Our garden is big. Yours doesn't have to be to yield lots of great food and flowers

I did not hear this in person. Bill did (on Marketplace Money on NPR last Friday). But he couldn’t resist telling me about it, chortling loudly the while.

As well he might. According to him, a garden advisor – whose name he didn’t catch – had pronounced that “if you can’t keep your room swept, you shouldn’t try to garden.”

This struck me as so wildly improbable I thought he must have heard wrong, so I looked it up.

Sure enough, there in the synopsis:

“…not every budget-conscious person can make a garden grow and save money. Meg Favreau of WiseBread.com says that if you can’t keep your own room clean, most likely, you won’t be able to take care of a garden. Just go grocery shopping. But for those of who (sic) can maintain a clean living space…”

Arrgh!!

In extenuation (please see update below), the interview was about frugality, not horticulture, and Ms. Favreau was presented as an expert on all things frugal, rather than as an expert at gardening, or, for all I know, housekeeping.  But still. There may be a few personality traits that would get in the way of successful gardening – hating the outdoors comes to mind – but a deficiency of tidiness is emphatically not one of them.

A few reasons cleaning the house and caring for a garden have nothing to do with each other

1) No amount of housecleaning will create some new piece of furniture or decorative object that was not there before. But if you plant an inexpensive 6-pack of baby zinnias, you could have great bouquets for months.

2. No amount of housecleaning will create something to eat. We hold this truth to be self-evident.

3. Cleaning what does exist in your own room may improve the looks of that thing, but not transformatively. There is no way that dusting a steel clamp light will turn it into a crystal chandelier. Tend to a little tomato plant, on the other hand, and more likely than not it will become a great big green vine dripping with delicious crimson fruit.

4. Cleaning indoors may be good exercise, but opening the windows won’t make it exercise in the open air. Even the most benign cleaning products do not smell nearly as nice as newly-mown grass or blooming lilacs or the warm earth all by itself.

5. There are degrees of uncleanliness, but basically a room is either tidy enough to occupy pleasantly or messy enough to inspire discomfort. In the garden, no such dichotomy exists. Instead, there’s a huge spectrum of imposed order from maintained-to-the-max to utterly overgrown, and there will be recognizable benefits just about everywhere along the line.

6. With maintained-to-the-max we arrive at the most important reason Ms. Favreau’s analogy is bunk, and (because of what it implies) dangerous bunk at that. The one thing that will doom you as a gardener is being a control freak. Doing the work, yes. Good idea. If you put plants in the right place, weed, water, fertilize and similarly help Mrs. Nature to the best of your abilities, you will greatly increase the chances of reaping rewards from your garden. But you cannot for a minute assume that you are in charge. You’re not.

That’s one of the things that’s most wonderful about the whole untidy, ever changing, always productive process of gardening. It’s always a partnership, and the gardener is always the junior partner.

Some posts that might be especially useful for food gardeners just starting out (try the Garden dropdown menu for more)

High Return Vegetables

Tips for Success with Vegetable Seeds

How to grow Garlic

How to build simple, easy trellises for tomatoes, peas and beans

* Update: Ms. Favreau‘s gratifyingly mild-mannered mother wrote in (see comments) to point out that the synopsis was by no means the whole story and that she didn’t discourage gardening and I should give a listen instead of simply relying on the retelling from NPR. Fair enough, and I do apologize; you’d think I’d know better in a political season full of dubious out-of-context quotes. So listen I did and so can you if you click the synopsis link. As it happens, I don’t particularly agree with her suggestions for how beginners should get started, but that’s a whole different post and a far less emphatic one.

Yet all that said, post-listen (not surprisingly, she was analogizing room-tidying to weeding) the gist of  it remains and I still think the message was unfortunate. There are indeed reasons that food gardening may not be a money saver  - again, a different post – and there are crops that will fail unweeded: carrots, onions and others with small tops that are easily crowded out, but one of the great things about gardening is that you can still get a lot of food if you don’t weed very often. For instance, once her recommended zucchini – and other squash – plants get going, their giant leaves will shade out weeds and you won’t have to worry about them.

This picture (taken at Adams, in Poughkeepsie, NY) is actually a bit of a cheat - I buy almost all of my seeds online, from too many favorite suppliers.* But it does say "time to think about starting seeds” in an unmistakable way.

