wideeyedfunk

Tag: vegetable gardening

  • Trash picking for winter lettuce.

    It’s more complicated than that title makes it seem. With some in-between formative steps.

    The WideEyedSpouse and I walk the Useless Little Black Dog and the Corgi for several blocks through the neighborhood every evening. This is terrible in the winter, mostly. It is nice in the summer, generally. It is ALWAYS great on trash day.

    Because we live in a neighborhood of historic homes filled with epic volumes of historic junk, someone is always prying something out of the basement or off of the house. I scored a china cabinet that reeked of basement mildew two years ago. It is now my garden tool shack in the garage. Elegant, efficient, free. From Spode to Spades. (I know, right?)

    The trick is to get there quick. Super quick because as I’ve noted before, Buffalo has an active trash picking culture. My amateur attempts are pathetic compared to the experts.

    We moved into this house and set up the garden four summers ago. I’ve been waiting for someone in the neighborhood to replace their generously sized divided light windows for all of that time. I’m going to make a cold frame for winter lettuces. Sure, there have been windows out to the trash, lots of times. They were too small, not divided, broken, or the pickers got to them before me because they were so obviously awesome and worth something to someone. And sure, I can buy greenhouse panels to make a cold frame but why when there’s all this free stuff going out to the trash?

    This was the week my friends. Up on Summit, where the houses are big and the windows are wide, someone tore out their near perfect condition divided light sashes and put them out to the curb in a tidy unbroken stack. Hamish and I approached them first and I chased him away from his obvious intent to pee on the stack. “Cut it out,” I told him, “some of those are ours.” He looked at me like, “that was exactly my point.” The Spouse and Miss Tibbit came up. “What are you doing?” The Spouse asked in his suspicious, high toned query voice. He knew full well what I was doing and wanted nothing to do with it. “Score,” I said, “I’m coming back for these.” I think the Spouse rolled his eyes but if he did he made sure his back was to me a little bit.

    Hamish and I stepped smart for the rest of the walk. We made a veggie lasagna and tossed it in the oven for an hour. I didn’t even care, all I could think about was my windows laying all unprotected on the street. I was heading for the car when I noticed that the grass was sort of really, really long. I mowed it super quick. I yelled down to the basement where the Spouse was doing something with the fitness gear, “I’m going to get my windows!”

    The Pathfinder and I hove to the curb next to the window stack. “Yeah,” I muttered to myself, “but don’t be greedy.” Afraid I wouldn’t listen to myself, I grabbed the first two on the stack and fled.

    My new cold frame lids.
    My new cold frame lids. The white ones. The brown ones I got at a salvage reuse STORE before I understood. Besides, they don’t have windows in them. And they are the garden fence not cold frame parts.

    And there they are. Resting against the garage, the tops of my cold frames. Now. Now I am on the lookout for junky old bookcases to act as the frame of the cold frames. They always show up around this time of year when the college students move in and out. I just have to be patient. And quick.

    The garden today. Notice the grapeless vines, the pear-less trees, the unripe tomatoes. Frederico the Falcon is NOT deterring the pest.
    The garden today. Notice the grapeless vines, the pear-less trees, the unripe tomatoes. Frederico the Falcon on the Pergola is NOT deterring the pests.

  • Green tomatoes all over the place.

    Hoist with my own petard. That’s my tomato situation. Although to be fair and correct I wasn’t intending to harm anyone with my tomatoes. Ok, I might maybe have considered throwing the nibbled ones at squirrels and urban skunks so maybe I can use the petard thing. You know, I’m just going to.

    The healthy tomato garden.
    The healthy tomato garden.

    Last summer I planted five heirloom tomato plants: the garden peach and some kind of giant lumpy variety. They grew fast, blossomed well, and produced just a few incredibly aromatic, pleasantly textured tomatoes. The WideEyedSpouse and I made an event of each one because they were so few.

    This summer I decided on a tomato blitz. I tortured myself with descriptions of heirloom and organic varieties in the Fedco catalog. I agonized over which seeds to buy. I settled on a cherry variety, a dense purpley Cosmonaut, and the succulent yellow Garden Peach. I nurtured those seedlings under a grow light in my dressing room for months. It was inconvenient, sure, but we all dreamed of a tomato bounty. Baskets full. Frozen. Sauced. Canned. Salsaed tomatoes.

