Gardening Backstory

I came to gardening in what I should probably just go ahead and refer to as midlife, after we bought our first house and moved in in 2010, when I had a two year old and was pregnant with #2. As a child, we didn't grow anything much (although I do have vivid memories of making mud pies in bare dirt, so that's something!). As an adult, I was living in apartments and working fulltime. My husband meanwhile had spent 10 years jazzing up the bare dirt of his rented house, and one of his first romantic gestures was dropping off a bag of his homegrown tomatoes for me. Yet even after I moved in, I was too busy and uninterested.

That changed when we moved in our "own" home and I had a child to teach. I wanted him to understand where food came from, to eat vegetables, to be outside, to learn about science and math from nature as well as from books. My husband was completely occupied with landscaping the front of the house (another bare dirt situation) so the backyard became the fiefdom of me and the kids. I stopped paid work when my younger child was born, so even if I didn't have "free time", I was home more and could step outside without it being a big production.

The backyard was rototilled when we moved in (2010) and basic fill dirt added. Since then, I haven't added any significant new dirt to my 10x20' (approx.) patch. My summer priority is tomatoes. My year-round crops (okay, some months this is still aspirational) are lettuce and cilantro because I am a major cilantrohead. Everything else is added by whim, by accident, or by best-laid plan, and we know what happens to those. I do my best to grow without pesticides; I try to use organic seeds and starts but not exclusively. I care a lot about my plant-babies but some laziness creeps in; as my husband says with a shrug, "It's only plants. You can plant them again!" But you can't grow kids again, so my focus is more on the process than the product.

My older child's excitement and younger child's enthusiasm for gardening are awesome. Some days of course are better than others - this is true of any parenting effort! They usually enjoy being outside with me in the garden, and that's what's most important.

Wordless Wednesday - June Snapshot

Today in the garden

Small Yards for Families

This Nurture Store post is inspirational - makes me realize anew what a mistake it was when my husband and I put in grass in our backyard. We thought... oh never mind. Here it is! I'm fired up to make some changes!

Wherein Rain Buys Me Some Time, AKA Planning Your Garden Pt. 2

The elusive rain is falling as we speak, crushing my plans - I even had it written in my datebook! - for planting. That's okay; I can spend a little more time reviewing my plans and buying strategy.

This year, my garden plan started with the kindergartener requesting his "own little garden", probably based on the Milly-Molly-Mandy story in which she is gifted a surprise plant for her garden plot. I made him a land grant last fall and nothing came up, as so often is the case when I do ad hoc sowing, so I want to wrap his plot in with the bigger picture and hopefully facilitate some success... or at least a sprout or two.

Next, I had to soothe the three-year-old who was burning with injustice that she was not going to get her own little garden. "You'll be mommy's number one helper!" Uh-huh, she's heard that one before and it's starting to wear thin.

Then, I consulted my copy of Pam Peirce's Golden Gate Gardening, which points me to the edibles that should be planted April-May, allowing of course for microclimate-based margins of error. We live in the cooler, breezier band so generally I follow Peirce's recommendations for foggier areas although the fog cover actually varies quite a bit year to year here. From the long wish list of spring plants, I slotted spaces into a sketch of my vegetable garden (leaving space for my son's). This weeded out the lower priorities and plants that have a shot at midsummer or fall planting. There's also a short list that I may try in our front yard, always a problem because I forget to water out there... so lower priority plants get a chance to impress me with their drought resistance, ha.

My final aspirational list of plants and seeds to sow this spring - let's say between now and Mother's Day: 5 tomatoes (three cherry and two standard), zucchini, pumpkin, basil, lettuce, cilantro, beans, sugar snap peas, lemon verbena, and cucumber. Now I have to make it to the nursery/ies and fulfill this lengthy shopping list!

Planning Your Garden, Pt. 1

It is getting to be that time... the time when all gardeners' fingers start itching to plant, no matter how industrious they've been over the winter. Before I muster the internal fortitude to document how I "plan" my garden, I wanted to share the NurtureStore's approach for doing it thoughtfully and artistically, and involving your elementary-school-age kids in the process. We'll cover other approaches as the season dawns. 

What You Need to Garden Successfully With Your Kids

One appeal of gardening is that the barrier to entry is very low - that is, you need a patch of dirt or a pot, and some seeds (did I mention you can buy 4 packs for a dollar at the dollar store?!) and you're good to go. However, there are of course some tools and equipment you can get for your child to have a more successful experience.

My child model demonstrating the two most important pieces of gear - clogs and shovel.

My kids both have garden clogs, and I have finally somewhat trained them to step into them the second they step outside. We do no shoes indoors, so otherwise they would be running around outside barefoot, getting their feet filthy in addition to stepping on every pointy leaf and objet out there. Garden clogs save a lot of drama. They each also have their own (because sharing is just too hard) hand trowel. For our family, those two things are the bare minimum. As they get older and more involved in the actual work - as opposed to digging holes in the rough vicinity of where I requested - I can see wanting a hand rake, gloves, and maybe even a gardening apron. (Heck, I'd like one of those.) But for now, they like getting their hands (and clothes... and faces... and....) dirty, and the feeling of helping with their own little shovels. More power to them.