This year’s gigantic assortment of seeds has finally arrived, bringing with it the usual gigantic dose of buyer’s remorse. I had firmly decided against bulbing onions, for instance, having concluded that purchased plants  -  also available mail order, in convenient bunches of 50 to 75 -  do much better than the plants I start myself.

Yet somehow, mysteriously, here is a packet of heirloom Australian Brown storage onion seeds, roughly 700 incipient plants. Here also are 8 kinds of peas, most of them the kinds that require poles. We cut way back last year and they were sorely missed, but this does not explain where the hell I’m going to put them all. As usual, too many tomatoes, but on the other hand I’m not going to start any eggplants.

I had no intention of getting into cardoons again, either, but then there was this nice packet of Gobbo di Nizza in one of those racks (well, you have to at least look), and a facebook friend had just assured me they really could be delicious and before I knew it, two dozen little green sprouts, each capable of becomming a bush 4 feet tall and almost as wide.

Even if you don’t eat them, cardoons are great in bouquets, especially in late fall when most other home grown beauties are no more. This Thanksgiving arrangement also includes Redbor kale and Bright Lights chard.

I’ve given individual pots to only 6 of the strongest-looking, but even that modest number will be eating too much precious seed starting space by the time it’s time to start the tomatoes.

And thus we arrive at When Is the Right Time to Start the Seeds? The chart at the end of the post provides some guidance and many seed packets have suggestions too, but the truth is it all depends.

SOME THINGS SEED STARTING TIME DEPENDS ON

* First and foremost, LIGHT. Outdoor plants do not cope well with the restricted light of indoors. A greenhouse helps, obviously, and grow lights can be almost as good. But if all you have is a windowsill it’s best to start only a very few things and to do it only a few weeks before they can start spending at least some time outside.

Tomatoes, for instance, are typically started 8 to 10 weeks before the last frost, but windowsill seedlings will be stronger if started no more than 6 weeks in advance. They’ll be small, but they’ll catch up, and they’ll catch up more rapidly than they would if they’d been stressed by two more weeks of low light.

* How dependable is the weather? All timing for seeds started indoors is calculated on the basis of distance to last frost. You can use a calculator like this one from NOAA to get a probable last frost date, but “probable” is the best that predictions can do. In places where there’s enough frost to worry about in the first place, spring weather is often unsettled. Balmy days can be followed by cold ones so blustery it is below freezing if you count the wind chill; and sometimes it’s just plain below freezing – late cold snaps can never be completely counted out.

On top of that, most tender plants prefer genuine warmth, in the air and in the soil. Forty five degrees is far from freezing, but if you’re a tomato it’s also far from warm. Short version: even though I have a greenhouse that lets me start early, I count as though “last frost” will be ten days later than predicted. If warm weather comes promptly, the seedlings will be a little smaller than planned, but that’s better than having them too big. (Seedlings that outgrow their pots get root bound, which sets them way back. )

*What’s the weather like indoors? A tomato seed may germinate in anywhere from 5 days to 2 weeks, depending on the temperature of the soil. (75 – 80 is ideal, but anything over 60 or so will work, eventually). This obviously affects how much of the allotted time the seedling is actually growing.

* How crucial is it that the vegetable, fruit or flower get a big head start? Plants that must make good growth in cool weather (delphiniums) and plants that are ruled by day length (onions) must be about 12 weeks old when planted out in early spring, no matter how long the growing season may be. Plants that just need three or four months of warmth after they hit the garden (tomatoes, peppers, daturas) have a lot more leeway – at least in places where the first fall frost doesn’t come until mid October or later.

* Some favorite sources for seeds , with a brief excursion into heirlooms and hybrids

More on seeds and seed starting:

Is seed starting really essential?

Organic seeds, starting off on the right foot

A Seed-Starting Timetable

(slightly adapted from one provided by  Kitchen Garden Seeds)

Counting back from last frost:

Vegetables

Four Weeks: Winter Squash, Melons, Cucumbers, Nasturtiums

Six Weeks:  Fennel,  Shallots, Tomatillos, Basil, Echinacea  and St. John’s Wort.

Eight Weeks: Eggplant, Tomatoes, Chiles, Sweet and Bell Peppers, Chives, Sage, Stevia and Thyme.

