The Independent Stitch

Green tomatoes

We've had a hard enough frost to blacken the vines of the tomatoes and squash. Because of the repeated, late starts, most of our crop hadn't ripened yet. This is about four times as many tomatoes as we've had ripen on the vine this year.

As is evident in the raised bed that can be seen in the yard, the beets and carrots are still trucking. The tomatoes used to be within the squirrel-impeding wire enclosures directly behind them.

Next things to figure out:

1. What to do with green tomatoes. I did read about hanging them upside down while still on the vines, but I walked around the house carrying the vines for about five minutes and couldn't find a good place to accomplish that task, so they went on the windowsill instead.
2. Whether or not something I remember having read about not putting tomato vines into the compost should be a factor here, and if it should, what to do with the poor, wilted former-greenery, currently sitting on the deck awaiting a decision.

At least it feels like we are clearing space for next year's go at having a garden.

Garden harvest, just a bit

We've been on the edge of first hard frost for over a week. It's predicted yet again for within the next forty=eight hours or so. Sooner or later. . . .

Meanwhile, the raised beds offer promise for next year. We got some teasers out of them this year (well, out of the two we planted; we never got around to the third because it took so much to get the other two going).

Enough basil for a double batch of pesto (three quarters frozen, one quarter eaten).

Plus parsley, sage, and thyme:

And that lovely summer squash that the packet said could be used like zucchini, although its skin is a very light green and it was so sweet and tender it made the whole garden worthwhile. All that from ONE squashlet. We might get a couple more if the frost holds off for another few days.

The parsley turned into something pesto-like (only no nuts in it) and the sage and thyme are hanging in the office, drying.

We've already got a squirrel-deterrent cover in the works to be used on one of the beds next year.

I spent last weekend enjoying locally grown foods at the Artposium in Delta County, Colorado. Yum. More on that coming up.

Gardening: summary of a year of hail and squirrels

Predictions call for a hard frost tonight. If we don't get one, we may have a few more tomatoes and the tiny zucchinis may have time to get big enough to contribute to part of a meal.

However, we're close to closing out our gardening experiment for the year. It has not been a blazing success, but we do have this, which my daughter gathered in a few moments ago:

Parsley, sage, thyme, (no rosemary), and one home-grown zucchini. We also got a few tomatoes, and I have enough basil, clipped two days ago, for two batches of pesto.

Perhaps not remarkably abundant, but very pretty shades of green.

I know how to preserve basil in several different ways. I'm deciding what to do with the other herbs: freeze, dry, ? My daughter will probably saute the zucchini with a bit of garlic. We just had some (purchased) kale that way. She does a lovely job cooking simple, fresh vegetables.

We left the carrots and beets in the ground. They should be fine even if the temperatures drop. We haven't eaten any of our crop of root vegetables yet, so we're looking forward to seeing what happened underground. We think there's something down there under the leaves.

The garden: starting pretty much over at the end of July

After we built and filled the new raised beds for a kitchen garden, we got pummeled with hail. Repeatedly. We even had another hailstorm last week that knocked out one of the largest providers to our farmers' markets. The Community Supported Agriculture farms have been hard hit, and have been helping each other out, depending on who just got bombarded and who didn't.

This makes our miniscule backyard efforts look both insignificant and more important than ever.

Here is what our new garden looks like at the end of July, nearly eight weeks after the final frost:

It only looks this good because last night my daughter planted the replacement herbs we bought.

Inside the mesh walls at the back of the tallest bed are the tomatoes, doing their best to put out leaves and fruit despite the weather and the squirrels. In front of them are basil plants, one of which has made it through from the earlier planting and three of which are new. The marigolds have been trucking along fine since the start. It's been nice to have their cheerful color survive day to day. In front of the marigolds are some beets (you can actually see their green tops) and, nearly invisible, starts of carrots.

In the other four-foot bed, my daughter just added sage and parsley, and she is hoping her zucchini will make it before winter . . . and that the squirrels haven't dug up the seeds. There's chicken wire over the bed because the squirrels do love to dig around and kick the dirt out into the lawn.

We haven't planted the small bed at the back yet—too busy reworking and protecting the others.

Slow progress on building the garden's raised beds

One of my favorite phrases is the I Ching's "perseverance furthers." Around here, it's the only thing that does. Almost everything takes much longer to accomplish than I think it should.

Last week, an author I've been working with and I sent a book manuscript to its editor-at-the-publisher (I've been its developmental and line editor, working on a freelance basis). I looked into my files and discovered a document outlining our thoughts for this book that was dated April 2004. Just over five years. Well worth the time and effort. But not an "immediate gratification" sort of project.

