Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )
Onions are no so much a vegetable as a necessity. At the old farmstead, I planted 2000 onion sets a year. This year, a quarter of that on about ten square feet of where the front lawn was removed last Easter.
They may last until Christmas. Unless I make a whopping pile of onion jam or something nutty like that. The smell of harvesting them with your bare hands is exotic. If onions, something we ate 1,000 years ago, were not common they would be a spice. Next year, more.
The garden – by which I mean the yard – has been inordinately productive while promising more and more.
The green beans are on their third wave of crop. Salad green have been on every plate for weeks. Stoke’s Cherokee purple tomatoes are meaty things with tiny watery seed cell. And, as illustrated, the yellow and purple fleshed carrots that were planted where I lifted up front lawn on Easter weekend are now a foot and a half long. I dug deep. Layered in a deep seam of sheep poo. Going into a carrot cake this evening. And green beans can be made into pesto. Who knew? Ripped out another yew hedge and put in black currants. Sugar snap peas for autumn planted.
Foot long Chinese pole beans are in my diet now. Hidden under over reaching… or, really, crowded… collards there are defiant multi-coloured Swiss chard. I am already looking at seed catalogs dreaming of next year. And that shower stall in the basement might get turned into a salad grow-op for the off season. It already has a drain so why not? I could start 1,000 onion seeds in February in my own home. I could. As the thumbnail shows, Google maps hardly recognizes the place out front since the decision was to ditch the ornamental ugliness of the front lawn for tasty utility.
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The drought has had its effect. Something of a shut down by the onions. A refusal to go on. Squash and zucchini did not make it for a couple of reasons well studied already. But the leaves are booming. I have two sorts of mustard green as well as beet greens, red and green oak leaf lettuce as well as spinach. The salad bowl is full nightly. Beans boom. We are between flowerings so may well be looking at a late August harvest mirroring the mid-July one. A second planting of peas is taking off, too. Basil is booming. It will be pesto week. Collards have formed a blue green wall. All but two of the grave vines have excelled. Location is everything apparently. Having a yard full of berries now makes sense. There is nothing wrong with a yard full of berries. The rabbit has taken up residence. Were this 1870, he would make a swell stew along with the purple and yellow carrots. Starting to think about next year already. Five month to seed catalog ordering you know. Soil will need shifting, too. Much depends on soil quality.
Acalymma vittatum or the striped cucumber beetle is the enemy of my now entirely dead blue hubbard squash. The wee bastards not only chop the plants themselves but carry the wilt bacteria in their propagating guts. Bastards. Anyway, all the vines are dead and I seethe with hatred. The only thing that calms me is the vast crop of green beans, lettuce and carrots.
We are eating our greens and have pretty much been since early June. I also built a second raised box bed out of cedar this week and have started to think more systematically about what the front lawn will look like. See, I have a system. And the system demands berries. So, out with the ornamental hedges of juniper and yew and in with the juneberries, raspberries, black currants and other stuff.
And it has rained. It began raining about 4 am and has been raining off and on since then. Big news since we’ve been mostly dry since early June.
What a difference a week makes. The long vines to the right are yellowed and likely lost. I do not have the heart to photograph them. All for the lack or even delay in application of a little copper sulphate. Really? Apparently I also did not know the golden rule: do not water your winter squash from above but tickle only from below. Who knew? Lesson learned. Well, some are now saved but, as on the Day of Judgement that awaits us all, others may not be saved. In better news, the yellow pettypan summer squash are being eaten, the replacement zucchini are up, the cantaloupe show no sign of disease but no sign of fruit either, the green beans are heroic, the carrots are worth pulling from the ground and leaf lettuce continues to feed us. The grapes greens thrive. Leeks are holding their own. The raised bed built just last week shows good efforts from both the mixed greens and basil. I may mow but only to reshape the weeds. Still no rain.