Nine Weeks: Broccoli, Cabbage and Kohlrabi (transplant out four weeks before the last frost date).

Ten Weeks: Celery, Celeriac.

Eleven Weeks: Leeks and Cauliflower (transplant out four weeks before the last frost date).

Twelve Weeks: Artichokes, Cardoons and Brussels Sprouts.

Flowers

Five Weeks: Alyssum, Calendula, Marigold, Zinnia.

Six Weeks: Balsam, Cutting Ageratum, China Asters, Celosia, Cleome, Coleus, Catmint Nepeta, Echinacea, Euphorbia, Forget-Me-Nots, Dahlia, Nicotiana, Scabiosa, Snapdragons, Stock, Thunbergia.

Eight Weeks: Baby’s Breath, Black-Eyed Susans, Milkweed, Coreopsis, Gaillardia, Globe Amaranth, Helichrysum, Hibiscus, Hollyhock, Heuchera, Nigella, Phlox, Platycodon, Statice, Yarrow.

Ten Weeks: Dianthus, Digitalis, Lobelia, Heliotrope.

Twelve Weeks: Datura, Salvia, Verbena, Viola.

However.

Reading up on gooseberry fool – don’t laugh; it turns out to be a much explored subject* – led me into a briar patch of nursery catalogs, from which I have only recently emerged.

Two ways of serving Gooseberry Fool.

You will notice the gooseberry color is a sort of midgrade pink-red, roughly the color of faded brick. This is decidedly unclassic. Recipes differ widely in method, sweetness and dairy component (most of the older ones use custard of some sort, rather than straight cream). But all of them call for green gooseberries and usually that’s green as in unripe.

Ripe gooseberries may be yellowish green, or yellow or red or almost purple and they can be delicious – as long as they remain uncooked. Unfortunately, even the best of them turns insipid when heat is applied, which may help explain why they haven’t become the hot new (old) thing.

Or it may be the thorns; gooseberry bushes are by nature dauntingly thorny, and the varieties bred to be less prickly tend to be less tasty as well.

But it’s probably the preparation problem. The blossom end has a dry scar and each little stem clings fiercely. The blossom ends, aka tips, aren’t objectionable in the raw fruit, and when you’re eating them out of hand you can simply nibble each little berry away from its taillike stem. But just about every recipe, whether for savory sauce, sweet dessert or preserve starts  with the instruction“tip and tail” -  as in remove same from each grape sized (or smaller) gooseberry. Not this one.

GOOSEBERRY FOOL

1 pint gooseberries, green to partially ripe (The ones in the fool in the photo were about half green and half pale pink, still far from their eventual deep wine red.)

scant ½ cup sugar to start, more may be needed

1 c. heavy cream, the heavier the better

1. Combine sugar and berries in a microwavable bowl. (see note) Cover and cook 1 minute at half power. Stir, then give them a minute at full power. Stir again. Uncover and cook in small increments until berries are soft and bursting out of their skins.

2. Put the mixture through a food mill to get pure pulp. Discard detritus. Chill puree thoroughly; it will thicken as it gets cold.

3. Taste pulp. It should be pleasantly sweet-sour. Add sugar to taste if necessary and stir well to dissolve.

4. Whip the cream until it holds firm peaks. Either fold it into the pulp or layer it with same into a glass serving dish or dishes.

4 servings – the glasses in the picture were 2 servings each.

Note: A microwave isn’t traditional but it is an almost foolproof way to soften the fruit without adding any water or heating up the kitchen. If you prefer, combine fruit and sugar in a small covered casserole and bake at 325 until fruit is soft enough to puree.

RASPBERRY CHOCOLATE FOOLISH PIE

Because it would be foolish to use the oven any more than necessary when it’s 90 degrees out.

5 oz. crisp, plain chocolate wafer cookies. I used Nabisco Famous (the ones with the whipped cream roll on the box) because I keep them in the freezer as a baking staple, but anything unadorned and unfilled that isn’t super-rich will do.

4 oz. amaretti

6 tbl. melted butter

1 heaping pint raspberries

3 tbl. Cointreau

¼ c. sugar or more to taste

1 ½ – 2c. heavy cream

1. Mix the raspberries with the cointreau and 3 tbl. of the sugar. Let them sit for at least an hour at room temperature, as long as overnight (in the refrigerator). Drain well, reserving the juice, then crush the fruit into a medium sized bowl. Taste.  There should be a sharp edge, but if the berry pulp is very sour, add a little more sugar.

