Hiatus? What hiatus?

Well, it was only a matter of time really, given the nature of this blog before I was sure to get distracted by something, or pulled away by something and have to move on.

Specifically, this time anyway, it was that I went back to Los Angeles for a little while, and then Iowa, and then Japan and well, the garden, though maintained in my absences by a few dedicated friends (Thanks, guys!) was left unrecorded for a significant stretch.

Coming back to it, nearly finished for the season, I felt sad and a little guilty about the abrupt cyber-silence. “But really,” I consoled myself, “Who reads this thing anyway? Would anybody even miss it?”

Well, I don’t actually have an answer for that, but a few weeks ago I received a comment about the blog being potentially mentioned in Florida Gardening Magazine. Suddenly I was flooded with guilt. Now what excuse do I have for not putting up an update?

I’ve got my public to think of!

Ok, probably not. But it really was time I got back to it, especially as I have recently (surprise, surprise) moved into an even sweeter house with a fellow gardener and we’ve been gearing up all week to get our brand new winter garden into the ground!

If there really was anyone who was missing this little blog, I am sorry, and I hope you can forgive me, and accept these photos from around June of some of the small bounty:



















These are my Green Zebras! See the stripes?

And here was my prize Cherokee Purple. It got huge! And, purple!

Those were my ambitious pole beans, doing what pole beans do. And there's my mini yellow watermelon patch down at the bottom of the picture.


And this was dinner one night. Pretty, no?

Anyway, that garden has been put to bed. But the blog has begun again. Do stop by soon and see how the new garden is shaping up!

Time To Eat Already?

It's the start of May. In most places that means planting season is just creeping into high gear. The frost is finished, the ground has thawed, maybe your seeds are starting to sprout, maybe you’ve just put them into the soil…

Either way it’s a long way still ‘til harvest time.

I guess I’ve been spoiled growing up in Southern California and now gardening here in North Florida, but to be honest I don’t know how you all have such patience! It’s an inspiration, really, to think that you can keep motivated, sitting on your trowels at it were, all through the long, snowy Winter, and then the teasing, never-quite-warm-enough Spring.

Why, I was going crazy back in February!

And so I rushed to get everything into the ground (or pots, as the case may be) holding my breath as the uneasy springtime temperatures rose and fell, a phantom frost threatening constantly...

And now, I’m astonished to announce, that at the start of May it’s harvest time in my little garden!


In fact several of my plants are already done for…

The potato discovery of my last post lead to several delicious meals all last week and the end of my potato plants. So long!

My mustard greens have been finding their way into stirfrys and soups all season and now they’re spent.

The lettuce seeds I planted in March have provided plenty of salads and have now said their goodbyes.

Others are just now on the verge of ripeness.

The eggplant is just laden with lovely dark fruit (getting bigger by the day!)


The tomato vines I planted way back when are exploding with green (and a few orange) tomatoes…


And the pole beans are racing up their tethers faster than I can even photograph.

The one sad part is that I'll be out of town for the next two weeks and will miss a lot of the action. A few friends have offered to come by and water and I'm happy to imagine them munching on fresh, warm tomatoes and red, ripe strawberries, I only hope there's something left for me when I get back into town!

Surprise!

Back when I started this blog one of the first things I attempted to grow were potatoes. Partly because I’m Irish, partly because they were calling to me from a big display at the nursery, but mostly because it seemed so mysterious. Even carrots and radishes give you hints to what’s going on below the soil. Potatoes were this big green question mark.

I had to buy a whole bag of them at the nursery but when it came time for planting I only had space for two in my big pot. At this point I hadn’t even prepared a raised bed or tilled any of my garden’s hard, clayey soil. I hated to waste perfectly good seed potatoes though, so without a thought I threw a few of them straight into the dirt in a corner of my garden and essentially forgot about it.

That was over two months ago now, and while the potted potatoes shot up immediately and have flourished in their cushy digs,


the ones in the forgotten corner have stayed small and sad and neglected, barely growing 6 inches and then just sort of staying that size.

To be honest they made me feel more guilty than hungry and so today as I was watering the rest of the garden, I decided I may as well pull them out and get it over with. Put them out of their misery so to speak.