On rolls the summer. The lawn has the texture of shredded wheat cereal. The squash display a range of coping that stretches from vitality to the grave. Next year more zucchini. Not the green hot dog shaped ones though I have rammed more of those seeds into the ground to compensate for the lack luster patch of blue hubbards. No, I want the yellow 1950s spaceship shaped ones, pattypens. Been watering like a mad man. Everything has made its case for increased acreage next year. I would not sow a second round of bok choi, however. Seems to be not liking the heat. Spring and fall for that one. Carrots have been eaten. Onions are robust. Made a box out front with cedar boards. The box itself cost maybe $35 bucks to build but the soil was more. Some handy, though. That’s what I said when I looked upon my work and saw that it was good. “You’re some jeesely handy” I said to myself. And so I was.
Bok Choi is now my favorite garden crop. I had no idea it grew this quickly. While we still wait for lettuces to get to a point where thinnings could be added to a salad, the bok choi is ten times the size. Peas are flowering. I need more carrot seed. More space, too. I want to dig up the lawn and ram potatoes in its place.
The grapes are all in and buds are popping quite nicely. There are 29 vines on the lot now. Viognier, Cabernet Franc, Concord and Pinot Noir. I want more. I am having a hard look at the front lawn for next year. It can’t all be onions and squash, can it?
Beet greens do not exist on my lands. Swiss Chard needs to be renamed Swiss chewed. What the hell is going on? Lettuce is not touched. Bok choi booms but there plans are eaten down to the stems. They seem to be making a fight for it, re-sprouting leaves only to see them nibbled again days later. Sugar snap peas full the multi-story shelf unit I set out for them to climb into. No buds yet which bodes very well for plenty in the near future. Had to move a couple of tomato plants due to rouge swash popping up unexpectedly. Two Cabernet Franc plants yet to locate. 27 vines in the ground so far. Four varieties. If that turns into a lot of jam and nothing more, is that so bad? Dandelions are a thing of the past. Why do we fret? It is a 2 week event. Leeks roar as only green hairs can roar. Rabbits apparently do not like leeks either. Parsnips continue to pop out of the ground 48 times more slowly than carrots.
When you plant a garden, you really should be thinking about meals. Today, the meal I was thinking of happens in 2021 or so when I have my own white wine from our own vines and a raspberry pie from our own canes. The grapes may have paid for themselves by then. Sure, it will all be for nothing if the Mayan calendar thing is correct but you have to have dreams. Beet root is starting to impose itself on my mind. I like me a good roasted beet. And a pickled one, too. Which leads you to meat and cheese. I was thinking that my small property couldn’t produce either until I saw the state of the Swiss chard out front. A rabbit got to it. So, if I am feeding the rabbit ought not the rabbit feed me. I knew a perfect rage only known by Elmer Fudd for a minute there. The squash is producing flowers already. The nasturtiums are up. I ate a bok choi leaf. Or was the other one the bok choi? I look at lawn like a desert now. A pointless patch of the inedible yet time consuming. Every front yard is a ton of carrots lost.
Everything is up. Even the leeks of desperation sown where the leek seedlings failed. Leeklings? Bush beans and pole beans jumped out as well. There are a few patches for second sowings but now it looks like the main task is weeding. But what does a parsnip look like when it is first up? How do you know for sure what is the weed and what isn’t? That’s the trouble when you take a decade off from vegetable gardening – no institutional memory is left. Somewhere I even had a book that I kept notes in. Now it’s all just “throw some seeds there, see what happens.” I ate a pea shoot. It felt a bit like infanticide what with all the July peas in their pods that shoot represented. But it was good and I felt righteous. The neighbourhood smells good. Last Thursday at the softball game there was so much lilac in the air it was like being back in the flower shop my mother ran. The hubbard squash looks like it is ready for greatness. Good thing too as the front lawn looks awful. It needs a bit of cucurbita action to give it some interest. The onion patch near the front door looks so good I only feel badly about not making it five times the size.