2. While the berries are marinating, process the cookies together until reduced to fine crumbs. Or put them in a heavy plastic bag and crush with a rolling pin. Mix in the melted butter and press the (still somewhat crumbly) crumb mixture into a shallow 10 inch pie pan, making a low raised rim. Chill.

3. Whip the cream until it holds soft peaks, add the remaining 1 tbl. of sugar and beat until firm peaks form. Set aside about a third of the cream and gently fold the rest into the raspberries.

5. Turn the raspberry cream into the pie shell, smoothing the top. Carefully dollop on the remaining whipped cream and spread to make a smooth frosting. Chill uncovered for 3 or 4 hours or freeze at once.

Serving:  Cut in slices and pass the reserved juice separately. Be warned the refrigerated slices will be a bit slouchy. If you want the neat edges in the picture, freeze the pie solid, cut in slices, then let them warm up in the refrigerator until semi-thawed.

* see especially Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and a Glass of Wine,  Jane Grigson’s Good Things and  Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, and Alan Davidson’s The Penguin Companion to Food.  Every one of these books is great reading, worth having for reference and living proof you can’t get everything on the internet. So is Elizabeth Schneider’s Uncommon Fruits and Vegetables.

GARDENERS NOTE:

“Of all garden fruits, least attention need be paid to currants and gooseberries in the matter of sites and soils; they will grow in any garden if the climate is suitable.” U.P. Hedrick, Fruits for the Home Garden, 1944.

True, at least in my experience. There are only two important things:

1. You have to have a real winter; gooseberries are a Northern fruit, and

2. You have to be allowed.

Gooseberries come in two main species Ribes hirtellum (small, American and mildew-resistant) and Ribes uva-crispa (large, European and horrendously mildew prone). There are, not surprisingly, many hybrids aimed at combining the best of both worlds.

The catch? Ribes species, including currants and jostaberries as well as gooseberries, are essential to the life cycle of pine blister rust. The rust is a fungus disease that kills white pines, and for a long time federal law forbade planting any of the enabling fruits. That law was repealed in the 1960’s but some states  – DE, MA, ME, NC, NH, NJ, RI, WV – or counties within them still have prohibitions of their own. Reputable nurseries will not send plants if you live in one of them.

A Luna moth (Actias luna). Not the enemy, even though its children are very large and green.

I don’t have a picture of a hawkmoth, aka sphinx moth or hummingbird moth (so named for its ability to hover and its very long tongue). But if you see one of these gray-brown creatures, almost big enough to pass for a small bird, you’re seeing disaster on the wing. The Hawkmoth’s very large green children are hornworms.

Tomato – or more likely tobacco - hornworm (Manduca quinquemaculata or M. sexta), both voracious consumers of tomato, pepper, petunia, tobacco and other plants in the nightshade family.

In our New York and Maine gardens, hornworms usually show up in late July or August. But I’m thinking about them early this year because a Facebook friend in Virginia is already beset.

“Hornworms are eating my tomato plants,” she wrote, “anyone have advice on how to get rid of them?”

But of course!

Try the tips on Hornworm eradication at the end of this post, I replied, and if you get the chance, employ these two major organic defenses:

1. Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), kurstaki strain, a widely-sold bacterial insecticide that kills caterpillars but is otherwise more or less harmless. It must be eaten to do its work, so baby butterflies are safe as long as you spray it only on the  hornworms’ dinner.  Unfortunately, Bt is most effective on hornworms when they’re still small. By the time they’re big enough to notice – or do damage that’s noticeable – Bt is no match for them.

2. The Braconid wasp Cotesia congregatus. These tiny, deadly parasites have evolved to prey only on hornworms and are generally available anywhere hornworms are found. To get some, simply notice which hornworms have white bumps and leave those alone.

This hornworm is (inadvertently) an organic gardener’s dear friend.

I used to think the white bumps were wasp eggs, which would on hatching enter the hormworms and eat ‘em up, but that was literally backwards. The bumps are cocoons, spun by the wasp pupa after they’ve eaten the hornworm and emerged, ready to transform themselves into adult wasps.

