blog about our garden

We upgraded WordPress recently and I haven’t figured out how to link our posts back to 43things as easily as I’ve done in the past. I’m working on that.

Meanwhile, some recent highlights include:

Our 100 Year Old Lilac

Lilacs & Rain: Sweet Spring Scents

Rhubarb Containers

DIY Cloches: A snake in the grass

Rub-a-Dub Planting Tub

Planting Peas

Hey, that’s a lot of posts! With pictures and everything!

I’m trying to find the right pace for the garden blog, the ideal of posts-per-week to shoot for. Every day blogging is a bit too much. A post each week isn’t really enough. Jimbo and I are co-blogging (is that a word yet??) which makes it a bit easier and more fun. We need to work on encouraging each other, I guess.

Meanwhile, I wrote a post yesterday about our current bush, which can be read here.

I need to finish some of the other posts I’ve started. Our garden is just waking up so there’ll be lots to write about in the coming weeks.

Have you ever seen traditional garden cloches? They are beautiful, glass bell jars that you put over tender plants to protect them from the harsh elements and insects. You can use cloches to get a head-start on the growing season. They add a very classy, Victorian look to a garden. Imagine a row of them, covering all the early seedlings in a garden. How lovely!

And imagine the expense! At $50 or $60 a pop, these beauties are not cheap.

Using cloches is an ingenious gardening technique, however, and we’ve managed to do so for the last few years with a bit of the DIY project. If you are itching to get your garden going again, this is an easy, earth-friendly recycling project with which you can pass a little time until the snow melts.

We save large-ish plastic juice bottles. With heavy sheers or a knife, carefully cut off the bottom of the plastic bottle. Once you’ve transfered your seedlings to your garden soil, top them off with a plastic cloche. The cloche keeps the air warmer, but vents itself through the spout, so it doesn’t get too hot inside. Cloches can cut down on insects on your plants. Using cloches has reduced the number of flea beetles that find and nibble on my baby eggplants.

Ours are not particularly gorgeous, but they serve the purpose. We switch them around after a week or two, moving them to the newer or smaller seedlings over the course of the start of our garden.

Jim came up with a clever and whimsical way of storing our plastic cloches too. He strings them on a rope, creating a very cute clear “dragon” that we hang on a peg in the barn when the cloches are not in use.

On this, that rare odd extra day of February, it is still winter in Michigan, and it has been a very wintery winter. It seems like it’s always snowing. In fact, it’s snowing right now.

We had a little break in the weather last weekend (that is the temperature went above freezing for the afternoon!) so Jim and I had a chance to work outside for 20 minutes or so. We tidied up the yard a bit, moving a wheelbarrow into the barn that had previously been frozen to the ground, carrying compost out to the bin, and taking a few pictures of the frosty garden.

Given the frozen state of affairs, I’ve had compost on my mind. While not actually gardening, composting nonetheless lets me think about what I will feed our plants at some point in the not-too-distant future.

In my websearch for composting resources, I came across this great list: 163 Things You Can Compost Marion Owen’s list includes some things have I haven’t composted (so far), and it also inspired me to make an exhaustive list of the things we have composed. So here goes:

Freezer-burned vegetables
Freezer-burned fruit
Wood chips
Hay
Popcorn (unpopped, ‘Old Maids,’ too)
Freezer-burned fish
Old spices
Pine needles
Leaves
Matches (paper or wood)
Hops
Old, dried up and faded herbs
Spent grains from brewing beer
Spent yeast from brewing beer
Grass clippings
Potato peelings
Weeds
Hair clippings from the barber
Stale bread
Coffee grounds
Wood ashes
Sawdust
Tea bags and grounds
Egg shells
Grapefruit rinds
Pea vines
Houseplant trimmings
Old pasta
Grape wastes
Garden soil
Powdered/ground phosphate rock
Corncobs (takes a long time to decompose)
Blood meal
Beet wastes
Tree bark
Flower petals
Pumpkin seeds
Expired flower arrangements
Bone meal
Citrus wastes
Stale potato chips
Rhubarb stems
Wheat bran
Nut shells
Clover
Straw
Cover crops
Fish scraps
Tea bags (black and herbal)
Apple cores
Electric razor trimmings
Kitchen wastes
Shrimp shells
Crab shells
Lobster shells
Pie crust
Onion skins
Watermelon rinds
Date pits
Olive pits
Peanut shells
Burned oatmeal
Bread crusts
Cooked rice
Tofu
Banana peels
Wooden toothpicks
Stale breakfast cereal
Pickles
Pencil shavings
Fruit salad
Tossed salad (now THERE’s tossing it!)
Soggy Cheerios
Burned toast
Old or outdated seeds
Liquid from canned vegetables
Liquid from canned fruit
Old beer
Snow
Fish bones
Spoiled canned fruits and vegetables
Produce trimmings from grocery store

and here are some other items we compost that are not on that list:
• ash from hardwood charcoal (NOT from charcoal briquets!)
• leftover oatmeal
• sad old rice
• the lost items from the bottom of the fruit and vegetable drawers
• flour that’s gotten too old
• jack o’lanterns (and other pumpkin shells)
• spent sunflower heads (after Jim has saved the seeds for next year)
• avocado peel (we’ve had less luck with the seeds- too hard)

Marion Owen’s list also included several categories of things we don’t compost, the most prominent being paper products. We have always lived in places where curbside recycling collects paper; we’ve put our paper there, rather than composting it ourselves. The exception to that is newspapers, which we’ve used successfully several times to take down weed patches. To do that, we spread newspaper layers over the area, like behind a garage say, and then put a layer of yard waste like leaves and trimmings to hold the newspapers down. Over the course of a season or a winter, the weeds underneath are thoroughly smothered.

