The Independent Stitch

Gardening, such as it is, 2011 version

Ah, gardening. I still haven't adjusted to making it work in clay-soil, semi-arid conditions. We do keep trying.

This year we ended up with LOTS of tomato plants and we managed to keep them from being shredded by hail, which is a major accomplishment. The plants are happy in the raised beds. (They get water; the grass hasn't gotten much, and the summer has set records for heat.)

Both of the square beds are full of tomatoes. This was just a few days ago. I've planted a few herbs in the small bed, including some perennials, in the hope that we will have some continuity from one year to the next. The abundance of tomato plants, though, was unexpected, and I know we're not supposed to plant tomatoes in the same place two years in a row. So next year may be a puzzle.

Here is our tomato crop so far, picked and photographed on Monday the 5th:

That's my daughter's handwriting. We did share it. Even our tiny bites had more flavor than several pounds of store-bought tomatoes.

We do have some bounty this year, though. We are participating in a new CSA (community-supported agriculture) farm. We have a mini-share, which means that we don't get a lot of produce, but because of the way this CSA is organized we get to choose from a "menu" of options each week. Because of work and other commitments, for several weeks I arrived very late in the pick-up hours, and the number of the menu items still available was limited. However, each time there has been basil, and it's been abundant and gorgeous. So for a several weeks I have taken our whole allotment in basil. We are also growing a bit of basil.

Here's what happened after last week's pickup:

Isn't it BEAUTIFUL?

Then came this:

And then this:

I ran out of pesto-sized (half-cup) containers, so we had to eat the leftover amount in the big bowl in the middle. Somebody needed to be responsible for taking care of the extra. It was a tough assignment, but we managed. ("HEY! How come there's only a tablespoon left? I haven't had my share yet!" - ("(oops) um, i guess i ate it . . . "))

Shortly after the packaged bits went into the freezer (alongside two previous batches), I asked the rest of the family, "Do you think we have enough pesto?" . . . wondering if I was nuts to be considering a whole mini-share of basil again the following week. Their response? "I think we need more."

These are the sorts of relatives it makes sense to live with.

They also are the sort who tend to say, "I hope you doubled the garlic."

Yesterday was the pickup. I got more pesto-size containers, more almonds, more asiago. We already have the garlic and the olive oil. This winter we may not need to ration the pesto supply. Last year's total pesto stash consisted of 8 containers. The photo above includes 10, and that was the third batch, with another about to be made.

We do love pesto.

So despite the garden's less-than-stellar performance, I'm feeling really happy about our harvest.

Plus we might still get a few tomatoes.

__

P.S. I riff off Susan Tweit's recipe. We read the garlic quantities as "at least this much." We minimize the olive oil (using half to two-thirds the amount called for), figuring that if we want a more fluid pesto we can add oil later, and the way we prepare the stuff reduces our need for both containers and freezer space.

Garden update, plus a bit on fiber (more to come)

Wow, it's been busy around here.

Book progress

The art director did a few days' worth of photos before I arrived to share the work. She did the pictures of the items made with various types of fibers. They're standard shots that don't include really technical fiber stuff.

Then I was there for five days of photography that turned into seven (I delayed my return home) and we finished all the wool shots.

I'll be going back for either four or five days, which should let us complete the photography for the other critters' fibers and the chapter openers and maybe the cover. Hopefully the cover. We did some preliminary cover photography at the very end of the wool days, but the final stuff is yet to come.

When I have a minute, I want to get some snapshots of the fiber-shoot posted.

Today, however, I spent arranging travel. Two more trips.

This just in

A few days after we get done with the next photo shoot, I'm flying to Cleveland for a little over 24 hours to tape two segments for next season's Knitting Daily TV. It'll be part of series 600 (series 500 is now airing and series 400 is available on the web, and there are DVDs of the other series).

That's a lot more travel to coordinate. I thought I was home for a bit. . . .

Meanwhile, the garden

Between bouts of booking flights and rental cars and arranging places to stay, I have been enjoying our garden.

Here's what it looked like in mid-May (on my mother's birthday, in fact):

By July 11, this is what we had:

Note the new squirrel-proofing on that one bed. The other beds seem to have been far less attractive to the critters this year. We did protect the plants vigilantly until they got reasonably large.