Same difference in the control department except you don’t have to worry about how much Mr. Bumpy might eat before the wasps get busy. By the time you see the cocoons, he’s on his last legs and no longer very hungry.

PS. Wondering what the Luna moth has to do with anything? Nothing, except that it’s prettier than a hornworm. To view the Luna moth’s children, check out this series of photos.

And how different from the lettuce at the market, whether super or farmers.’ Being both extremely bulky and highly perishable, first class lettuce is a perfect poster child for home-grown.

Panisse (left) and Forellensclhuss – one modern, one heirloom. One toothsome, one super-tender. Neither suitable for any but the most local commercial cultivation.

It’s an ever-changing parade, with overlapping performers. First come the mild, mid-green frills of Black Seeded Simpson, dotted around in self-sown clumps, offspring of last year’s late summer’s crop. Then close behind them the classics of spring planting, including our favorite: buttery thick-leafed Webb’s Wonderful.

Self-sown Black Seeded Simpson, being permitted to stay in place beside the tomato patch. It grows so fast we ignore Rule # 1 and just cut the crowded seedlings by handfuls until we’ve used them up.

Rule # 1? Thin the lettuce! Do it yesterday. Whether it’s fast growing spring lettuce or the slower summer types, plants that are free from undue crowding grow at a pace that promotes flavor and tenderness.

#2. Provide fertile soil and ample water but don’t get carried away. Lettuce that gets too much nitrogen gets big without developing flavor and is vulnerable to rot, a favored child of soggy soil.

#3. Choose the lettuce for the season. Any good catalog will describe its choices in terms of their resistance – or lack thereof – to heat. Craciovensis, for instance, shoots up quickly in a way that would spell inedible bitterness in most varieties. But it not only keeps its sweetness, you get the thick stem as a bonus. Anuenue, a crisphead from Hawaii, stays rock solid when temperatures climb, and if it’s less sweet than cool season crispheads it still makes a mean BLT.

Spring-planted Craciovensis and rocket (arugula). Both will be shooting up shortly, at which point the lettuce will still be great while the rocket is no longer a leaf crop. Let it be, if you have the room, so you can eat the flowers.

The Best Spring Salad Dressing

When the lettuces are super-tender, mild flavored and sweet, the way to dress them is in cream, not olive oil.

Mince a small amount of garlic or garlic scape and crush it with salt in the salad bowl. Add a good glug of heavy cream, about 2/3 as much liquid as you’d be using if it were oil. Squeeze in not a lot of lemon juice. It will thicken the cream. Taste. Add more lemon if it’s insipid. Otherwise, in with the lettuce, toss and taste again. That’s it. The lettuce is a miracle. Don’t mess with it.

Another reason to Grow your Own. Conventional lettuce is on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen List. It carries quite a bit of pesticide.

Result: blog silence. And here it is time for the next spring fling recipe swap.

If asparagus comes, can rhubarb be far behind?

This time it’s rhubarb, about which I have had a lot to say over the years on account of because I love it. Please use the search to find everything or go directly to the Rhubarb Custard Pie pictured above.

That post has links to other pies, but if you’re interested in the garden angle

you might as well start with deep dish rhubarb-peach, which includes quite a bit of growing info.

The recipe swap originates with Margaret Roach, over at A Way to Garden (or at least it does as far as I’m concerned), and clicking this link will send you to the rhubarb edition, where there are more links to recipes aplenty, including a few for rhubarb dishes that are not dessert.

Not as many as might be nice, so I’ll try to codify something before the season is over, but meanwhile the thing to keep in mind is that rhubarb is lemonlike in its fruity sourness, so it goes well with fatty meats like pork, fatty fish like salmon and shad, and fatty poultry like duck, as well as rich vegetables like sweet potatoes and winter squash.

Preserving Rhubarb

The season is brief and summery, which is all very well in its way but then what about having Rhubarb Fool for dessert the day after Thanksgiving or doing Valentine’s Day Duck Legs braised and crisped over rhubarb sauce?

Fortunately, rhubarb freezes as well and as easily as berries. No need to cook it or pack it in syrup or any of that. Just spread in a single layer on a cookie sheet and freeze solid, then pack airtight in freezer bags (or glass canning jars if you’re having a plastic freakout and have a massive freezer). Chunks last a little longer than sticks, because they freeze more quickly, but given the press of spring’s endless to-do list it’s better to cut it in bag-length pieces than not freeze any at all.

