Lifescapes

Essential garden tools 2

Earlier, I wrote about my garden journal as an essential garden tool. It is, especially as the seasons continue and I go back and compare notes. Let's see: when did I plant those peas last year? What varieties? When did they start to bear? When were they finished? What went into that bed when the peas were done?

But for me, an equally essential tool is my garden plan. I've set up a basic template on my computer, outlining the beds. (This could be done with pencil/pen just as easily.) I've numbered each bed and dated the plan. Then I go to work with my pencil, figuring out what goes where and when. Some crops need to be rotated, always a juggling act because my garden is currently fairly small (about 400 square feet of raised beds). I also have to take into account the fact that I live in a climate that permits a two-season garden. I do a lot of interplanting, as well: okra grows up, sweet potatoes grow down--they're good bedmates. I do a lot of erasing on my plan, and it evolves as the season goes on. But that sure beats planting and pulling up. A little pencil work saves a lot of time and energy. Do you make a plan for your garden? How does it work for you?

Book report. I'm taking a breather from writing this week. Cat's Claw flew off to New York, along with a proposal for the next three books in the China Bayles series--#21, 22, and 23, a fact that takes my breath away. China and I have been working on her projecct for a looong time. I also finished the copyedit of The Tale of Castle Cottage (the final book in the Beatrix Potter series); the page proofs for the hardcover edition (also available as an ebook) of The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies, due out on July 5; and the page proofs for the paperback edition of The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree also July 5. Whew.

Next up on the writing desk: The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose. This book's backstory involves the "real" Confederate rose: Rose O'Neal Greenhow, who spied for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Don't know how that's going to work out just yet. It'll be fun to find out.

Coming events. But my writing time will be limited, because April is travel month, with the publication of Mourning Gloria on April 5. I'm no longer doing national tours (just takes too much time, energy, and gasoline--and you know how I feel about saving energy!). But I'm still doing some Texas travel: Beaumont, Houston, Rockport, Victoria, Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas/Lewisville. You can check out the complete calendar here.

This morning, I'm heading out to the garden. It's time to take the plastic wind sleeves off the tomato cages and transplant the broccoli, pepper, and eggplant seedlings I've been raising under lights. Time to plant the sweet corn, too--altho that's as much a testament to gardening faith as it is to gardening savvy. We never get enough sweet corn to justify the space I give it. But I always hope that another variety will do better, that the weather will be more cooperative, and that the raccoons won't climb that fence.

Hope. Faith. That's what gardening is all about.

Reading note. We need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field [and the garden], in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.--Michael Pollan 

Lovely little lemon

 
Inspired by fellow writer Susan Tweit, I acquired a Meyer lemon. (I bought it online at Meyerlemontree.com, which shipped promptly and in a sturdy container. And no, they didn't pay me to say this.)

I'm not predicting success just yet, because I've only had my little lemon tree for a few weeks. But it arrived well rooted and loaded with buds, and since the buds are producing blossoms, I'm hopeful. I've kept it indoors on frosty nights, sent it out onto the deck when the sun shines, and am anticipating fruit (a cross between a lemon and either an orange or a mandarin orange) that looks like this:

I've read that most citrus trees are self-pollinating, and the flowers (as you can see) are bunched close together, which enhances pollination probabilities. But I spotted a friendly bee visiting the flowers, so I think that part of the reproduction process is covered. I hope so. I'd love to be able to grow our own lemons!

The rest of my life for the past two weeks feels as if it's been loaded with lemons--metaphorically speaking. My computer was infected with malware. The very nice geek who fixed it installed an anti-malware program that created all sorts of problems, as did the software updates he installed. Windows wouldn't let me upload photos from my camera, for instance--and there were other horrors. Finally, after four trips to Marble Falls (60 miles round trip, with the price of gas going skyward), I got smart and uninstalled the A-M program, which cured the problems, at least so far. Fingers crossed.