    Green cosmonauts.
    Green cosmonauts.

    Look at your calendar. It is September. My 15 lush, health tomato plants carry hundreds of turgid, deeply green tomatoes. I counted them.

    If only they were yellow, purple, and red as they are meant to be. Cursed cold Buffalo summer nights. Cursed green tomatoes. Next year I am shoving a couple of store bought Big Boys in the ground and calling it good.

    A sorry week's harvest.
    A sorry week’s harvest.

  • Twenty things I could have bought with the $20 I lost yesterday.

    1. 2,000 pieces of penny candy. Two thousand.

    2. 20 minutes of satellite phone time to talk to the Spouse from the remote fieldwork location.

    Strawberry Shortcake Donut, with Angel Cream.

    3. 2 dozen Paula’s Donuts. That’s 24 items of pure deliciousness.

    4. Two tickets to a Buffalo Bisons game.

    5. 20 Mega Millions lottery tickets.

    6. A shovel.

    7. 6 bags of Family Size potato chips.

    8. Gas for a scenic drive to Olcott and back, with a stop at Reids Hot Dogs.

    9. A really big bale of toilet paper.

    10. Contact lens solution, pickles, potato chips and fair-trade coffee at Target: the intended purpose.

    A dog needs a good chair.

    11. A dog chair.

    12. A dog license renewal.

    13. A marriage license (17 years ago).

    14. 180 dukie bags for dog walks.

    15. 2 completely drinkable bottles of wine, or one wine-in-a-box (Equivalent of 4 bottles – stays fresh for a month. Just saying.).

    16. 2 6-packs of quality beer.

    17. Almost 3 months of Netflix.

    18. Approximately 60 showers, 8 dishwasher runs, 5-10 loads of hot water laundry (whites and dog beds) – in other words, a summer month gas bill.

    19. An emergency room copay. The Spouse got rollerblades for his birthday.

    20. 48 vegetable plants.

     If only I had used my wallet to house the $20. All of that could have been mine.

  • Thinning seedlings: I think they scream as I tear them out…

    A row of baby little marvel shell peas. All unsuspecting.

    I think the baby plants scream when I ruthlessly pluck them out of the ground. I know it has to be done. It is my job as a gardener to be a creative, even divine force. The choices I make about which of the little seedlings get to swell into tastiness, into full fruit and seed producing maturity, are irrevocable. My choices shape the future of plants in my garden through pollination and seed harvesting. The lucky ones spaced properly apart for effective growing survive. The particularly lovely, big, and cheery looking guys make it. A lot of not-yet, never-will-be plants will die though, and their unique random genetic mutations die with them. It pains me every time I tug on their little bodies and feel their tiny roots rending.

    A pea sprout gets it.

    I have already this spring killed baby radishes, peas, tomatoes, carrots, peppers, eggplants….and it isn’t just the vegetables who get it either. Zinnias, poppies, nasturtiums, wild bergamot, calendula: no one is safe. My seedling book says that I am doing no one any favors by letting them live too crowded. The book says unthinned seedlings will be stunted and weak. But thinning. It has such a Malthusian feeling.

    The radishes. Screaming as they lay shriveling in the mulch.

    Yesterday I thinned the peas. The tiny roots of the rejected seedlings clung desperately to the soil. I thinned the radishes. And I must admit that in an act of god-like absorption, I ate those tiny baby plants (and again, Malthusian!). I hovered over the beets, but they are too small for thinning. I can’t yet determine which are weak, which are unsightly, which are destined for the compost. The whole row of beet sprouts sighed and shivered in relief as I stood and walked away.

    Hamish is concerned by all the screaming, and carefully monitors the garden as I work.

    I told the spouse about my worries. That I think the little baby plants shriek and fight to live. The spouse patted the dog and looked at me over the garden fence. He reached over and snatched a tiny radish plant from its tidy row. His teeth crunched a little on the tender leaves. “They’re just plants,” he told me, and wandered off with the weed trimmer. I looked at the empty spot where that radish used to be and now was never going to be again. I really thought I heard it scream.