Alternatively, plain old stewed rhubarb, sweetened to your taste and ready to go also freezes just fine, whether in bags, jars or yogurt tubs. Lovely spooned over oatmeal on a cold winter morning.

Rhubarb Fool

Ingredients: rhubarb, sugar, the best heavy cream you can get. No numbers or numbered steps needed.

Make some stewed rhubarb, sweetening it just enough to take the sour edge off (the cream will also gentle it, so it needs less sugar than you might think). Mix it with an equal or slightly larger quantity of whipped cream. It’s prettier – especially if you have pink rhubarb – to layer it in sherbet glasses or similar, more traditional to mix it completely. A little vanilla doesn’t hurt and will help if the rhubarb is particularly tooth-furring.

When I got out the butter I was thinking "have a measure to show the lengths," but it doesn't hurt to remember you don't HAVE to cook it in olive oil.

It was planted 20 years ago, which means 16 years of bountiful harvests and about 5 years of asparagus posts, most recently Tips for Choosing, Storing, Preparing and Growing. Want recipes? I seem to have called it a day at Cream of Asparagus Soup (made from the otherwise discarded tough ends) and Spring On Toast, with asparagus, morels and eggs. So I was feeling faintly remiss when

I happened over to my friend Margaret’s A Way To Garden and discovered a major multi-blog asparagus recipe swap, down at the bottom of her as usual very informative asparagus post.

Recipes galore, there for the clicking. I haven’t tried any of them, not being much of a recipe follower unless I’m writing the thing. But once the plenty kicks in, who knows?

Meanwhile, welcome to the swap, which seems to be a sort of edible chain letter. Margaret links to what might be called the ringleaders’ blogs, then invites readers to include their own recipes (or links thereto) in her comments. The other lead bloggers do the same, then their blogs’ readers do the same and …

So. Please consider yourself invited. My comments are your comments, after all, and the more the merrier.

Margaret’s original lineup includes:

* from the Food Network’s Healthy Eats, Asparagus 5 Ways

*  from the Food Network’s Dish, Easter Asparagus Recipes

* from The Cooking Channel, Asparagus Frittata

*  from What’s Gaby Cooking, Skinny Asparagus and Gruyere Tart

* from Food2, A Seasonal Spotlight on Asparagus

and

** Asparagus Gratin, originally from Cook’s Country, channeled through Steamy Kitchen and, with different commentary (commentary being the fun part), Pinch My Salt.

Note: At the lead blogs – this one makes no promises – swaps will be going on weekly all through the season. This is the first batch, aka Spring Fling:

Wednesday, April 20: Asparagus

Wednesday, May 4: Rhubarb

Wednesday, May 18: Artichokes

Wednesday, June 1: Strawberries

Wednesday, June 15: Peas

The view on March 8th.

Shortly afterward it got warmer – pleasant even – although there were still large heaps of dispirited snow in the shady spots. But gradually (very gradually), the heaps diminished to tiny piles. We heard peepers. The crocus, early iris and eranthus began to bloom.

One thing I love about eranthus are those frilly skirts. Another is their cheerful willingness to multiply.

As further encouragement, we have now had St Patrick’s day, aka Make Soda Bread day and the first day of spring and the arrival of two of my favorite fall catalogs – Brent and Becky’s Bulbs and Adelman peonies. Definitely planting time, even if it is going to be 14 – 16 degrees at night for most of the coming week.

As usual, I have a good supply of things to plant “as soon as the ground can be worked.” What I wish I had more of is patience, because unfrozen is not enough. “Can be worked” also means “not sopping wet.” If you grab a handful of the soil and it sticks together like clay when you open your fingers, it’s too soon to plant no matter what the temperature.

This is the part where I’m glad the Hudson Valley garden is built on top of an old railroad bed. After 20 years of improvement it’s still an evil nest of stones that thwarts every attempt to set a stake or insert a shovel, but you can’t beat it for drainage. Even though it’s still more than six weeks before average last frost, the soil will shortly be crumbly enough to plant :

Lettuce

Rocket (arugula)

Parsley

Coriander

Poppies

and

Peas  – but not sugar snaps, which need warmer soil, and not quite yet sweet peas, the seedlings of which are a bit less frost tolerant than those of edible peas.