Same with the garden's raised beds, on a smaller scale.

Here they are as of May 28:

Yup, nothing there but good intentions.

Here's June 5, a week later:

In between, we got the wood, and got it cut, got screws and nails, drilled holes, and fastened things together.

Here's June 7:

My daughter agreed to dig the sod out from inside the frames. When she finished, she covered the area with old newspapers. Her devoted helpers hung in there while she worked; it took two days' worth of spare time, and she caught up a little on some of the newspaper articles she hadn't had time to read when they first appeared. She's done with all this now. I was inside working on the book that just got sent off.

It's a week later and we still don't have any soil or plants in the beds. They'll get there. The afternoon thunderstorms have coincided with the times we might have had available to work on these next steps, and the hail would have pummeled the plants if we'd had them in the ground, so for the moment all is okay.

Meanwhile, things we planted in previous years in the front yard are rewarding us with carefree blossoms:

We're grateful (again) that the garden isn't in yet

We've been working on the raised beds between deadlines, but a few minutes ago had reason (again) to be very happy we haven't gotten the plants installed:

That's hail (again). It's our neighbor's trailer, right next to our driveway. Those clumps of ice are ricocheting off our roof.

Here's some of what accumulated in a couple of minutes. Most of those ice balls are about a half-inch (1.25cm) across.

Okay, we're going to try this garden thing again (starting late, but not too late)

I grew up around gardens in the Midwest, and my mother and my sister both garden, and I didn't notice that I had trouble growing things in the Pacific Northwest and New England, but so far this semiarid bit of the West has not encouraged my efforts. I did manage a few tomatoes and herbs and asters and marigolds at the first house we lived in here, but the second house (which we are still in) still has one of those blank back yards, not because I haven't tried.

Last year, we put some containers on the deck and harvested tomatoes and basil. It was fun. We probably could have bought the produce cheaper, but it finally gave us a taste of success in this environment. I've spent some time and energy seeing if anybody wanted to take on this yard as part of a SPIN farming project, exchanging use of the space and of water for a small share of the produce. Although there's an active SPIN network in Boulder, an hour away, nobody here has been interested beyond conversation.

So this year, we're taking it to the next level on our own.

Here's part of the space, and some of the supplies:

Here's my plan, and a resource book I learned about through Twitter and Facebook (with both of which I am only moderately acquainted and active):

One of the challenges for me is that square-foot gardening is pretty rectilinear, and I prefer a more natural or cottage-y aesthetic. However, I'm telling myself that anything we do is going to be aesthetically more interesting than what we have now.

When I was browsing for ideas, I came across garden plan 18 at the bottom of this page. I really like that big maze, and we have room enough for it. However, we can't afford to buy the components or fill the beds with dirt. Plus it might be too much for neophytes. . . . Just maybe. . . .

I also like labyrinths, arbors, garden seats, shade. Those are not in the plan.

Moving right along. . . .

I did figure out an arrangement of simple square and rectangular beds that appeals to me for its slightly maze-y feel. Right now, we are only putting in the beds that are drawn more darkly on the graph paper, but we wouldn't know where to place them without the whole concept (which, of course, is subject to change). We'll see what happens after we get those going. There will be two 4x4 beds and one 4x2 one. They will be 6 feet from the fences, leaving room for 2-foot beds and 4-foot aisles on those edges, should we get even more ambitious in the future. Aisles between the beds are a generous 3 feet, but I want plenty of room to play with a wheelbarrow around the periphery, if we decide we want to do things that involve wheelbarrows.

One thing that's appealing about the square-foot method is that the book gives enough information but not too much . . . especially for someone who wants to do everything right the first time, if possible, by researching the heck out of it, and is already involved with many work projects involving masses of material and looming deadlines. Another appealing aspect is that the soil amendments (of which we need plenty, being perched here on clay) get applied in a focused way to exactly where they're needed. If I'm going to use items of limited global supply, like peat, I want to use them efficiently.

While I was looking at hefty bags of compost (our home compost isn't ready yet), my daughter wandered over to the seed section at the garden center. I hadn't planned to buy any seeds without thinking the whole project through a bit more: I just want the beds in place in time to have a place to plunk down the tomato and basil plants we intend to buy at the farmer's market on Sunday.

Here are the seed packets we bought yesterday:

My daughter wants a zucchini plant (which will consume most of one of the larger beds), broccoli raab, kale, the yellow beets, and several of those lettuces. I added the red lettuce, the red beets, and the chard (I sense a color theme in my selections that I hadn't noticed before).