Imagine my surprise then when I yanked out the saddest of the bunch and found not shriveled barren roots as I had suspected, but two perfectly formed (tiny) little red potatoes!


I couldn’t believe they’d grown anything at all. I rushed inside to see if they were even edible and sure enough after about three minutes in the microwave in a bowl of water the little guys were about the most tender, butteriest, delightful little roots I’ve think I’ve ever had.


And they practically grew themselves! Now I can’t wait to find out what’s hiding in the big pot. I think I’ll have a potato party this weekend.

What Grows On

Florida, I think I’m in love with you.

These past few weeks have been glorious: sunshine, birdsong, and an explosion of flora. The dogwoods have mostly faded now, but they were incredible, like shimmering tufts of snow.


And the Azaleas, be still my heart, I’ve never seen anything like it. They’ve got every shade imaginable here, from office-paper-white to soft, fluttery pink to vibrant, electrifying violet. And when they flower it’s all at once, this avalanche of pure, saturated color. It’s overwhelming, really. I’ve almost crashed my car from it. Seriously!


While I haven’t been blogging much, it’s only because my fingers have been too caked in dirt to go near my computer. That’s right, the garden is in full effect, and I couldn’t be happier with it. To date I’ve planted an absurdly ambitious assortment of goodies in my little space. Though now that everything is starting to come up, I think there’ll be a lot of tough love to be shown as, well, 15 Buttercrunch lettuce heads can’t really share a one-foot square of bed space, how ever well-intentioned.

All in all there are about 25 containers out there now,

plus I’ve built two small raised beds and loaded them with seeds (most of which have sprouted!).

But the most exciting developments so far have to do with the plants I bought impulsively back at the end of February

The eggplants have displayed their first purple flowers,

the lettuce has been eaten and enjoyed, and my violet bell pepper plant is steadily growing two of the most fantastic-looking peppers I think I’ve ever seen.


!!!

Of course all this garden reverie is not without the occasional looming cloud. Lately the weather channel has been whispering about a serious chill sweeping in over much of the country. Down here’s not supposed to be hit nearly as hard as some of the North, but then again, gardeners up there probably don’t have such a precarious hope chest of tender seedlings already sprouting through the soil…

I’m crossing my fingers! Send warm thoughts, please!

My First Salad!

I was thinning the Mescaline Mix seedlings this afternoon when I realized, "Hey, I could eat these little things!". I looked around the meager garden and noticed the Red Oak Leaf lettuce I bought at the nursery was in need of some maintenance as well. I broke off a handful of the pretty leaves, plucked some Johnny Jump Up blossoms, threw it all into a bowl and splashed on some dressing for the prettiest impromptu salad I ever did see. If I do say so myself...

Here to eating the garden!

Tomatomania!

Ever since my little venture into the frenzied world of Heirloom Tomato enthusiasts, getting my hands on some impressively unusual tomato plants has been a minor obsession of mine. Suddenly my garden will not be complete without some towering vines cascading in lumpy, multicolored, so-delicious-it’s-been-passed-down-through-nine-hardwoking-generations-of-Amish-farmers fruit. The only problem has been figuring out how to make it actually happen.

I’ve found a ton of websites selling heirloom tomato seeds. Often with tantalizing photos and ecstatic copy about how each one of their 400 varieties just happens to be the tastiest, most beautiful, biggest, sweetest heirloom on the market. It’s hard not to get wrapped up in all the hype. The only problem is, I don’t have time for seeds.

Seeds, had I bothered, would have had to have been started a month ago, in that greenhouse I don’t have, and then transferred out about now into those raised beds I haven’t gotten around to finishing…

But I just want my purple tomatoes! Like, yesterday.

I was almost ready to give in and settle for whatever predictable red variety I could find at my local nursery, when I stumbled upon a website that appears to be the answer to all my problems.

Windowbox.com is a site geared towards container gardeners like myself. Along with the usual useful tubs and window boxes and space-saving gardening equipment, they ship 10-week-old organic heirloom tomato seedlings all across the country. I still haven’t figured out which I am going to order. I only have so much space, but the pictures and descriptions make it tough to not just click “add to my cart” over and over until my finger falls off.

