Category Archives: My Toils

Fall Gardening – Converted Cold Frame Pulls Double Duty for Seedlings

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Fall gardening, for me this year, means keeping it easy.

Mostly because the squirrels and sun aren’t on our side come late September.  I’ve started cabbages and kale and lovingly transplanted them to well-prepared containers up and down our stairs in autumns past, only to have squirrels dig them up daily until the sun lost itself behind the neighbor’s house.

Never again.

This year I have my magical cold frame I converted to a squirrel-free grow box – I simply swapped out the glass lid for a hardware-cloth (wire mesh) lid.  Anything I plant outside of this box will be on a whim and left to its own devices on the squirrel front.

Inside the box, we took our freshly emptied summer pots, seeds leftover from spring, and planted mesclun mix, turnips, radishes and a few onion seeds.

With heavy rains forecast for the following few days, the kiddo and I dragged out an old shower curtain, tucked it under the lid’s edges, and weighed it down with scrap wood for good measure.  These rains would be remnants of Hurricane Isaac, and all summer has been either no rain or crazy-windy-big-storm rain, so might as well add the wood.

The kiddo, B, who had methodically pinched the tiny seeds from my palm and less methodically sewed them, was very into storm proofing the cold frame. She’s three now and loves a good project, especially a short one she can get her helping little hands on.

The next day we got nearly 4 inches of rain in two hours.

I didn’t touch anything for two more days.

Today, SEEDLINGS!!!  Tiny sprouts!!!  No washout from the rain!  Not wanting to further starve them for light, we set the scrap wood cover aside but kept the shower curtain.  The weatherman says we’re still at risk for all-or-nothing rain the next few days.

Let’s see if we can squeeze a few beet, spinach and kale seeds into the squirrel-free, rain-shuttered box in a few days.

Herbs – Pruning Basil to Get More Basil

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Basil.

When I worked at the garden center, if a customer bought only one herb, it was basil.  Folks would ask how to harvest it and, depending on which of us was asked, the answer was usually either “pick leaves” or “cut stems.”

You don’t have to be a an either/or pruner, but thoughtful harvesting will ensure you have fresh basil all summer long.

For a few leaves on sandwiches or in salads, step out and pick a few from established plants.  But when you need a good amount for a recipe, or when the plant gets about a foot tall, snip the plant above the second or third set of leaves.  Two stems will grow just below the cut and your basil will produce much more basil than just picking leaves as you need them.

If this sounds simple but harsh, read this basil thread on GardenWeb to see that you can’t really do it wrong but you can do it well by keeping a few things in mind:

1.  Leave 1/3 of the plant growing when you prune/harvest.

2.  Let the plant recover before cutting again.  Feel free to pick a few leaves (and leave enough leaves behind when you harvest to do so).

3.  Harvest diligently (every four weeks or so) if you want to prevent your basil from flowering.

4.  Grow multiple basil plants to harvest one each week.

Whether or not to let your kitchen basil flower is another topic entirely.  I’m in the pinch-it-off camp, that is, if the plant is able to out-run my kitchen snips.

Come late fall, I let all the basil flower their hearts out.  The plants are spent, the flowers look great and the little flower heads are fun to fry up in a skillet.

If I were smart, I’d harvest the seeds to get more basil.

Native Plants – The Delightful Wild Strawberry

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Wild strawberries.

A few years ago I’d never hard of them.  Our neighbor who gardened before me in our shared back yard would (thankfully) weedwack everything outside the flowerbed she built.  As I started gardening back there as well, I asked she leave the little strawberries be.  I’d noticed most the nasty other weeds didn’t grow through their little patches.

And they’re cute.

The wild strawberries inspired me to buy cultivated strawberries and plant them a few places the wild ones thrived.  The cultivated ones made it into their second year this season with great fruit alongside their wild cousins.

The toddler says “They’re strawberries everywhere!” as she goes around picking and eating the little wild ones that all ripened these last few weeks.  She loves them.  To me they taste like tiny seeds held together with a little juice-less flesh, I’m not that into eating them.  She checks on the “real” strawberries and reports to me when the cultivated ones are ready to pick.  She has free reign over the wilds.