Also not time yet for carrots, beets or cole crops and definitely not time to plant potatoes; they shouldn’t go in until frost season is almost over. But back there with the soda bread, several St. Patrickses ago, I made a loose promise to discuss potato planting at potato planting time and then…

Planting Potatoes

It’s easy; potatoes are determined to grow and as they come with their own food supply they will grow for quite a while with no encouragement at all.

A familiar sight at this time of year. NOT suitable for planting*

The Classic Method

Choose a spot in the garden that gets full sun and has well drained, fertile, slightly acid soil, innocent of fresh manure. Dig an 8 or 9 inch deep trench, piling the excavated soil at the edges.

Set the pieces of seed stock in the trench eyes up, well apart, according to the instructions for the variety.  Resist the urge to use it all up if you’ve got more seed than planting space;  too-close planting is likely to produce lots of little potatoes that don’t store well.

Cover with a couple of inches of soil,  then stand back and let ‘er rip, gradually filling in the trench as the stems grow, then piling on yet more soil (or straw) so that by the time the plants are bushy they’re growing out of a mound of darkness.

The potatoes form on stems growing above the seed piece and the more buried stem you have, the more tubers you’ll get. Within reason. The plants have to switch from stems to leaves fairly early or there won’t be anything to convert sunshine into potatoes.

The Less-Work, Easier Harvest Straw Pile Method

For a while there, various back to the land publications were pushing potato planting minimalism: Scratch out a shallow depression in any soil not heavily infested with perennial weeds. Plant the potatoes. As they grow, keep covering them with straw. Water frequently, potatoes need consistent moisture. Don’t let the straw get soggy, potatoes rot in wet soil. Pull any weeds that appear.

When the potatoes flower, there should be a few new potatoes available for gentle removal, and at the end of the season you will have a heap of rotting straw with potatoes in it.

I have actually done this, about 30 years ago, and it worked pretty well, but it didn’t work nearly as well as using the straw pile method on potatoes planted in shallow trenches in fertile garden soil that was more or less weed free to start with.

Plus voles, field mice and rats, which are the dark side of all heaps of straw no matter what you’re doing with them. (This is perhaps the right place to mention that domestic cats, notorious killers of birds, got domesticated for a very good reason and I’m not talking about being cute.)

For more detailed instructions, consult this handy potato planting PDF for home gardeners from the University of Maine. Everything you need to know except how to avoid fungus diseases like late blight without using conventional fungicides. For that, it’s Organic Alternatives for Late Blight Control in Potatoes, from the National Sustainable Agricultural Information Service and when they say information they ain’t kidding. The preventives and remedies described are applicable to most other crops and most other fungal threats.

* Two reasons these potatoes are unsuitable for planting:

1. Because I bought them to eat, not to plant, I didn’t pay any attention to whether they might be carrying blight or other potato diseases.

2. They have already exhausted their energy making those long shoots. Nothing left to make roots with or to support the production of the first sets of leaves. Pre-sprouting seed potatoes (called chitting) gives them a good head start, but that’s done in good light and cool conditions, producing short fat green sprouts that look like little stars.

Ice storm photo by Bill Bakaitis

Where there are shoots, there will soon be flowers. Also bees.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed with imminent spring. It’s just so inspiring to see those fleets of tender crocus shoots pushing up; so inspiring ( in a slightly different way) to see those fleets of last autumn’s canned goods still lining the shelves.

Haven’t started raking yet, but I have been making Honey Bars, playing around with assorted vintages, pairing the perfumes of the honeys with different nuts: floral with hazelnuts, herbal with pecans, smoky with black walnuts.

That’s the thing about keeping bees:  if you get any honey at all, you generally get a lot, so even though last year was a total bust we’re in no danger of running out.

The thing that’s in danger is the bees. And as Bill points out in this guest post, the first wave of threats is already pawing away at the doorstep.

Sweetness in the Snow (Nope, It’s not Maple Syrup)

By Bill Bakaitis

In deep winter, our bees stay put, venturing out only on the rare warm days when they can clean up the hive (and themselves) without fear of freezing.