By July 27, just before I left for the LOOOOOOONG trip, here's what we had:

I arrived home to find this, on August 31:

What's not evident from the photos is how much we've actually been eating from that greenery. We were having lettuce before I left, and that was it. Now we have delicious tomatoes (thank you, Susan and Richard!), HUGE squash, and basil (thank you again, S&R!).

Lots of basil:

So I spent part of today (between travel-agent tasks) making pesto.

That's eight half-cup containers (four full cups) of pesto.

Yum.

Upcoming book on Dorothy Reade's original knitted lace ideas

Was it just a year ago that I was knitting that lovely, rich red afghan from bulky yarn? I had hoped to have the afghan back from the publisher for use this winter, but it's not here yet. I've heard that a number of the items knitted for the book it will appear in are going to be displayed at the big needlework trade show in June, sponsored by TNNA. Then maybe it can come home!

The book the afghan was made for is called Successful Lace Knitting: Celebrating the Work of Dorothy Reade, and it's by Donna Druchunas. That subtitle is really important. Dorothy Reade was really important, and most knitters haven't heard of her. Among other things, she was instrumental in helping get Oomingmak Musk Ox Producers Co-operative going in Alaska. You can read some about that in Donna Druchunas' earlier book, Arctic Lace.

While Donna was working on Arctic Lace, she got intrigued by Dorothy Reade's story. First she did more research. Then she got a group of contemporary knitters to make projects based on a couple of dozen of Reade's original lace patterns. The resulting projects—by a bunch of amazing designers, and one by me—are wonderfully inspiring.

Here are my previous posts related to the project:

• First post, on beginning it.
• Second post, on the inspiration and the peculiarity (for me) of knitting with bulky yarn.
• Third post, with blocking photos.
• Fourth post, completely blocked and about to disappear from my life for quite a while.

I have just caught sight of the afghan again, for the first time since the end of February 2009! I got to see this photo that was shot for the book, which will be released in a few weeks:

 

I hope that young woman has some nice tea or cocoa, and that it was a cool day when they held the photoshoot, so she could enjoy the experience of being warmed by the afghan.

If you pre-order the book before its publication date through Donna's website, she's making a contribution for every sale to the Musk Ox Farm, which needs some fundraising. They're all closely related—Dorothy Reade's knitting adventures, Oomingmak, the Musk Ox Farm—and this is a great idea that Donna has had, and you'll get your money's worth both in the book and in the form of deferred benefits by supporting research into how to help maintain musk oxen, and supplies of their lovely underdown fiber, qiviut. The official pub date is May 11, 2010.

Meanwhile, a few thoughts on the afghan, somewhat scattered because I'm still reviewing the edited manuscript for The Project. . . .

The inspiration for my afghan came from a bulky-yarn afghan a friend made for me forty years ago. It shows almost no wear, despite regular use as a central part of our family life:

That's my daughter, doing homework (grad student) with the help of Tussah. They're both pretty cozy.

The only problem is that when they are wrapped up in the afghan, I can't use it. Therefore I decided to seize the opportunity of the Dorothy Reade lace project to make another afghan that would meet the same sorts of needs.

It will.

Before next winter.

I think.

If anyone who reads this is at TNNA (it's a trade show, so only open to people like yarn shop owners) and the afghan is there, please give it a pat and tell it I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

Here's more info on the book, with more photos of the projects.

____

Meanwhile, The Project has been intense enough that I haven't been able to plant any seeds (we were going to start our own plants this year, and we got the supplies). It wouldn't have taken much time. I just haven't had any moments to spare.

We will have a garden. Last year we built the raised beds, and this year they're already in place.

Last year we also discovered that our biggest challenges in gardening are hail and squirrels. We'll have to see what this year's hail situation will be like. This photo, taken today, indicates that the plans we've been making to keep the squirrels out will all be put to good use.

I missed the really good photo opportunity, where this character was digging so far into the bed that his (or her) whole front half was in a hole. We didn't even plant much in that bed last year—several squash plants (all but one of which were eaten by squirrels) and a few herbs. Three of which were perennials and should have come back up. Except I think they were eaten by squirrels.

Note the wire covering on the small bed in back. We're getting more official this year. We've already got a wire-covered frame to fit over the larger bed. We need to create similar protective caps for the other two.

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.