The wild strawberries keep to the edges (being many in our city yard) and make the most polite garden bed invaders.  Their little runners constantly make it across our scavenged brick-and-stone bed border but I divert them back across as I find them.  Slowly they mound and fluff up in favored spots.

The Complete Book of Herbs, by Lesley Bremness, confirms Fragaria vesca fruit are edible and suggests eating fresh with cream or using for jam, cakes, pies and syrups or to flavor liqueurs and cordials.  It also notes the leaves of woodland strawberries can be infused with other herb teas to add bite and, medicinally, infuse as tea for anemia, nervousness, gastrointestinal and urinary disorders.  Reading you can eat the fruits as iron supplements sold me.

Today, as B brought me tiny wild strawberries with garden-dirty fingers and a giggles, I said “Thanks so much!” instead of “Oh, thanks, but that’s for you.”

Iron never tasted so cute.

Fruit – Strawberries!

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Strawberries!

The photo says it all.

Our two surviving strawberry mounds say hello to their second summer with a fat little crop.

We just returned from five days away visiting Neal’s parents in Florida.  Maybe being away actually let them ripen, the slugs and rodents must have other things to eat since only a few of these had any nibbles.

B loves her welcome-home present from poppa (a new watering can) and watered the strawberry patch with renewed enthusiasm.

You can grow your own strawberries, you can be pretty intense about it or you can go pick your own in Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Search your local area for varieties to grow or pic- your-own farms.

Potting – Pepper and Tomato Frenzie

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Pots!  Get the pots!  Need more potting soil!

That about sums up the last week.

Some of the tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings finally started taking off.  Plus, I am about to take off for a long weekend, so I sorted what to keep and give away, and got to potting.

The Jimmy Nardello’s Italian pepper, Celebrity tomato, Garden Peach and Eva Purple Ball tomatoes were the first chosen and potted.  The rest of the week blurred by with Flower Mart, The DC State Fair seedling swap, more potting and more planting.

Companion planting scratches that itch to magically make containers produce more with less fuss.  I am obsessing over borage this year but have never grown it.  It deters tomato hornworms and is a best friend to nearly everything, so I stuck a borage seedling in with each big pot I planted this week.  This may have been wishful thinking since they grow 2 – 3 feet tall.

I mixed and matched other tomato companions: marigolds, basil, carrots and chard.

I heard from Midwest gardeners on through to the East Coast and South saying they were slammed busy between rains this week.  I think we were all on twitter during the rain and outside when it wasn’t.

What did you plant this week?

Herbs – Divide and Conquer

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WARNING: This is not a how to.  This is a what I did.

I have never before divided old plants.  My timidness on the practice explains why my herb box has gone five years without splitting up the overgrown chives and thyme.

For real advice on dividing plants, start with Fine Gardening’s 10 Tips for Dividing Perennial Plants.  If you’re looking to create more plants from cuttings, see Gayla Trail’s guest post on Apartment Therapy.

I read a few google results on dividing thyme and chives and went for it.  I also divided my old Golden sage but, it turns out, that was probably a waste of time.  I didn’t even take pictures since it just felt wrong how I cut it in half.  The leaves were tiny and bland last summer, about a year after I should have replaced it.  I have a robust Berggarten sage starting its second season and can live without the spent Golden.

Really, I should pull out the divided Golden sage to allow more room for the two flagrant cat-lady additions: pineapple sage and lemon thyme!  (Though, my impulse-buy pineapple sage might get too large for my herb box, it would be lovely to see it bloom just outside our screen door.)

I created the new (second) herb box for a friend, she’ll receive it in a few weeks once I’m sure the inhabitants recovered from surgery.

If these herbs survive my dividing, I will have conquered one more proper maintenance item.

Seedlings – Get in the Ground!

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Miss B’s and Mr. O’s beans look great and look huge in their Ben and Jerry’s pints because they’re beans.

Mr. O is out of town but they left a shiny new toddler wheelbarrow in the backyard to share.  What better inaugural run than filling it with dirt to transplant a pair of beans!

Don’t take bean growing advice from me, I tried growing them in the fall of 2010 to pathetic results.  No matter, it’s spring 2012 now.

