delicate flowers for feet) and after I got 2/3 the way through that clump I had to get Philip to finish it off.

Ahhhh! Look how much room there is for good stuff. I do have plans to get rid of that other sprawling bush. But not right this minute.

First I needed to get some fresh soil. We really could use a couple of yards of soil but we aren’t committing to such purchases until the house situation is resolved. So I just spread a few bags of soil. It will have to do for now.

Next up I planted Max’s flowers, situated the bay laurels for maximum dramatic and witch-deterring effect, and planted my tomatoes. I can’t tell you how tempted I am to stuff a few more in there. I have a tendency to cram things tightly in my garden. I’m resisting the urge pretty fiercely.

Up close shot of the pretty Max flowers.

Some more of them. That little bunch of daisies were also chosen by Max for me.

Cause you know you want to be flogged with pictures of flowers my son chose for me. Next up I have to plant more flowers. I have rudbeckia, red valerian, echinacea, two different penstemon plants, chard, sage, chives, and lettuce.

Hopefully I’ll find the time to get all that in soon. I can’t wait to see this space fill out. Oh – the bare patch near the lion is still in need of much digging – the agapanthus roots are thick in there. My poor feet are finally recovering from their many ridiculous problems so I’m hesitant to get out there and abuse them some more. One thought I had was to cover the area with thick cardboard and then top with dirt but then it will make planting more difficult unless done with seeds only.

What are you doing in your gardens right now?

Agapanthus is the Devil

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This is 1/2 of our front yard. The other half is essentially the same. Small, square, dirt full of pea gravel, and filled with vigorous agapanthus and an unknown sprawling shrub that collects spiders. I want vegetables and flowers like calendula, coreopsis, black eyed susans, grandmother’s pin cushion, marigolds, roses, and zinnias.

That bare spot used to have the other half of that clump of agapanthus in it. Philip has not removed the rest of it as I requested him to do because it traumatized him. So I planned to fill in the crappy soil with some fresh better soil and plant a couple of vegetables.

But I’m greedy for space and this spider condo was on my hitlist. I felt sure it wouldn’t be as hard to remove as the agapanthus. At least I could grow more than one tomato if I removed it. I hate shrubs like this. They’re what you plant when you don’t want to actually garden. They’re what you plant if you’re studying arachnids and need to provide the ideal environment to lure them with.I was right. The shrub was just a great sprawling thing that was mostly dead and brittle underneath the top layer. Its removal revealed a startling sight.

About half of the agapanthus clump behind it isn’t even growing into the ground. It’s packed into itself in a crazy-ass impenetrable tangle of root and fiber and I got blood thirsty.

I thought that not having to dig them out of the actual ground would make them easier to remove – I was terribly terribly wrong. By the way, all the time I worked on chopping up the spider condo yesterday it was in the 80′s and I sweated like mad and it was awful and gross. This morning was no different.

That mess is all growing above ground. It’s thick. It will most likely break my shovel handle. I’m using Philip’s burly digging bar which helps but my long held suspicions about agapanthus have been proved true.Agapanthus is the devil.

Would you look at that gnarly mean mass of shovel-breaking root?! It’s living off of itself, people! No wonder they always plant this in parking lots of malls and institutional buildings. This is a corporate strength plant. It will survive balls of fire and lightning bolts of blight.

I had to come inside to hide from the stupid heat. You have to actually hate yourself to dig a cancer like this out of your yard in 85° heat. I may be temporarily defeated but I now have my sights set on removing the entire mass instead of just half of it. And I intend to make Philip remove the rest of his too. Because on the other half of our front yard we have THREE MORE OF THESE ENORMOUS CLUMPS OF AGAPANTHUS.

Garden Wish List for 2013

Sharon’s Mushrooms Unidentified

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Sharon has some impressive mushrooms growing in her yard. We wish someone could identify them for us. It turns out I have the same mushrooms growing in mine. Are they edible? I don’t have time to research it right now.

Even if I did – I’m not sure I would feel comfortable trying to eat these without a mycologist’s identification. I have read that in some places in France you can bring any mushrooms you find to the local pharmacy and a professional will pick out any inedible ones for you. People love to forage mushrooms in France, this way fewer people die doing it. Genius.

I wish we had that here. There are people who lead educational mushroom foraging walks in Sonoma County. I am going to try to find out who to talk to next year when these come back. Maybe I can get an expert to pronounce on these.

I am posting an exhaustive number of pictures in order to help identify them later from my books. Just as an exercise for my own mycological education.

If those babies were edible you could make several meals out of that cluster! And she has two of them in her yard! No, wait, she has three. Two big ones and one little one.