Winter Gardening

Positioning the marker just so in the pot

After my last post, I fully expected to stay indoors for a couple months. Then my gaze fell on my in-box, and on the radish seeds someone gave my daughter for her November birthday. "Come on kids!" I shouted. "Let's go plant these radishes real quick!"

"Okay!" responded my 5 year old son enthusastically. "And carrots too! They're a winter crop!"

Well. Can't argue with his garden savvy or his gusto, so the three of us spent an hour in the vegetable garden this afternoon. It was in the low 60s, I'd say, a welcome respite from the recent "bitter" (by Bay Area standards) cold. We planted radishes in a pot, and in the ground cilantro, mesclun, beets, and carrots, all from seed. I pulled out my sad, sad plants formerly known as tomatoes, clicked my tongue over my peas, and weeded. Grr. Also tried to redirect some sneaky bamboo, grr x 1000.

Any excuse to practice those kindergarten writing skills

The kids spent their time messing around with the seed packets and decorating plant markers (craft sticks). That was actually a good use of their time, as opposed to having them sow the actual seeds with me, which is a great way to have your lettuce row sprout a big ol' cilantro in the middle. It will be handy to have a visual marker of what went where, since my memory is obviously deteriorating rapidly.

I think the Vitamin D did us all good. Whether we'll reap anything more tangible, time will tell.

Of COURSE you need to bring out about 50 craft sticks to choose from. All the markers too. You never know what you'll need.

Our Garden is Beautiful

My 2 y.o. and I spent some time this morning gardening together. No matter how little I feel like gardening, or how little I'm looking forward to the drudgery of winter gardening, just getting out there and doing it with a little helper puttering nearby is sweet. Bonus: It leaves me with an (undoubtedly illusory) feeling of accomplishment. Today, after I turned over a patch about 4'x4', she and I planted cilantro, beets, carrots, and "Salad Bowl" lettuce (the latter in ground as well as in a pot that I had just yanked basil from - call it an experiment). I enhanced the soil with some of my special Recycling Center compost; fingers crossed. I pulled out the basil (sniff; it was so good to me this year) and a Roma tomato. I showed the baby how to break up soil clumps with her little shovel, and she trotted after me when I took things out to the green waste. We picked a few golden cherries and took a break to munch them. And when we were done, she wiped her hands on her jeans and announced, "Our garden is beautiful!"

I had to agree.

When to Yank?

Almost too cute to eat

The thing that always strikes me about the weekend is that, with kids, it is as busy or busier than a weekday. However, at least my kids are old enough so that they can run free out in the backyard while I am fretting about the garden, a.k.a. watering and weeding. I can't do any real work, like planting, with their help. Well, I mean, I do it with their help, and then I go out later and do it again. Anyway, so we grabbed some time this morning on one of the hottest days of the year to go out back and fret, and/or poke your sister with a stick, and/or take your brother's tub of tomatoes that mommy said not to mess around with (depending on your age and weight class).

My main fret-tage currently concerns when to yank my summer/fall harvesting plants. I get - literally - a handful of green beans every couple days at this point. Worth keeping the plants? A few tomatoes are ripe, with a few more still green on the plant preventing me from pulling it. Am I a sucker? Am I letting these overripe plants suck the nutrients out of the soil and I'll never ever get it back? Remember - I'm the "undergardener", not the head gardener. I don't have a clue what I'm doing.

However, on the plus side - and the awesome thing about gardening is there is always a little bit of a plus side - my pea shoots are up, cilantro is abundant, and I got one cute lil' strawberry today, just about the size of my thumbnail. And picked up some free compost from the city recycling center. Fall planting is just around the corner, as soon as I get rid of these summer plants...

Basil Forever

... That's what it seems like, anyway. As long as I pick off the flowers as soon as I notice them, apparently no harm no foul. I bought it in April or May, from a local nursery, potted it, and after a slow start, it's been a faithful producer all summer. (During the slow start, I panicked and bought a bonus basil from Trader Joe's, which shriveled up by August.)  I am going to leave my producer alone as long as it seems happy and healthy - maybe it can be a year-rounder if we have a mild winter? Ah, gardening fantasies.

Fall Planting: Beets, Peas, Lettuce

Checking out the last of the golden cherries

Planted today - it had been on my to-do list for about two weeks but everything else - such as planning for the world's best Angry Birds birthday party, coming up this weekend - took precedence. On a lovely 70-degree day, took the 2 y.o. out there for some "help" (company) to plant a third sowing (this go-round's count) of salad bowl lettuce and cilantro. Planted two rows of beet seeds, one from this year and one from 2008 that my husband had saved (they WERE yummy golden beets, but my hopes are not high), and - a first for me - snow peas. Mixed advice from Pam Peirce on all the beets and peas but I figured worth a try. Anytime I have the time and ability to plant, I try to, with whatever *could* theoretically work at that time of year, +/- a month (or two).