Unfortunately, the computer issues have slowed down the writing, and I'm about 10 days behind on Cat's Claw, the next book in the Pecan Springs series--the Sheila Dawson book. I'm hoping to get caught up in the coming week. The book is in good shape and I feel fine about it. Just hate being slowed down in the last chapters. That's when I really need the writing momentum to pull the book forward to its conclusion.

But lemons make lemonade, and the time I couldn't spend on the computer last week, I spent in the garden--a happy compromise, since gardening is the thing I most love to do, next to writing (and reading of course). The potatoes are recovering nicely from their hard freeze, the spinach, peas, onions, and lettuce look green and pretty. I built trellis for the beans and one warm day, with the soil temp at 72, planted beans and cucumbers. My seedling tomatoes will be going in later this week.

Reading note. What we do best comes from not from our heads but from our hearts, from an ineffable impulse that resists logic and definitions and calculation: love. Love is what connects us to the rest of the living world, the divine urging from within that guides our steps in the dance of life.--Susan J. Tweit, The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes



Essential Gardening 1: Potatoes

In 2008 (for reasons I explain in An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days) I turned my attention from flowers and herbs back to vegetables and herbs. I'm more interested, these days, in growing an essential garden: a garden of essentials that Bill and I can rely on to tide us over a food emergency--staple and storable foods, such as beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, and corn. I'm not growing these essentials because I'm expecting the world as we know it to end next week. I'm doing it because we love fresh foods and because I feel good about having greater control over our food supply. But I also know that the gardening skills, experience, and knowledge I'm gaining might just come in handy--if the world as we know it somehow and suddenly becomes the world we never expected.

Potatoes. In my Texas Hill Country garden, potatoes are always an iffy crop. The young plants in the photo I took a couple of days ago got zapped with an unexpected hard freeze last night. They'll recover, but they'll have to put some of their effort into producing more foliage crowns, rather than the tubers I covet. (If I'd known the temperature was going to plunge, I certainly would have covered my babies. But I didn't, and like all gardeners everywhere, have to live with the consequences.) Here, we plant potatoes on Valentine's Day, so they're vulnerable to late frosts. And we harvest them in mid-May: a short season and a fairly small crop.

But potatoes are still worth planting here, and they'll likely do even better in your garden. They thrive in most soils (their favorite pH is 6-7), they can be grown without any (or much) extra water, they store well, and they don't need anything more than a quick scrub to be marvelously, deliciously edible. They're much more delicious than potatoes you get at the grocery and they're not contaminated by the pesticides used by potato farmers. But best of all, they're a tidy package of pure food energy, with over 7 grams of protein, 270 calories, 25% of the RDA of fiber and 48% Vitamin C. Yes, some people can't eat them, and they do require some care in storing (keep them out of the light, to avoid skin greening). But these concerns aside, the potato provides nutritious, delicious meals for most of us. In the essential garden, potatoes are an essential crop--my favorite comfort food.

There's plenty of online how-to. Mother Earth News has a good article on planting. If you don't have space in your backyard (or maybe you don't have a backyard?), try garbage-can gardening. If you can't find seed potatoes locally (don't use supermarket potatoes: they may be sprayed with a sprout inhibitor), shop online. I buy mine from Wood Prairie Farms in Maine. Those folks publish an informative catalog (and have not paid me for this recommendation). Eventually, you may want to save your own seed--fine, as long as you have a disease-free crop.

I hope that the world as we know it stays just that way. If it doesn't, I hope I'll have a good crop of potatoes.

Reading note. Hard times are normal. . . My garden needed to be designed around the reality that life has its ups and downs. It has good times and bad. How to garden in the best of times was not the issue. I didn't need a "good-time garden." I needed to understand more about how to garden in hard times. I needed a more resilient garden. And I needed a garden that better enhanced my own resilience, in all kinds of times, good and bad. Carol Deppe, The Resilient Gardener