Even if they don’t turn out to be edible, they are COOL. I’d still like to know what they are.

I like fungi. They’re fascinating.

And beautiful.

I want to get some edible fungi growing in the dark dampish corners of my yard. Make use of all that shade.

I did see chanterelles growing in a really trashy yard down the street from me. I didn’t know you could grow them in your yard. From the looks of the house I’m guessing it was an accident of nature. I’d like to reproduce that happy accident.

Right after Sharon showed me her mushroom riches I found an enormous clump of the same variety of mushroom growing in my own yard!

So this is something for me to work on some time before next year – trying to identify these beauties. If you think you know what they are – please share!

Santa Rosa Gardens

Artichoke Math: home grown versus store bought

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I still hear people asking if it’s really worth it to grow your own food. Usually what they mean is “Is it cheaper?”. In our country this is how we evaluate nearly everything. By its cost in dollars. There are aspects of growing your own food that are difficult to quantify such as the benefit of choosing the variety of food you grow, knowing exactly what chemicals (if any) were used in their cultivation, and getting your food directly from the garden to the table in a matter of minutes or hours rather than days.

The cost of growing your food is much easier to quantify. You can make it as expensive or as cheap as you want. There will be a cost but you control how much you spend on garden tools and purchased compost and the seeds or plants themselves. Depending on where you live you may have to pay close attention to how much you spend on watering your garden. When I consider the cost of gardening I don’t include and then add in the cost of tools every time. You don’t replace your garden tools every year (unless you’re fighting off zombies with them) so I think of it like this: gardening requires an initial investment of some things like wheelbarrows, shovels, trowels, and clippers.

The cost of water is highly variable so it will be different where you live than where I live. Here in Oregon it’s a lot cheaper to water your garden than it is in California. You don’t have to start watering regularly until at least a month later than you have to in California. The water isn’t rationed here and we get so much of it falling during the spring that spring crops rarely need watering at all. In the southwest water is more expensive and precious than it is even in California. So there are places where this is definitely a bigger cost and concern for growing your own food. I will counter this with the fact that there are a few ways to cut down on watering your vegetables (drip lines, heavy mulching, and under-planting come to mind).

If you’re gardening smart then you aren’t buying compost for your garden, you’re making it. Fertilizers can also be made from things in the garden such as comfrey (you make a comfrey tea to pour on the plants). Depending on where you live you can also get free horse/cow/goat manure from people who keep such animals. This might be hard if you’re gardening in a large city but even most cities have farmland not far outside of it where such things as free manure can be found. When I set up a garden initially I do buy a large quantity of compost because I always do raised beds and I have to buy soil to fill them with. After that I don’t buy compost and I rarely buy fertilizers or pest control products either. So my yearly garden expenses aren’t very high once I’ve set my garden up.

I’m mentioning all of that because I want to acknowledge that there are a lot of costs to consider when gardening but most people with gardens are already spending all that money whether they’re growing vegetables or not. So it seems silly to me to quibble over those costs because the person who is gardening but not growing any of their own food is spending the same amount I am (probably more if they have any lawn) but they also have to buy more food than I do. So what if you were watering an artichoke plant where some lawn used to be? Or where a rhododendron used to be? How much would it save you to grow some artichokes of your own?

Here’s some artichoke math I was doing just yesterday:

I have 5 artichoke plants that I paid about $2.50 each for. This year I picked and ate 24 artichokes of varying size from those 5 plants. That means that each artichoke cost me .52 cents.

I saw some globe artichokes on sale at the store yesterday for $2.69 each. I recall that last month they cost $3.69 each.

24 home grown artichokes cost a total of $12.50

24 store bought artichokes on sale cost a total of $64.56

Even when you consider that my home grown artichokes were much smaller than those enormous ones at the store – the math still works out in favor of home grown. The truth is, I didn’t buy those artichoke plants this year. I planted them last year and they did yield artichokes but I didn’t count them and I didn’t eat them because I was not paying attention to my garden enough and they flowered before I could pick them. The plants died down and then they came back this spring. And just for the record – I didn’t water them once. So this year I actually paid nothing for those 24 artichokes.

One other thing to note is that size is NOT superior when it comes to artichokes. It turns out that those small artichokes – the baby ones – they haven’t matured enough to develop the inedible choke yet – which means that more of the leaves are edible and tender. I’m telling you – they are wonderful!

I love artichoke math.

Why not plant some artichokes for yourself if you haven’t already?