Anyway, I’ll update soon when I’m ready to place my order. I’m very excited!!!

Duck, duck...

Can I call it Spring yet? Seriously. The sun keeps shining like crazy, the birds wake me up in the morning, even the time has changed. And last week I sat in the park for an hour watching day-old ducklings test the waters beside their mama.

It's gotta be time to put seeds in the ground!

Any other North Florida Gardeners out there got any advice? I'm new here...

Sturm und Drang

"75 and sunny" I said! Ha!

More like menacing and thunderous.

I must have jinxed something because last night we had the most incredible storm. I'd never seen anything like it (we stick to earthquakes over in Los Angeles). Rain poured down in sheets from the eerily glowing sky as nearly continuous thunder and lightning created this dizzying strobe effect of light and sound. The wind whipped through my open window so hard it knocked half the items off my desk.

Jerrod and I raced out in ponchos to protect my tender seedlings from the onslaught. We called out to each other as we worked above the ceaseless, deafening roar, and the sense of urgency and camaraderie was the picture of melodrama.

So much fun!

Jerrod, Southern, used to all this, could brush it off and go to sleep indifferent. But I in my naive excitement was up for hours just watching the squall.

Everyone (plants included) was fine in the morning. Except for a few fallen branches it's like it never hit at all. The sky is back to baby blue and I'm gardening again as usual. Check out my amazing potato plants. They're growing like an inch a day! I can hardly mound the earth up fast enough.


And see how pretty my "mystery planter" (which turned out to be an old grill, go figure) looks all done up in lettuce, nasturtiums and two bell pepper plants?


This place is something else, I'll tell you that much.

Spring?

Sue over at The Balcony Garden really nailed it when she said it’s actually February that’s the cruelest month. How can we resist the temptation to put things in the ground when the birds are singing and the jackets absent and the sky looks like this all day long?


It’s especially tricky when you just moved somewhere and haven’t learned the reality of the seasons yet.

Add to this the fact that it’s been 75 and sunny for nearly a week now and the 10-day forecast shows more of the same, and well, you’d be hard pressed to keep me from dashing down to the nursery to load up my radio flyer with an ambitious assortment of goodies.


Is it too early for all this? The nursery was buzzing. I’ll take my chances.

Besides, that’s the beauty of container gardening. If a cold snap threatens, I can just bring them all inside!

Does it get any better?

One Man's Trash...

Gardening changes the way you look at the world. I'm not talking philosophically here, or spiritually, that’s a whole separate post. I mean becoming a gardener means you look at things, physical things, in this different, opportunistic way. You become this scavenger.

When my roommate yesterday cleaned out the crawl space under our house he dragged its contents to the side of the road to be disposed of.

I was aghast.


All this beautiful treasure: some sweet old seat-less rocking chair, fine wood planks to frame a raised garden bed, an empty plastic suitcase to start seeds in… just cast aside, forgotten.

I tried not to be too huffy as I dragged most of it away from the street and back behind the house.

I'm proudest of this gem:
Won’t it be just perfect with some Swiss chard filling up the center and nasturtiums flowing over the sides? It even has wheels! What a find!

Any ideas on what it actually might be?

Aunt Jubilee’s Great Orange Ball of Flaming Fire

The cold snap last week saw the whole neighborhood shrouded in old blankets and flannel sheets as people attempted to protect their greenery from the insidious killing frost. I’ve never seen that before. It looked morbid and tender at the same time.

Not much gardening could be done so I dragged my babies indoors, positioned them under a grow light, and settled in to do some serious botanical research.

I’ve been wanted to learn more about the different tomatoes I might grow, and so I sat down at the computer, typed a few words into the search engine, and thus I began my odyssey into the fantastic, fanatical, endlessly fascinating world of Heirloom tomatoes.

And what a world! Did you know there are over 4,000 varieties of tomato? In the supermarket you’re lucky to find maybe 4 or 5 varieties, and even then they are just this mealy, tasteless, anonymous produce. A mockery of cultivation! A tomato satire!

