The Great Weeding

We have been gone for three weeks, walking across England. Late June and early July is not a bad time to leave Corvallis or the garden. I missed the trash piles of students moving out, the last few grey rainy days, and the end of cherry and pea season. Other than that, the garden was all in and growing, but not producing anything I had to process for winter.  That being said, it did grow while I was gone and the innocent weedy plants, like nasturtiums and amaranth, which I often leave to keep the insects happy, took over several beds.

I have been hacking back for two days now. I have a system, developed over the years, for such occasions. I start in the back bed, weeding, transplanting, mulching, repairing the hoses, tying up the vines-- whatever needs to be done for that bed—and then I trim out the grass around it and move onto the next. It is very efficient. All of the tools are out at once, which reduces the wandering around factor. I can always tell where I left off, if I am called away for a meeting or phone call, because the bed is not trimmed out yet.  There’s immediate gratification that comes with seeing a neatly mulched and trimmed bed, even if it is only the first, that would not happen if I weeded all of them at once. And it reduces the number of blisters I get from too much aggressive trimming. When I have finished one side of the garden, I turn on the soaker hoses and move over to the other side, watching for leaks and sprays as I work. When the back gardens are done, I move to the front.

While I was working this morning, I was very aware of all of the other creatures that use my veg garden. The few old peas that were left on the vines had been nibbled out; someone had gnawed through the seams and eaten the peas. I found a small rodent nest behind the lovage, where someone else had dragged a few stalks of ceremonial wheat in for a snack. There was a small pile of possum poop in the back of the potato bed and a young pumpkin hidden in the grass between the beds, half eaten. As I trimmed, I encountered ants and spiders, pillbugs and the occasional slug. Honeybees and bumblebees where disturbed when I pulled out a huge borage plant. I could see where Bunzilla had chomped on a low hanging kale leaf and where the cats had been napping under the rhubarb. Fortunately, the chickens had been too interested in dropped cherries a few days ago when they were loose to wreck havoc on any plants, although there was signs of a dust bath up near the house. Life clearly goes on in the back yard when I am not around, perhaps even more so.

The back garden in now pretty much in order. The vines are tamed, the potatoes mulched, the beds trimmed for the summer. There will not be another spurt of rampant growth that will need to be reigned in again; the season is about to dry out, the grass is ready to go dormant for the summer, and I will be home to keep an eye on things. The leeks and parsnips are breathing a sigh of relief, but I don’t know about the other living creatures.

Summer Salad-- good for a warm day when you do not feel like cooking

Chop half a red onion and a couple of stalks of celery. Toss in the bowl. Add a can of garbanzo beans and a can of tuna. Toss with about a quarter of a cup of mayo, a gulp of red wine vinegar, some pepper and chopped basil (fresh is nice, but dried will do). Arrange on a bed of lettuce. You can get fancy and add hard-boiled eggs or sliced tomatoes around the edges.  Weirdly enough, french fries are a nice touch.

June Work List

In some ways, June is the easiest gardening month. Everything is in the ground and growing, but nothing is ready for preserving yet.

This month’s tasks:

·      Mow and trim.

·      Clean up the canning area—evaluate jars, sharpen knives, purchase lids, make the list.

·      Clean out the larder.

·      Get the final seeds in the ground before the Summer Solstice.

·      Make ful from fresh fava beans.

·      Mulch the whole garden.

·      Repair hoses.

·      Set up the greywater system.

·      Clean out the outdoor shower.

·      Tie up rampant growth.

·      Pickle beets and make rhubarb preserves.

·      Eat peas.

·      Move classroom plants home for the summer.

One More Year

 I put in the soaker hoses today. It’s always an adventure. First, wrestle the hoses out of their winter storage place in the dead shower stall in the basement (don’t ask…). Then, lay them out, one bed at a time, connect to the Big Hose, turn it all on, cross your fingers, and wait for the inevitable geyser.  There it was, in the middle of the pumpkin and zucchini bed. Water spraying everywhere but on the plants. Deep sigh. Turn the hoses off, find the bag of hose repair parts which I bought in bulk a few summers ago, dig out the right screwdriver, cut the bad spot out, place the repair pieces in, tighten down the hose clamps on either side, and turn the water back on. Good to go for another year.