The contemporary seeds I planted today (2008 beets not shown)

My "helper" hard at work dropping pea seeds all over the place

Garden Chores

Watering: an unfavorite chore in the garden. Not that, come to think of it, I have a "favorite" chore. Gardening is a bunch of work sporadically punctuated with something yummy. But one of the reasons I liked the name The Undergardener for this blog is because I have so much still to learn about gardening, and none of it comes naturally to me. Didn't do it growing up, didn't even do it as an adult until moving into the first home I owned three years ago. Nothing is "in my head" - I have to schedule planting, watering, even harvesting, among all the other garden chores. Today, my to-do list includes watering, alongside make dinner, do laundry, and oh yeah, pick up the kids from school. (Phew, I remembered to do that!) It's a hot day and the kids are home, which means the plants will be quite lucky to actually get any of the water on themselves as it will be in high demand for mudpies and sprinkler-running. Because I am not going to have time (or any of us the patience) for a full hand-watering, I'll hand-water the berries and pots (basil, mint), then set the sprinkler in the main planted area. It's late afternoon, which means it may not dry fully before night... oh, jeez, better just get out there now and do it!

Tomatoes and Plums

EVERY DAY.  I remembered AGAIN! I even had a helper picking many unripe tomatoes for me... well, maybe they'll ripen a bit on the windowsill.

Also harvested a few leaves of container lettuce - nice, since I haven't had much luck with that venue before - and a couple strawberries. F YOU, SLUGS! Have I shared my slug repellent? I use broken eggshells everywhere I think the little bastards might crawl to get at my few but luscious berries. Works just fine, if the timing is right (scatter them a day or two before the berries are fully ripe), and much cheaper than the beer method, which after a few weeks I realized was a) costing me, and b) getting my kids a little too comfy with the nasty smell of old beer.

In less good news, I picked up a couple pounds of plums at the Berkeley Bowl this week intended to make freezer jam from them. As usual, it turned out as a sauce. Boy, is my freezer full of varied fruit sauces and syrups. I need my Jam Mentor friend to come over and walk me through it step by step. She has such a sure hand with jam, that (she told me this week) she tried to make syrup, and it turned out as jam.

Seasonal Recipes: Lemon-Tomato Pasta Salad

When will I learn that you have to harvest EVERY DAY when tomatoes are in season? This is about half of what I picked, and I only got to two plants. At least I had already incorporated tomatoes into the week's menu plan, so I could use up most of them. We like this pasta salad from Epicurious. It does turn out a bit oily and garlicky, so feel free to ratchet down those ingredients. I also always add more tomatoes - since, after all, I'm trying to use up the harvest. I also use these Alliums of Mystery (tm) in place of the green onions called for in the recipe. I think mine might actually be leeks?

Early September in the Garden

Things are looking pretty good. I planted three pumpkin plants and have one pumpkin to show for it - but it's like a magazine-quality pumpkin. A nice high-end magazine, like Martha Stewart Living.

Elsewhere, the prolific mini-Romas are slowing down, but still coming, as are the golden cherry tomatoes (two of those, and that wasn't too many). Since we have a long, strong Indian summer, I should probably be more patient and plant my tomato plants after the traditional Mother's Day date. I bet I'd get more, longer. Hmm. I just can't wait... the sight of all my neat little tomato plants lined up in the ground makes me happy!

A benefit of our generally mild-to-cool climate close to the bay is that lettuce and cilantro are - theoretically - year-round crops. This is the first year I've tried cilantro. The photo shows my 5th sowing ready for picking, and my 6th sowing coming in. I cook with cilantro frequently so I'm motivated to figure out this fussy-ish crop. It didn't like my pot or some other locations in earlier sowings, but so far so good in the lettuce zone. You don't get a ton of seeds in each pack, and my "helpers" always scatter the seeds like crazy, so this is probably my third or fourth pack.

Lettuce is a finicky crop for me. I had wild beginner's luck with it in 2010, our first year in this house. We ate salads straight from the garden for a couple months straight. My husband was in awe. And then... and then... virtually no luck in 2011. 2012 was a rebuilding year. And now in 2013, I've been doing monthly sowing and getting small heads fairly regularly, as you can see in the photo. We like Salad Bowl and butter varieties. I've also done okay with microgreens in a pot. I have a feeling that lettuce might be one of those crops that would prefer being in a planting box instead of directly in the ground. There's also a watering conflict with the tomatoes, in terms of the frequency they want it. I do hand or sprinkler watering instead of drip irrigation - I am interested in drip but haven't gotten around to educating myself enough to implement a system. Maybe I also think it's overkill on my small plot - about 6x15. But clearly over/under-watering is the #2 issue in my vegetable garden.

The #1 issue ... bamboo. Grrr.  Photo shows uninvited guests coming in from neighbor's yard.