What's missing? Two of my favorite vegetables on earth: carrots and sugar snaps. I'm contemplating those, while browsing the Renee's Garden online catalog. Carrots need more depth than our beds will have, so I am thinking about that. Sugar snaps require support, which is beyond what I can think about right now. So do the tomatoes, but we have tomato cages from last year.

What else is missing? Wood to frame the beds. Cedar Supply is cutting up rough 2x6s for us and we'll pick them up this afternoon. I'm trying to decide if we can get away without cutting away the sod if we lay thick strata of newspaper and cardboard, topped with weed barrier, beneath each of the beds.

And here's the primary garden helper, who loves raspberries and will pick them for herself:

We don't currently have any raspberries. She probably likes strawberries, too. We're pondering this situation: it's one reason we find the square-foot gardening concept appealing. Because of the modular nature of the beds, we could make wire cages to set over the plants to limit the self-sufficient tendencies of certain critters. Although this helper is quite capable, she would probably need to ask us to grant her access to the strawberry beds (she probably, although not for certain, couldn't lift the cover off herself). We don't mind sharing. She would, however, cheerfully and daintily eat every morsel.

Our gardening assistant is ever-so-fond of the back yard even without anything other than grass to nibble on, and even though she can no longer get up the stairs by herself (that's why she wears a harness, so we can give her a little extra support when she needs to climb). She will be happy if we spend more time in the yard, even if we don't grow any berries for her this year.

Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair: Ideas slowly into action

Last year I went to the Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair, biking back and forth, and I've been looking forward to this year's event ever since. Nothing earthshaking or of immediate import happened last year, but I had a fine "day off" and learned about new things that I've slowly but surely been able to implement. Same sense this year.

One of my goals is to get solar panels on my house. So far, I haven't been able to find a way to afford them. (Fantasy: a booth with a sign that says, "You provide the roof. We provide the power." There was an outfit that was close to that offer last year, which worked because the excess power was sold by the panel-provider back to the grid, although the start-up costs were still beyond my budget.)

Another connection I located last year provides locally recycled printer cartridges. I've recently managed to shift to using their products in my printers—it takes a while to make such a change. Part of making this particular shift involved connecting with the suppliers when they're open . . . no weekend hours, and my weekdays are pretty crammed with work. So are my weekends, come to think of it. . . .

Recently I read in Edible Front Range about SPIN farming, the use of suburban land that would ordinarily be covered with lawn for the production of food. SPIN in this case stands for Small Plot Intensive farming. My type of spinning involves fiber, but this kind is extremely intriguing as well. There's no way that I have time to take on a major gardening project (beyond my plants on the deck), but I'd sure rather look at a garden than deal with so-called lawn, which isn't an appropriate use of space or water in a semi-arid climate.

The article mentioned that the initial steps of such a project were being undertaken in the city where I live, although there was no contact name. After reading through the property-providers' guidelines for the Boulder project (our space qualifies), I e-mailed Kipp Nash, who is coordinating the Boulder efforts, who forwarded my message to someone in our county offices here who is just at the initial stages of developing a resource list of interested people. She asked if I'd be willing to be a guinea pig on a collaborative mapping project, I said yes, and our site is the first on the list of available spaces. However, it's hard to tell how long it will take the local interest to reach critical mass since so far there are only about seven people on the mailing list for the mapping.

While at the fair, I was talking with my friend (and fellow shape-note singer) Hill, who is spearheading a local food project called the Northern Colorado Food Incubator. (I wish there was a similar business-support effort for very small publishers: I could use it.)

Our conversation naturally came to the point that anyone who wants to start this type of farming in our area needs to be locating space and beginning to prepare the soil and plan crops now if they have any hope of getting it off the ground (pun intended) next year. Hill's on the county-person's guinea-pig list for the development of the map and knew that I was interested in this. We talked about accelerating the communication to see if we can jumpstart the effort. I'm going to be sending him info on our space and he's going to send it to his mailing list and we'll see if anyone bites.

Maybe by the time of the fair next year we'll have instigated a bit more change in the local food scene. . . . Hill's effort is already well on track. I'd like to be part of a parallel project, while continuing primary work on my own passion of writing and publishing and textiles.

A whole lot of potential:

A whole lot of potential from another direction:

It might look pretty much the same next year. It might not.

