A Brief Pop-In.

This is my first year to be on a seed catalog mailing list. Well, a digital catalog anyway. There is a great little seed company just down the road from me in Albany, Oregon called Nichols Garden Nursery. You can find them in a lot of the nurseries around town and I have had really good luck with their seed stock so far.

I've been virtually leafing through their wares and marking things on every page that I want to plant next year. The list will need to be pared down, most certainly, but it's fun to dream right now. I'm getting excited thinking about fresh heads of butter lettuce and how next year I'll successfully grow a cabbage. Excited and nervous. My whole family will be here in late June for the wedding. That garden better be spectacular!

In other news, our garden still has carrots. One thing that went well this year was carrots. I pulled up a few for some Minestrone this weekend and there are still several small rows in the garden. I planted a Nantes variety this year and it has done great. Strong and long carrots with a beautiful color. I know now why it is such a mainstream variety. It will be a standard in the garden for years to come.

I found the cable to my point and shoot camera! That means no more crappy cell phone photos! One of these days I'll get around to getting a nice digital SLR, but it's not on the top of my list. I've snapped a few shots around the homestead and I'll get those up soon, along with photos of all my recent knitting. I've been doing a lot of it.

Planting Season.

It seems every day the last couple weeks there is something on my list to plant in the garden. April is a strange purgatory month, especially this year. It's the time to start everything and plan for the growing season so you are busy, busy, busy - but you don't have anything to show for it yet. Lots of work with no reward, only the hope that everything sprouts and grows into something edible.

The garden as it stands today:



I don't have the flowering kale or the overwintering scallions on there because they aren't harvestable and I'm really just waiting for them to seed so I can get them out of there and put something else in their place. Out there now we've got onions, garlic, shallots, broccoli, spinach, radishes, spring kale, carrots, chard and cabbage. You wouldn't know it by looking out at the garden though, everything is super small or not sprouted yet and taking its sweet time getting there. We are supposed to hit 60 by the end of the week! For a couple days at least....

Lousy Smarch Weather.

Finally, three weeks behind schedule, I put out the first spring seeds today. We added some more soil to the far bed and covered up and tilled in the crimson clover and favas that had been overwintering there. Those will break down over the next few weeks and that bed will be ready for planting by the first of April. I cleaned up the center bed and put in radish, spinach, kale and onion seeds.

Overwintering there in the center is some onion and arugula. I learned this morning from reading a book that arugula doesn't do well in spring; the days getting longer make it bolt very early. Recommendation is for arugula to be a fall/winter crop. Sure enough, I went out there today and little flower stalks are forming in the arugulas. Time to eat it up!

This was the first real harvest, with the basket and everything, in quite a long time.

Down in the far end of the center bed are a few heads of lettuce that are holding on with a tenacity I never expected from a lettuce. I put those seeds in last fall and they didn't get big enough before the cold hit. They froze out into a slimy mess. But somehow life clung to them and they made it through the winter! I'm hoping they aren't woody or bitter (very likely) because it will be a great treat to have some very early season lettuce.

I planted way too many scallions last year too and there were several that never got eaten and stayed through the winter. I didn't intend to do this; but I did what is the hardest thing to do with onions, I grew for seed. Onions have to stay in the ground until their second year to produce seed. It takes a commitment of time and space to save your own onion seeds. A few weeks ago we saw the flower stalks starting to emerge from the overwintered scallions.

No more buying green onion seeds for me! I'll have to be sure and keep a few out in the garden from this year's planting so I can keep the seed saving going through the years.

Seeds and Beers.

A couple nights ago Mike and I attended Grow Portland's seed packing event at Amnesia Brewery. A nice group of people all volunteered their time (and a little bit of money) to put together individual packets of bulk seeds for non-profits and home gardeners alike. In exchange we all got to take home 15 seed packets. It works out to about 50% off for each packet. It was good fun and a nice way to spend the evening. A little beer, a little garden talk, and watching the Blazers get slaughtered on TV in the background (sad).




I planted some of the lettuce seeds and put them in the window along with 2 other varieties of lettuce leftover from last year and cauliflower.

The next phase.