B was seriously into getting the first bean into the ground, telling it to do so as I separated the pair and eagerly digging a hole for it.  As for transplanting the other into our repaired pot, once she helped fill it with dirt, she was out of there.

She had bigger plans for the wagon.

 

What’s Growing – A Few Chilly Days til May

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DC spring decided to switch gears to cold rain with May a week away.

One last hurrah from the Winter that Never Was.

Checking on the plants in the cold drizzle showed just how far the garden has come since setting the first seed pots in the cold frame two months ago.  April weather dipped cooler more often than March and the seedlings have gone through growth spurts between holding steady.  The cold frame is protective but only gets a few hours of good sun thanks to the rowhouse canyon of our backyard.  Each day their sun time increases thanks to the earth tilting in our favor as spring heads towards summer.  Things are growing, albeit a little slowly.

I’m wildly satisfied.

The Update

1.  Turnips!  The top: March 21st, four days after sowing.  Bottom: April 23rd.  I need to thin them out.

2.  Parsnips!  The right: Radishes alongside the parsnips last week.  Left: Radishes thinned to let the parsnips grow.  Originally sown March 17th.

3.  Beets!  The top: Sown March 17th.  Bottom left: The few that sprouted looking noble last week.  Bottom right: Either heavy rains or a bird flatted two, April 23rd.  Sadly, I need to thin the few that are growing.

4.  The Camilla!  Top: The last bloom hanging on five weeks after the first opened.  Bottom: Those that let go below it, April 23rd.

5.  Zinnias and Marigolds!  Top row: Transplanting them from their egg carton seed pots, around April 4th.  Bottom: They were the first to get kicked out of the cold frame a few weeks ago.  Short, but growing, April 23rd.

6.  Chives blooming!  This herb box welcomes its fifth season with the same chives, thyme (also blooming) and golden sage (not pictured).  I should replant the box but don’t want to touch it (other than my usual fertilizing and mulching), the inhabitants seem happy as is.  It survived Snowmageddon and Snoverkill in 2010.

7.  Mesclun!  Sown March 31st, pictured April 23rd.  Tiny salads at our first 2012 BBQ this Sunday!

8.  Bush Beans!  Top row: Planted by and for toddlers, April 5th.  Mid row: They sprouted(!) April 17th.  Bottom: Thriving, April 23rd.

9.  Wine-Box-O-Root-Veggies!  Top row: Prep, sow, grow (radishes a few days past April 5th sowing).  Mid row:  A few tiny beets on the left, carrots on the right and radishes all over, April 23rd.  Bottom: Carrots in front of radishes, April 23rd.

10.  Onions!  Top: Reclaiming pantry onions for their greens, April 11th.  Bottom: The stalks look great and spinach seeds sprouted alongside, April 23rd.  I’ll harvest the tops as scallions this weekend, they should regrow.

11.  Potatoes!  Left side: Planting a sprouted potato so the foliage will hang off our stair rail (just for looks), April 11th.  Right side: It’s growing, April 23rd.  I do this every year.  The pot is too small and it’s never as lush as the ornamental sweet potatoes, but it grows.  To really grow potatoes, you do it differently.

12.  Fresh seedlings!  Left: Balsam, 10 days after sowing.  Right: Borrage, 10 days after sowing.

13.  Freshly sown!  Trying to slip under the wire with this cold snap: onions, spinach and mesclun, sown April 22nd.

14.  Tomatoes!  I have yet to count how many tomato seedlings we have, same principle as counting chickens before they hatch.  I kicked a few out of the cold frame April 20th and two days later the 48-hr cold rain came.  I huddled them behind the covered bike to protect them from the 40 mph predicted wind gusts, picture April 23rd.

What’s not growing?  Basil.  After fighting off cutworms, they died after transplanting.  They were tiny and I think succumbed to damping off.  I’ll try again in a week or so.  I’ll also direct sow a few in the big tomato pots when the tomatoes are ready for final transplanting.

Not bad.

Not bad, at all.

Harvest – Radishettes!

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Look at these delightful tiny radishes!

They aren’t really even radishes yet, we planted them only three weeks ago.  Eleven days ago they were well on their way to radishdom.  Today it seemed we should thin a few.

The toddler helped me choose the which needed more space and – pop! – we ate these tender little radishettes with our dinner!