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Three days a week, I leave my office and spend a couple of hours at a coffee shop or the library, where I can focus on one or another task without many interruptions. On Monday mornings, the coffee shop of choice is part of a renovated building that contains offices with a shared receptionist in the front lobby. The receptionist puts a different quote in a frame on her desk every day. Here's today's, which seems like a particularly appropriate follow-up to the overall atmosphere at the Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair:

• "Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility." —Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)

Garden report, computer ?, and ah, nice fiber

This morning there's fall in the air. It's time for a garden-such-as-it-is report.

Last week I noticed that we are not the only creatures who enjoy our plants in pots. This beastie darted in and out brazenly. Usually the squirrels taunt the dogs by racing along the tops of the fences, out of reach. Squirrels in our neighborhood tend to be well fed. My next-door neighbor took early retirement about ten years ago in order to spend his days throwing them peanuts.

The most satisfying plant that we have been tending has been the Sun Sugar tomato. We've had a small handful of fruits daily. As the summer has progressed, they have tasted better and better. The ones in this photo aren't fully ripe. We've already plucked and eaten everything that was. But a couple of those guys in the back are close. We're trying not to hover too close and block the sunlight.

Second best has been the Husky Red. It's yielded ten or twelve nice tomatoes that have tasted great, and lots more are in the offing, weather permitting.

The Cherokee Purple has been teaching us a lot. First, we have only had a few tomatoes and we've had to trim the bad parts out of those. The fruits that are on the plant now and almost ripe all have serious splits in them. I don't know enough about tomatoes to know what causes splits, but I'm guessing irregular growth patterns due to rain/sun quantities. They taste just fine.

There are a gratifying number of fruits on the vine that have not split and may, or may not, have time to ripen before we lose this year's growing season.

We've made several batches of pesto and one of basil-tomato hummus from the standard basil.

And the Thai basil matured into a small but gorgeous plant. We need to use its leaves!

We've been pinching the flowers, but they're just so pretty against the green. . . .

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Computer

This morning I spent another 1.5 hours on the phone with Adobe tech support.

The good news is that I'm not hallucinating. The support guy ran through options with me, quickly ticking off ideas that I'd thought of and tried, and then had me transfer the book file to his desk via FTP. I ran it through an interchange export/import maneuver first; that process is intended to clean out file glitches.

When it arrived on his desk, the file misbehaved for him just as it's been misbehaving for me. Fixing the InDesign problems will not solve all my computer problems, or maybe it will, but at the very least we know some of my problems are InDesign-related and are independent of my computer. His primary comment, repeatedly, was, "WEIRD."

So that was good. I think. It's not just me. If I'm crazy, it's not with regard to seeing computer problems that don't exist.

I told him that I may have messed something up in the style specs, but if I did (1) I couldn't find the problem and (2) I'd be both embarrassed (for overlooking it) and grateful, because I could get my work done again. I said the gratitude would definitely outweigh the embarrassment.

We both tested options on our separate desktops, comparing notes on the phone line about what was happening (same results on both systems), until he declared himself stumped and in need of a consultation with some other folks. He's supposed to call me back.

So I shifted computers for a while. I figured out half of what I need to know to get the laptop (running Fedora) to recognize the new wireless modem. The laptop now appears to "see" the wireless network. However, I have at least one of the settings entered wrong (I don't know which) and can't get the connection to activate yet.

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While waiting for the file to transfer on FTP, I combed a bit of wool. It's so satisfying to comb wool. You start. You finish. It's pretty. It's absolutely a dream to spin.

While doing this I just have to focus on the wool and resist the temptation to fall on my combs sword over the computer problems. In any case, falling on one's sword is supposed to be connected to atonement for wrongdoing. I can't figure out what I might have done wrong in this situation. Other than risk everything I've worked for in my life to build an independent business that depends on computers.

I'm glad the whole problem rests at least temporarily in Adobe's hands, and I do hope they call back with a solution. Soon.

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Meanwhile I plan to take a short, restorative nap (late to bed, early to rise). I'll nap with the phone next to me in case of a tech-support callback. Then I can work on some of the illustrations, on which progress has been delayed by the technology-wrangling. As long as Photoshop and Illustrator don't crash (they have been crashing, too).

Nap.

Tomatoes and sweater ribbing

Here's a photo of the tomatoes as we were leaving on our trip:

We had a few of the little orange ones for breakfast before we left, and we took two big red ones with us. It was so nice to get into the motel last night and have fresh tomatoes from our garden as a before-bedtime snack.

Here's a close-up of the ribbing under discussion in yesterday's post and comments. The buttons are just from the mismatch box, laid on top of the fabric; I'll be doing some button-browsing on this trip:

Now it's time to pack the car.