This was the first weekend of the gardening season. By my calendar I'm ready to sow peas, radishes, kale and spinach outside in the ground. But, based on the fact that it has been an unseasonably cold year and night-time temps are still hovering around freezing, I'm going to hold off for an extra week. We did, however, go to the store and buy some lumber to put in two new raised beds! We also bought a wheelbarrow. I felt the same buying a wheelbarrow as I did when I bought a ladder last year. This homeowner thing is real when I own my very own ladder. This gardening thing is real now that I own my very own wheelbarrow.

My onion and leek seeds have all sprouted in the window. A nice spot of green against a mostly gray backdrop. Tonight I'm adding a few more seeds to the window: broccoli, cabbage and green onions.

It Begins!

I don't feel like I've been a very good gardener of late. I hardly ever walk out to the garden, mostly because it doesn't matter. Nothing is growing anyway; it's either dead or stagnant. But here I find myself, suddenly, on a Sunday morning in January, feeling like I did in summer when I was engulfed in gardening to dos. I'm the first one up in the house, I have my coffee, I've already eaten breakfast and now I'm pouring over my seed box and cross-referencing my garden plan to make my list of Spring seeds to buy today. This afternoon is the official start of the 2011 garden. Onion seeds are going in the window*!

Yesterday we went out for brunch and sat outside in light jackets and had sunshine on our faces. It felt and smelled like Spring. It is almost trickster February in Portland. It's always so nice in February, sunny and mild. Then March comes and it rains again until June. It really is an evil month. This whole seeds starting + relatively warm temps + occasional sun is setting me up for some severe Seasonal Affective Disorder come March.

*I had wanted to get a real seed tray with lights going, but suspected I wouldn't get around to it in time. This fall though, I'll be starting my cabbages and broccolis under lights.

The Seed Club.

I came home yesterday and there was a giant pile of seed packets on the kitchen table. Apparently Mike had found a free box filled with seeds, so he grabbed them. Most of them are exceedingly old, like from 2003. But there were a few from 2007. There were about eight packets of beets, five pumpkin, four endive, several beans and the list goes on. Since we aren't having much luck with our spinach seeds we planted so far outside I decided to give these a try, even though they are seven years old. You never know, maybe they will sprout better than the new stuff. I also threw out two rows of black-eyed peas and some endive, just for fun. If they sprout, it's free food, if they don't, no harm done.

I set out to make rye bread yesterday too. It all seemed to be going well until I put it in the oven and I think it actually shrank. Total rye bread failure. The only other time I have ever had a total bread failure was also with rye bread. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I want to try out a couple other rye recipes and see if I can't find one that works. Besides, the flavor of the failed loaf wasn't very good either. It was a little sweet, a little caraway; maybe nice for snacking, but we wanted to make Tempeh Reubens and it just wouldn't meld well.

Just to prove what I giant dork I am, I got really excited when I got an email promoting the Grow Portland Seed Club. That's right, it's a volunteer driven seed club that provides organically grown, open-pollinated seeds that thrive in the Pacific Northwest climate. I think I am going to volunteer and go help pack some seeds. It helped that the seed packing get-together in my neighborhood is at Amnesia Brewing. That might have convinced me.

I also discovered this awesome endeavor: The Portland Fruit Tree Project. Also volunteer driven, you can register your fruit trees and get people to come out and help care for them and harvest them in exchange for providing some of your harvest to community food banks. God knows there is no way I will be able to eat all the plums that we get even if I make jams and jellies and preserves until my head explodes.

So, even though it's pouring down rain all day today, and for the next five days, I think this is a pretty darn cool place to live where you can find free seeds on the side of the street, volunteer for non-GMO gardening concerns while drinking beer, and have a hoard of volunteers come and help you harvest your trees.

A lesson in patience.

It's a beautiful, sunny Sunday here in Portland. I was getting ready to take my dog to the park and I looked in my backyard and saw that my plum tree is starting to flower. Oh my goodness. This makes me so excited. Over the next week the tree in my yard that I have only known as bare limbs is suddenly going to become a giant white flower.

Then, I walked out my door and took my dog over to the garden in my obligatory check of the rectangle of brown in hopes that the new sowing will have sprouted, even though I know it's too soon for that. And, lo and behold, sprouts! Lots and lots of little kale and radish sprouts. They are from the first sowing. I know this because we figured out after we put in the first seeds that we should have done our rows in the opposite direction. The second sowing has rows in the opposite direction, so if they both sprout it's going to be a confusing little plot of land in a few weeks. I just needed to be patient. The seeds that should have sprouted in about 6 days took 15 days instead. My faith is restored.