Then, long before the snow is gone come the first warm rains of the season. They fell here a little over a week ago, following which we immediately began to see dead raccoons on the side of the road and raccoon tracks in fresh snow around the neighborhood.

Then, a few nights ago I heard one scrabbling around in the side yard.  Oh, No, I thought. One way or another, Ugly is about to be the word in the bee yard.

Both raccoons and their distant cousins, the Black Bears, emerge from their winter denning slumber in mid-March, hungry and ready to roam. They are on the look-out for fast food. Around here, that usually means bird seed, household garbage, molasses spiked ‘sweet feed’ and bee hives.

Almost all of our neighbors set out garbage nightly, many feed the birds, and at least two provide sweet feed to their stock. Amongst this suburban smorgasbord, bee hives can beckon as the sweetest of finds. In such a setting, things can get real ugly real quick.

When the ‘coons come, the bears are usually not far behind, and they seem to have a singular fondness for the contents of bee hives. It’s not so much for the honey, but for the developing larvae packed into the innermost combs of the hive. But whereas the ‘coons opposable thumbs can open latches and investigate nooks and crannies with the skill of an ornery six year old, the bears use all of the grace and cunning of a smack down wrestler to demolish the hive in their effort to get to the larvae.

One move, Ka Blam! And the three hundred dollar investment of a single hive is splintered in an instant. Ugly!

To ward off this threat, those of us who keep bees have learned to surround the hives with an electric fence.  The problem facing us in an early spring with a deep snow pack (and so far this year over seven feet has fallen) is that the fence is buried under snow and any electrical current shorts out immediately.

So for us, the first sign of the sweetness of this spring was not the boiling off of maple syrup but the digging out and reconstruction of the electric fence.

When most of us think of honey we think of warm days, blossom filled vistas, fragrant evenings and jugs of amber sweetness. Yet the tasks of late winter, although not so bucolic, are also part of the picture. Remember this the next time you purchase a pint of home grown honey at your local farmers market.

(Note: This seems like a good place to add that large mammalian threats are the least of the bee’s worries and that’s pretty much all bees, not only domestic honey bees like ours but also the native pollinators lately much in the news as possible replacements. Decline of Honey Bees Now A Global Phenomenon Says the United Nations. LL)

Sitting cuddled up with a big pile of catalogs and a ballpoint (felt tips bleed through) is one of the best cheap thrills going, and buying way too many seeds isn’t all that much more expensive, at least compared to the trouble you can get into at an outfit like forestfarm. But this is not about that, it’s about remembering to leave room for the seeds that plant themselves.

Although all colors of alyssum self-sow, white is not only the most prolific but also the most fragrant. The poppies are not fragrant, just about their only flaw.

The alyssum is a never fail; vast numbers of the tiny seedlings always manage to survive no matter how often you disturb the soil to plant something larger and flashier.

The poppies have been addressed here before, in Shirley Poppies, One of Our Better Weeds, but it never hurts to praise the niftiest thing about them: they’re noteworthily promiscuous, cross breeding over and over so each is different from the rest. Every spring morning brings beautiful surprises.

Including many variations that are not Shirley poppies, according to Reverend William Wilks, who gets to be definite about it because he’s the one who developed and named them, back in the 1880′s. By the Reverend’s definition: Shirley Poppies

(1) are single,

not like this one

(2) always have a white base

not like this one

with (3) yellow or white stamens, anthers and pollen,

definitely not like this one

and

(4) never have the smallest particle of black.

on account of black takes us back toward the original, the poppy that grew in Flanders fields when all those graves disturbed the soil and liberated the seeds.

The original species, Papaver rhoeas, is bright red, with that big black blotch. Reverend Wilks started out with one that had a fine white piccottee edge

kind of like this, but with the blotch

and that’s why all the lovely variations that would give the Reverend fits should never be called Shirley poppies, although they are more or less all the time, including ( as you may have noticed) by me.

The ancestor of my weeds was a packet of Angels Choir, bought from Thompson and Morgan about 25 years ago, before everybody and their brother was carrying the seeds.

Everybody and their brother still doesn’t offer the wide range of old fashioned annuals found at Select Seeds, however, so if you don’t have a poppy growing friend to provide you with the necessary…

(Rhoeas is pronounced row-ays, should you for some reason want to be botanical about it. Otherwise, corn poppy and field poppy are equally acceptable.)