An Apartment Garden in Portland

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I love how more and more people are turning their yards into edible landscapes. I especially love to see this happening on the grounds of apartment buildings. When I lived in the JC neighborhood in Santa Rosa I had a neighbor who was a great inspiration to me – he rented a small apartment just down the street and had almost no yard space but not to be discouraged he turned the sidewalk curb strip into a miniature garden in which he grew garlic and greens and tomatoes. In his small place he was busying brewing wine and making cheese.

It’s so easy to be defeatist and assume that if you can’t grow lots of food or make lots of your own preserves that you shouldn’t bother growing or preserving anything. My neighbor taught me that the important thing is to be doing whatever you can for yourself, that growing your own food, even if it’s a few heads of garlic and some salad greens, is an act of freedom and of self sufficiency. It’s about keeping your connection strong between yourself and the soil that nourishes you. It’s a little bit like a prayer or a meditation and it’s a lot like feeding yourself the highest quality nourishment you can even on a micro-scale. Learning how to grow things and preserve food is tapping into knowledge that is at the core of the success of human beings as a species.

In a more pessimistic view it’s also what’s allowed us to overpopulate the earth and conquer nations and fight wars. Growing things allowed humans to settle down and stay put through the seasons. Agriculture allowed us to stop roaming. The evolution of food preservation is what allowed humans to cross oceans and to cross masses of land to attack other people. Without drying and salting foods armies couldn’t go far. So in a weird way, while I’m eulogizing the wonderfulness of growing and preserving foods I’m also celebrating what has made humans the most terrible virus on earth.

Still, those humans who know how to grow their own food and how to preserve it for later use have truly valuable knowledge and in times of war or natural disasters this kind of knowledge gives you better chances of survival. Plus, everyone will want to be friends with the person who knows how to make alcohol from apples and who can make sources of protein rise from the ground in plant form when there’s no meat to be had. The person who knows how to pull wild yeast from the air and mix it with flour to make bread is like a magician when there is no bread and no packaged yeast in the stores.

I am happy every time I see evidence of humans getting into the soil to grow their own food. City gardens are hopeful and resourceful. I always stop to enjoy them whenever I see them. This garden has some really big beets that are ready to pick.

It’s time for some lemony beet salad!

Blackberry Wrangling Progress

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I’ve been working hard and looking like I tame lions for a living. I have some thorns still stuck in my skin. But it’s totally worth it and all the hours I’ve put into clearing the blackberries have been very meditative. I’ve been meditating quite a bit about the evil neighbors who killed these brambles with pesticides without my permission. Bastards.

I’ve also been meditating on cleaner and brighter thoughts too, such as how good it feels to be out there working in the plants and the fresh winter air. Meditation for me isn’t about clearing my head of all thoughts, because that is impossible (I’ve tried many times), but about letting my thoughts come to me organically and letting them say their piece without interruptions. I let the stream of consciousness be heard as it is formed. Inevitably my mind settles down after a while into a theme and a flood of thoughts about something my mind has been chewing on gets released. I always feel better afterwards.

I’m about a third of the way though the task.

Wait, no, more like a quarter.

Crap, maybe only like an eighth. But who cares? You can see part of the back fence again!

How To Remove Blackberry Bushes Without Pesticides

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As I have written here before, I love blackberries and I have let them go wild in my yard. The vines that are choking my porch to death produce wonderful berries in the summer and it was my intention to continue to let them cultivate themselves. However, these vigorous vines crawl up onto the floor of the porch where unwary people are given an unpleasant surprise.

If we were training with Cato Fong to stay on our toes and be Kung Fu all the time, we would not let such surprises daunt us. But, Inspector Clouseau we are not.

My mom told me that if I wanted to keep the blackberries I would need to get rid of the bushes underneath them and stake them in an orderly fashion so we can easily keep the blackberries off of the porch.

Wait. I have bushes under there?!

If you’ve ever had blackberries muscling their way into your garden, then you know they are very hard to get rid of. Most people soak them in pesticides and this works like a dream. Plus, then you get to help poison the watershed in your area. We choose not to use pesticides. Admittedly, this is the hard road in the short term, but poisoning our water supply will make for a much harder road down the line and I don’t mind a little work.

Here are some tips for getting rid of brambles without using pesticides:

Don’t let them attain mass in the first place. If you see a wee baby cane pop up in your garden anywhere, pull it up immediately. If you do this religiously, you will not find it necessary to read any of the following tips.

If, like me, you engage in lazy gardening habits (otherwise known as a crazy busy life) and your brambles have become the size of trees, you will need to grab yourself the sharpest pair of long handled bypass loppers you can find, leather gauntlet gloves*, thick pants, and some really motivating music on a portable MP3 player.