Another need for patience: pound cake. I had some people over last night and wanted to make some snacks. I also didn't want to spend much money. So, I went through my cookbooks and recipes and found a few things I could make with what I already had in the pantry. The only thing I had to buy special was a jar of artichoke hearts. Total money spent to make all the food for last night: $2.50.

Everything else were pantry items that I always have on hand. I made hummus, pita bread, veggies for dipping, cheddar artichoke quiche cups (leftovers made a yummy breakfast) and pound cake. I've never made pound cake before. I had never made any of these items before and it occurred to me about halfway through making everything that perhaps I should have chosen some recipes that I had tested. My oven also cooks hot. I've never put a thermometer in there to check, but cooking times in my oven are very skewed. I usually take things out about an average of ten minutes before the recipe says they should be done. Because of this I am terrified of overcooking and burning things in my oven. And I certainly didn't want a dry, burnt pound cake! So, I watched it carefully and took it out of the oven when I thought it was just almost done, it would finish cooking while it cooled, right? That's the way bread and cookies work. Not so much with pound cake. As it cooled it totally collapsed in the middle and revealed a gooey, uncooked center. The ends taste good though.

So, now I know to be patient with pound cake and let it cook through in the oven. And believe in your seeds. They are containers of life, and life knows how to grow itself better than I do. Now I just have to be patient and let my radishes grow. I guarantee you that there will be an entry in this blog telling you how I needed to wait longer to harvest my radishes because the bulbs didn't grow.

Even more seeds.

So, I may have gone a little crazy with the seeds. I ended up walking across a large swath of SE Portland today and I went past The Urban Farm Store. I had tried to buy onion, broccoli and pea seeds the other day at a nursery closer to my house, but they were out of all but the broccoli. I figured I would just stop in and see if they had the onion and peas here and then order the rest of my seeds online from Uprising Seeds. I bought my first round there, and already had my wishlist for the rest of the season saved in their online store. I walk in and it turns out they actually carry Uprising Seeds there, along with several other brands that are organic or heirloom variety. So, I went to town and bought a lot of seeds. I impulse bought a lot too, which I know I'm not supposed to do. So, now I need to find some space for lettuce, cilantro, echinacea, epazote and chamomile. Plus I bought bush beans, and I told myself I would get pole beans. But they had those purple dragon ones and I really wanted them. Sigh. So, I have a lot of seeds now.

I added my two onion varieties to my starter pallet in the window. And tomorrow I need to cut up some grass along our fence and make space for peas!

Sick and tired and waiting.

I've taken a few days off from the blog. This house has been infected by The Cold! I was laid out for a few days, and then I passed it on to Mike and he's still on the couch. I've been busy making soup and doing some more garden planning. When I really sit down and try to figure out where and when I'm going to plant everything my head nearly explodes. I had no idea it would be such an overwhelming task to and figure all of this out. Sigh.

I have been working off of four books primarily. The Edible Garden, which I bought a couple years ago. It's a great overview of planning, year-round gardening, and has about a page devoted to each vegetable with lots of big, pretty pictures, which I like. Mike had Organic Gardening for Dummies, which is always a handy reference. For Christmas I bought The Urban Homestead, which covers not only gardening but lots of home improvement ideas to make your house and life more sustainable and self-sufficient while still living in the middle of the city (the authors also keep a blog that I follow, Homegrown Evolution). And my most recent addition, Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades. The climate here is very unique; it's really a temperate rainforest. The summers are relatively cool, so growing things like tomatoes and peppers present a challenge, but the winters are quite mild, albeit wet, which allows for a functional year-round garden. This book has been great because it really addresses issues, tips, and the best varieties for our specific climate.

I've gone through my calendar for the year and roughly planned out when to start my seeds for each crop indoors, or sow outdoors, or transplant. I'm feeling a little more prepared. As for the seeds we planted last week....still waiting. Every morning we go outside and it's still just a bunch of brown dirt. No green poking through. I'm getting a little worried this is all going to be a complete and utter failure, but we are still in the normal window for the germination of the seeds we put down, so I'm sure it will all work out.

I'm starting some seeds inside today. I don't have a light set-up, but I do have a really large southern-facing window with ledges. So, we'll make due. I'm starting off with broccoli and am ordering a plethora of seeds for the rest of the season later this week.