Spend a few minutes on the internet, however and you’re exposed to a veritable cornucopia of tomatomania. They come in all imaginable shapes, sizes, colors. Red? How passé! Try peach, or black, or eggshell white. Some of them even have stripes.



Some are lumpy and enormous, weighing 3 pounds or more. Some are tiny and sweet, like little candies. Almost all have these fabulous names, like Hillbilly Potato Leaf, Mr Stripey, Nebraska Wedding, Wapsipinicon Peach and my favorite: Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter.

Their descriptions are rapturous. The Ananas Noire Tomato is, apparently:

“a true gem as it features a genuine kaleidoscope of colors between a jade green, a stunning purple and a bright yellow. When sliced, it reveals a bright green flesh with deep crimson streaks of color that has a wonderful sweet, smoky flavor with a slight hint of citrus.”

Might as well by a wine label. And why not? This, I’ve learned is a serious art. Most of these cultivars have been painstakingly perfected over years and years by passionate backyard botanists, then carefully passed on through the generations. It's no hobby.

I spent hours pouring over my choices. A whole world of flavor and texture and novelty has been opened to me. At the moment I’ve narrowed it down to about 97 varieties that I need for my garden . When I come to my senses I suppose I can narrow that down to about ten or so. Stay tuned!

You Say Potato...

My roommate Jerrod walked into the kitchen this morning and wrinkled his nose in the direction of the countertop.

“There’s something wrong with these potatoes, dude.”

“Oh my God, what is it?” I shrieked, rushing to join him.

“Well, for one they’re all nasty looking. And they’ve got like, stuff growing out of them.”


I sighed with relief. “They’re perfect.” I picked one up to examine it, “At least, I think they are…”

I’ll admit they did look a bit suspect, all callused and pink and warty, but the man at the nursery told me that’s what they’d look like, and who am I to question?

I’ve never grown potatoes before. In fact I had no intention of growing them, until last week at the garden center I was arrested by a cheerful, promising display. Five-pound sacks of Red Pontiacs for 2.99 a piece? Why, come summer I’d have enough potatoes to feed the neighborhood! I had to get in on it.

The salesman explained the process: cut them into egg-sized chunks and let them callus over, stick them into average dirt, when the sprouts sprout, mound them in more dirt. Repeat the process for a couple months, then dig your hand into the soil and retrieve your treasure. So simple! So mysterious! How could I resist?

I planted my little aliens in a big pot out in the yard today.

I’ll keep you posted on what becomes of them…

In other news, I’ve planted three types of tomato and one sweet organic basil plant I got at the local grower’s market on Wednesday.


I’ve read they make great companion plants, (the basil influencing the flavor of the young tomatoes), but I have my suspicions that that has more to do with their established culinary association than with any mystic cultivational alliance.

(I don’t think “cultivational” is really a word…)

Either way I’m excited to eat them together!

Stay tuned!

A Borage Plant Grows in Florida.

My story, in a nutshell, is that I move a lot. All my (grownup) life I've never managed to stay put in any house or apartment for all of a year. The reasons for this are manifold (restlessness, escapism, general thirst for adventure…) but probably sort of tedious, so we’ll cut to the chase with this confession: I'm not the most reliable gardener.

I do love plants, however, and nearly everywhere I end up I attempt to grow some. Problem is, to be considered a real gardener one must establish, well, roots. Knowing the soil and the seasons and the subtle, shifting temperament of one’s little Eden is a pretty big part of the picture. True gardeners spend years on one plot consistently observing and nurturing the earth. Their gardens are ever-evolving masterworks of dedication, sweat and loyalty.

I, on the other hand, stick three old pots on my doorstep and call myself a farmer.

But it’s a process; I’m getting there. I’m not quite ready to settle myself and watch the dirt ripen, but eight days ago I moved from an overpriced apartment in Los Angeles to a sweet little house in Tallahassee and here I’ve decided to try and see how much produce I can grow in the instantly gratifying, endlessly forgiving conditions of a container garden.

I’m not sure if my little experiment will work, but I thought it might be fun (or funny) to document the attempt…

And so, without further yammering: welcome to my blog! Come back soon and I might actually have a garden to show you…

'Til then!