 The new beds are more susceptible to leaks because of the nature of the system.  Years ago, we had a community garden patch which we used for growing potatoes and dried beans. After the first year, we bought sweat hoses for the entire patch, which saved on water and time. When we left the community garden for more beds in the backyard, we brought the sweat hoses with us, but they were too long for the beds. Never ones to waste anything, we cut them in half, wove them through the beds, bridged the gaps with a truly ancient hose, also cut into pieces, and hose repair kits (and hose clamps), and went to work. It’s not a bad system, although the old beds, where each sweat hose branches off of a common tube and can be turned on and off independently, is better.  And, every fall, I vow to change the new beds over—and, every spring, I run the old hoses One More Year.

When I had finished the hoses, I turned to the brush pile, planning to side-dress the garlic patch with freshly sifted compost. Mark was working in the back and directed me to the half full barrel. I picked it up and the last little bit of handle fell off. It was a good trash can, twenty years ago, but after ten years of being battered by automatic garbage trucks, we moved it out back to haul leaves and brush—and compost. I wiggled it across the grass, through the garden gate, and over to the garlic bed, dumped the contents, and brought it back to the brush pile. It’s got at least One More Year, I thought.

I walked by one of the “new” garden beds and saw that the bottom board was rotting through, but I propped it up with an old piece of garden bed fencing and it was good for One More Year. After all, the beds will all need replacing soon. When it was dinner time, Mark carefully took down the picnic benches, which we had fixed last summer with a couple of solid planks across the top, for, of course, One More Year.

There’s a pattern here, one, which separates farmers, even small scale ones, and gardeners.  My friend Maureen has a beautiful garden, just lovely. She works on it steadily, striking just the right balance between casual floppiness and tidiness.  Something is always blooming. Trees are always pruned. She has pathways of different materials. She is a Gardener. There is no fraying binder twine gathered in a bucket, mixed in with the tail end of a ball of yarn. There is no HUGE pile of bio-mass in the back yard; they send dead hedge pruning off to the city composting system. She waters by hand, deeply, once a week and weeds while she works. When I go out to Sunbow Farm, with its amazing soil and huge plants, it looks more like home. Hoses everywhere, tilting garden benches, trellises held up with binder twine, old tarps, piles of leaves composting down…. everything used to the max and beyond.

 One More Year.

Cardamon Cake—from the 1977Moosewood Cookbook

This is best the same day or the next morning for breakfast. I’ve made it with margarine and non-fat yogurt, and it is still yummy, but…

2 cups of butter

2 cups of brown sugar

Cream together until light and fluffy. Scrape the bowl a few times, just to be sure.

Add: 4 eggs and 2 t vanilla.  Beat in well.

Sift together:

4 cups of flour

2t BP

2.5 t BS

1.5 t cardamom

.5 t salt

Add and mix. Put half of the mixture in a tube pan and even out. Then sprinkle .25 c of brown sugar, 1T cinnamon, and .5 cups of chopped walnuts in. Add the rest of the cake. Spread out evenly.

Bake until done in 350 oven, a little over an hour,

Roadside Finds....who would throw these items out?

Permaculture is organized around  the concept of zones—putting things most often needed closet to the house. It works best, of course, when you have a clean slate to work with (which we did) and when the “zone three” of your yard is not also the floodplain for the entire neighborhood.  However, we have done the best that we could with the concept. Raspberries, Sungold tomatoes, and the bay tree are right outside the door. The dining table is in the back alcove, protected from sun and wind, five steps from the kitchen. Blueberry bushes catch your sweater when you walk by after putting your bike away. A little further out into the yard are the vegetable gardens and the afternoon reading seats, and then the chickens and bees occupy the far corners of the yard, which would be zone three. Then we move further outward; work, library, movies, and groceries are all a short walk from home.

We visited a further zone this weekend. I think of it as zone five--the trails that ring Corvallis. MacDonald Forest, Fitton Green, Finely Wildlife refuge, and the arboretum are a huge part of our lives and we walk through them in all weathers. This weekend, we climbed to the top of Mary’s Peak, our local four thousand foot mountain, highest point in the Coast range, and indicator of when to plant beans (when the snow is no longer visible from the soccer fields).

The hike leaves from Conner’s Camp, about 2500 feet high on the shoulder of the mountain. It leads through a Cathedral forest of tall straight Douglas Firs with a heavy understory of vine maple, fairy bells, and ferns. From the trail, we can catch glimpses of the hazy valley below, but the walk is silent. The trail climbs steadily  for several miles and we know every step. As we walk, we watch for the patch of coral root orchid that lurks in the shadow of one huge tree, the first monkey flowers of the season at a seep, and the anemones that wink in the darker shadows. I keep the plant list and each flower is, after ten years of this hike, an old friend. There are other landmarks as well, like the bench where the chickadee eyed Maureen’s hair for a nest last year and the steps right before the last steep ascent before the parking lot.