We have no pets, so we don’t compost pet hair or feathers. We don’t have a supply of manure either, although that may change if a certain proposal passes in our town. We’d really love to have chickens!

Marion Owen’s list also includes leather items, such as old gardening gloves and worn-out wallets. I have to admit: I’m intrigued. Jim’s present wallet is looking pretty sad and therefore like my next science experiment more and more each day.

My latest entry can be read here

People tend to think of composting as a summer activity, if they think of composting at all. In our 20 minute garden, we are thoroughly committed to composting year ‘round, and it’s among the easiest resolutions to make— far easier than promises to exercise daily or eliminate a bad habit.

Here are my top three reasons for composting:
Caring for the earth. Maybe that sounds a little hokey, but, seriously, every bit of kitchen waste that we compost goes back into the dirt as opposed to into a plastic bag for a couple thousand years. The more we compost, the smaller our weekly garbage output. Composting is just the next simple step up from recycling.
Focusing on nature. One thing I truly appreciate about gardening is that it keeps me in touch with all things green and growing out in our yard during spring, summer, and fall. In stark contrast, winter in Michigan is a very nice time to spend indoors. Composting keeps the life cycle fresh in my mind.
Free fertilizer. Finished compost is an excellent substance to add to your soil. At no cost, you can enrich your soil, making clay soil lighter and light soil richer over time. You can give your seeds and plant sets a head-start.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how very easy it is to begin composting.

It’s been a blustery, snowy winter so far in Michigan. We’ve had more than one picturesque snowfall. The newly-painted barn looks particularly lovely and sturdy!

The snow on January 1st was the wonderful sticky kind that piled up on and coated every surface, including the famed 100 year old lilac.

How can we continue to call it a garden, with so much snow, you might wonder? Does a garden imply green growing things, not piles of white fluff? It’s still a garden because of our memories of growing seasons past and our hopes of sunshine and seasons to come. We know what lies under the snow so it’s still a garden. Oh, and because of this:
All hail, King Kale! Snow-defying edible wonder! We marvel at your hardiness and welcome you to the dinner table still.

Growing beans sprouts all year long is easy. The only challenge is remembering how easy it is to grown your own sprouts. We especially like to grow sprouts during the winter time.

The requirements are very simple. You’ll need a wide-mouth quart-size canning jar, a ring that fits, a piece of cheese cloth and a tablespoon of mung beans. Put the mung beans in the jar, cover with the cheese cloth and twist on the ring. (I bought a nifty little round piece of screen that works well in place of the cheese cloth.) Rinse the seeds thoroughly with cool water. Drain them well. And set them aside for 8 to 12 hours. Repeat the rinsing and draining process. That’s pretty much all you need to do. The indirect light of a kitchen window provides enough sunshine for the soon-growing seeds.

Small sprouts will emerge usually within 24 hours. We usually let ours grow for 6 to 8 days in order to generate enough sprouts for a delicious meal of Egg Foo Yung.

Egg Foo Yung, basic recipe

• 2 cups of bean sprouts, rinsed and chopped a bit
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 6 eggs, well beaten

Combine the bean sprouts, salt and eggs in a bowl. Heat 2 Tablespoons of oil in a skillet. Fry by 1/4 cupfuls. Keep patties in shape by pushing egg back into the patty with pancake turner. When set and brown on one side, turn and brown other side. Serve hot with rice and sauce.

Variations

There are many easy variations on the basic Egg Foo Yung recipe. What we have on hand determines what else goes in. We also enjoy adding one or more of the following:

• 1/2 cup finely chopped onions or scallions
• 1/4 cup finely diced celery
• 1/2 pound of left-over ground beef, pork, chicken or shrimp. If raw, saute first and add to the egg mixture.

Sauce

We don’t care for the gravy traditionally served with Egg Foo Yung at many Chinese restaurants in the US. Instead we mix equal amounts of soy sauce, mirin, and rice wine vinegar to make a thin sauce that’s also good for dipping dumplings.

We sometimes get out of the habit of sprouting seeds. Getting back on track with sprouting beans is very easy however. It’s a great activity to do with children too because the results are very quick and pretty amazing actually. Sprouting seeds is an easy and fun way to eat something fresh and homegrown, even in winter.

In the dead of winter, when nothing green is showing in the yard, seed catalogs provide hope and ideas. They remind you of the promise of spring, the unfrozen ground, the warmth of the sun—just when you are in great need of having those memories kindled. They provide a bit of gardening inspiration in what we have to admit is only the middle of winter.

A few years ago, we managed to get on too many mailing lists. From January 1 onward, we received a catalog or three per week. We didn’t purchase from enough catalogs, I guess, for a couple years because the deliveries have decreased to a reasonable amount.

This year, I went looking online for some of the catalogs we like and I found some others that were new to me. Many companies make it super simple for you to request their catalogs online. Here are a few I contacted today:

Seeds of Change, certified organic
Park Seed Company, certified organic
Burpee, mostly conventional, some organic

I was very impressed by the 16 varieties of Black Tomatoes available from the Tomato Growers Supply Company. Who knew there were that many kinds of black tomatoes available?

Another fun site I discovered today was Golden Harvest Organics. Their site is full of organic gardening tips and encouragement on topics like animal control and companion planting, in addition to a wide variety of non-GMO seeds.

We don’t grow everything in our garden from seed, in part because we are able to get very reasonably priced organic plant sets from our local farmers’ market. We also have begun to save some of our own seeds, especially sunflowers and pole beans, and there’s tremendous satisfaction from doing that. Still, seed catalogs provide us with inspiration and ideas, even if we don’t buy anything from them. They remind us too that, in the grand scheme of things, spring isn’t so far away.