First cut off any obvious and easy to get at canes. Be sure to cut them in manageable pieces as you pile them up. You will be thankful not to be whipped by recalcitrant canes when you try to gather up your pile of trimmings to the yard waste container or compost pile. Speaking of compost piles, blackberries thrive in them and unless the canes are 100% dead before you put them in there (brown all through, no green in any part of them) they will take root with joy. So unless your compost pile is very hot, let the county take them to the dump or let them die before adding to your compost.

You work your way from the outside of the blackberries towards the inner tangles. This isn’t a tip, so much as a fact. If your blackberries are growing over other plants you actually want to keep, you must take care not to prune out the wrong branches. As you work your way inwards, you may need to take a band-aid break. Or, if you’re a tough broad like me, you can ignore the blood that is inevitably dripping from your arms and legs at this point.

Once you’ve gotten a third of the length of the canes cut back you will find yourself reaching into the shrubbery to find the origins and this is delicate work. There are insects in there with all that foliage. They don’t like you shaking them down. If your blackberries aren’t growing on anything else you may, at this point, start digging up the roots. If digging up the roots – dig DEEP. Blackberries are hearty plants with scrappy tough roots that are hard to pull up so they can survive your attack.

If still struggling with a bush situation, you want to get as much of the blackberry canes cut back before you deal with the roots. Don’t cut them all the way back though because you need some leverage when tugging the roots out. They do not come out willingly. Don’t mind that the thorns near the base of the root are big enough to impale birds. I promise that you will barely notice the scars in a couple of months.

Clean-up is very important. Do not leave any blackberry debris behind in ground containing 5% or more soil. Leaves, stems, and canes can all root themselves if left for more than four hours**. The only part of a blackberry plant that can’t root itself are the thorns. (I think) Be sure to check back in a week to continue pulling up surprise canes.

Continue to do this for the rest of your life. Consider it a zen workout. The blackberries aren’t your enemy and they aren’t evil. They are a fecund plant that gives free luscious fruit to humans, birds, and other enterprising animals. You do not eradicate them completely, the goal is to keep them in balance with the rest of your garden. Good luck!

*I never have these on hand. I bought a pair, as I often do, and then they sit around in spidery corners. I have OCD and issues with gloves. In fact, I keep my own pair of garden gloves inside where I can keep an eye on them. Then I perform a thorough examination of them before putting them on my hands which involves not just shaking them out but also crushing the full length of the fingers in case any insects happen to be great at hanging on. I then ignore the thought of crushed insects, compel my rising panic to remain quiet, and carry on. In any case, the times I have used long gauntleted gloves I have found that thorns still find their way through. Whether you bother to use them or not is up to you, I merely felt compelled to mention them in case you didn’t know you could get them. You can.

**Inaccurate information. It seems like only four hours when in fact, it’s more like 12.

August 2011 Garden Update

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Thanks to my mother our garden is doing great. She’s the one who’s been watering every other day (manually) and mulching and planting. While I’ve been working and writing and preparing for my trip she’s been out there working hard. These are Romano beans (Helda) and they’ve become my favorite now. They can get quite big and still not be tough or develop beans inside too fast and they taste wonderful. I’m done growing Blue Lake or Kentucky Wonder, both of which have performed poorly for me in the last few years.

I actually know a few people who don’t like tomatoes. I’d be devastated if I became allergic to them. I look forward to them every year with the same fervor some teens look forward to seeing Justin Bieber in concert. (I know all about Justin Bieber because my ten year old son mocks him at every opportunity) Everyone in my area keeps saying this summer is even colder than last summer but I don’t believe it. I have lots of tomatoes and there’s plenty of time still for them to ripen.

Bee balm. It’s such an outlandish flower. We already had quite a lot of flowers to attract beneficial insects but my mom has added a lot more.

I don’t care what Oregon says*, Buddleia is gorgeous and definitely brings the butterflies and hummingbirds around. I didn’t buy my buddleia, I got it as a volunteer from the neighbors. I will concede that it’s a bit pesty the way I keep finding more sprouts which get woody and dug in really fast if I don’t rip them up at first sight.

Squash! Everyone jokes about it but for us it isn’t growing so valiantly that we must share it with anyone at this point. The two crookneck squash plants died. One of our zucchini plants is a little yellow and small and that leaves just one trooper that is giving us some promise but the delivery has been nothing to brag about yet.

Thank you mom!

*Buddleia is considered a noxious weed in Oregon and it is illegal to buy it. One of those ridiculous laws that defy sense since nurseries are allowed to sell it. Maybe the law is that you’re not allowed to grow it. You can buy it but not grow it? In the Master gardening program I asked some very keen questions about it but naturally the answers just went in circles.