It is always a shock to climb from the woods to the car-filled lot near the peak. There is a road to the top, which we have taken several times, and it is a popular afternoon drive. The wind whips across the empty spaces and everyone scrambles for a jacket. Right where the trail emerges, yellow and purple violets mingle. After a quick stop at the outhouse, we head for the alpine gardens of the peak. Red penstemmons, purple phlox, and yellow wallflowers huge the ground in a carpet of color. We join the groups at the top, settle into a protected area, dig out lunch and plant books, and settle in for a rest. Some days, we can see the ocean and Mount Hood; other days, we can barely see the trail. Sunday, it was partly cloudy, so the valley lay before us on one side, the clear-cut patchwork of forest on the other.  We could see, however, our entire watershed, which is always a deeply rooted feeling.

After lunch, we descend. There are always a few plants we missed on the way up to be noticed and recorded, but the mood is more subdued. We have been to High Places once more, looked over our corner of the world, and are heading downhill towards dinner. Life is good.

 Beet Greens and Ricotta Pie

Make a pie shell. While you are at it and covered in flour, make two so you can have a rhubarb and blackberry pie as well.

Chop a large bunch of beet or chard  greens fairly finely. Chop an onion. Satee both until tender. Add salt, pepper, and a bit of nutmeg.

Mix about four ounces of ricotta cheese, 2 eggs, and about half a cup of milk. Mix into the veg. Pour into the pie shell and bake at a 350 degree oven until done, about 45 minutes.

Greens for Dinner, again. (and again. and again...)

            We had a small dinner rebellion last week. Mark came home, hungry and damp, and asked what was for dinner. When I told him greens and polenta, his face fell. Normally he loves polenta and greens—the balance of creamy, cheesey, soft cornmeal flecked with dried tomatoes and basil

and the sharp and garlicy tang of the mustard and kale greens, but tonight…he was not a happy camper. “Could we go to the store,” he asked quietly, “and get some broccoli…and maybe a little sliced turkey?” We did, and we picked up some ice cream, too. Dinner was fine—and we ate the greens the next night.

What to do with various leafy greens…

Chard:

            Gratin

            Pasta with dried cherries and toast walnuts and parmesan cheese

            Shells with chard and chickpeas

            Frittata

            Tart with ricotta and eggs

Arugula:

            Pizza

            Gnocchi

            Salad

Collards:

            Black eyed peas

            Soup with beans

           

Kale:

            With squash in lasagna

            Sautéed with leeks and garlic

            Tomato and barley soup

            With feta and pasta

            With chickpeas in soup

            Pie

            Quiche

            Lentil soup

Any and all greens, mixed together:

            With beans on toast

            With peanut sauce and rice

            In quiche and frittata

            With tofu

           

Chicken in the Mist

By May, the patterns of  the garden are established for the year. Everything is in the ground, or has been started on the potting bench, and we are just watching for growth—of crops, of weeds, of grass.

May Work List

·       Start winter crops and leave on the potting bench.

·       Replace winter-killed annuals and perennials in pots.

·       Late in the month, when all of the snow is off of Mary’s Peak, plant beans directly in the ground.

·       String up the trellis for beans and climbing flowers.

·       Move the peepsters in and out every morning and evening.

·       Mow and trim.

·       Harvest asparagus.

·       Make signs for new crops.

·       Preserve rhubarb; rhubarb red currant jam is excellent.

·       Clean out some of the dead greens from early season bulbs.

·       Turn off the heat and clean out the filter for the last time.

·       Take long walks watching for wildflowers; they are glorious this year!

·       Move the coop onto the last garden bed and fence the chickens out of the main yard.

·       Work on the compost pile.

·       Clean out the van for summer camping trips. Get a tune-up and oil change.

·       Admire.

Rhubarb and Red Currant Jam

7.5 cups of rhubarb, chopped

zest of two oranges

2/3 cup of orange juice

3 cups of sugar

Put all of this in a non-reactive pot, stir and wait until the juices release. Boil gently for 15 minutes.

Add 

2 cups of red currants (I always have a bag from last summer in the freezer.)

1 t of nutmeg

cook until gel stage. Place in clean jars and process in steam canner for ten minutes to seal.