Eating greens and all, Bunny looked at me and said, “Mom, I wanna eat more radishes.”

Super yay.

Sowing – DIY Salad Crate Via Melissa and Doug

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Free seeds.

I have 28 packs of seeds I ordered and scheduled on my sowing calendar, but for the free seeds, I lack a plan.

I attended the Washington Gardener Magazine Seed Exchange a few months ago and found a fun selection of seed packets in the swag bag.  I was already splitting seeds with friends and gave a few packets away.  Where to plant the ones I kept?

Our apartment building has one trash can out back and I noticed our neighbor’s toy wooden crate from their Melissa & Doug Band-in-a-Box set on top.  This is such an annoying piece of packaging (we have similar toy wooden crates from M&D products).  It’s a fair-sized wooden crate made solely for the purpose of making you feel kitschy and earthy about the product within.  It’s not quite sturdy enough for a toddler to really be trusted with and it’s not flimsy enough to immediately toss when you open the package at home.

It’s a marketing ploy in small wooden crate format.

I saw it there on top and immediately thought of the free seeds:

- Botanical Interests Lettuce Mesclun Asian Salad Greens (21 – 45 days till maturity)

- Thompson & Morgan Organic Beet Bolivar (British site, I could not locate them on the US site) (70 days for full-grown beets)

- Peaceful Valley Cherry Belle Radish (20 – 30 days)

If I harvest the mesclun mix as young greens and the beets as babies, I only need a container that will last about two months.  After that, I’ll keep cutting mesclun mix greens until the summer heat stifles them or the crate falls apart.

The photo set tells how I turned a tossed toy crate into a petite salad garden, inspired by Life on the Balcony’s pallet garden.

DIY – Seed Starting – Step One [LOST POST]

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I wrote this post two months ago (January 26).  I looked it up to add a link to tomorrow’s post and, what do you know, I never posted it.

Oops.

This spring all out of whack, everything is blooming a few weeks early with the steady warm weather, but I’ve pegged mid-April as DC’s date of last frost.  That’s based on a few internet searches, not gardening experience.  I usually run out in late May and buy a slew of young plants at the garden center, this is my first year aggressively starting my own seeds in spring.

The post is still relevant so here you go.   Happy seed planning!

STEP 1:  Find a seed source: local hardware store, garden center, online seed swap, local seed exchange, neighbors, online retailer, etc.

I chose Southern Exposure Seed Exchange because they are in the same plant hardiness zone as I and have an amazing selection of Southern heirlooms at good prices.  They promote seed saving and traditional plant breeding to counter the loss of crop diversity.

STEP 2:  Loose your inhibitions and imagine yourself growing more than you could possibly ever know what to do with.

STEP 3:  Now actually read the seed package or catalog guide to see what veggies/flowers/herbs might suit your situation.  The Living Garden has a great how-to on choosing seeds.

STEP 4:  Choose your seeds.  (Buy, barter, order or swap.)

STEP 5:  Make a chart or mark a calendar plotting when to start the variety of seeds you’ve chosen.  All the information you need is in the catalog and/or on the seed packet.  And there’s always the internet.

Growing – Radishes! Superfast!

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Just look at these perfectly tender radish sprouts!

I planted these little guys back on March 17th along with long-to-germinate parsnips (which should be sprouting soon).

The radishes should be ready to pull on April 7th – that’s in a week!  I love these instantly-harvestable shoots of joy.

Even their fat little first leaves reach up and shrug with a super-cheery “YAYY!!!”

It’s as though the parsnips have their own radish cheerleaders.

Cutworms – I am Winning

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SATURDAY:  I pleaded for help on twitter.

Something had cut down multiple basil seedlings.  Kathy Jentz with Washington Gardener suggested cutworms might be to blame.

In the evening hours between my original post and Kathy’s reply, another two basil seedlings were sliced down.

SUNDAY:  I found a cornmeal/molasses/Bt powder cocktail online that would work with the cold frame and went to town.

TUESDAY:  Today, two days after scattering the elixir, the basil STANDS!!!

My original tiny basil sprouts have three new tiny buddies and none have been cut down since sprinkling the cutworm kryptonite.

Winning.