January is the time to plan and dream

It’s mid-January already and the seed catalogs have begun to trickle in, promising beautiful, delicious fruits and vegetables to satiate anyone’s palette. It’s been two years and three months since we moved up to New Hampshire. Since we moved up in the fall of 2016, this is our third winter though that we’re experiencing, and the learning curve has been huge! We are so much better at dealing with the snow and ice than we were the first winter. Which is comforting when facing a weather forecast which promises 3 feet of snow over a two-day period such as we are this weekend, if we are to get the high end of the forecast. As a gardener, we have always been a little bit more in tune with the weather forecasts; however, living up here on the mountain – we are so much more in tune with it than ever before. First off, to be fair when we moved up here, we also bought a weather station that works with our phones so we can see the exact conditions of things at our house at 1500ft which can be vastly different than what’s going on down at the lake at 500ft. 

Our view from 1500ft up overlooking Newfound Lake

Last summer was our first full growing season in our new garden since it took basically a whole growing season to demolish, prep and rebuild the new garden space.  The old garden consisted of old beds had been a combination of old rock beds that were incorrectly built that had caved or crumbled and some rotted out birch logs with old brick paths that had heaved from all the harsh New Hampshire winters. Everything had to go! We removed everything and leveled the area best we could with our tractor.

the original garden 

Initially we placed flattened cardboard boxes down in the area to suppress any and all weeds until we were ready for the gravel. That was all we did that first summer other than getting the fencing up around the garden.  At the time, we were still running down to Connecticut to take care of our client’s gardens – a part of the business we no longer offer – and I had no time to set up, let alone take care of our own garden.  I had some spare starts from over ordering for our client gardens and planted them in some Smart Pots in the new garden area. We had a few tomato plants, some potatoes, some peppers and squash.  We hadn’t run the hose from the house to the garden area yet and I had to run a hose from the garage which barely wet everything the way it needed to be. This was a far cry from my beautiful raised beds in Connecticut that were suited with soaker hoses that was on a timer. Mother Nature thankfully helped me out quite a bit and watered the garden for me quite nicely for the most part.  At the end of the season we had harvested a surprising amount of squash, a smattering of tomatoes and a few pounds of potatoes. Considering our situation, we faired pretty well – we are used to so much more but were thankful for what we did manage to grow that first season.

By the summer, we managed to have the gravel put in which would be the base for our garden and two raised beds put in. It was important to me to get some of the raised beds in before winter so that we could plant our garlic, onions and shallots to overwinter.  It always feels good to me to be able to stare into the garden in the dead of winter when there is snow covering everything to know that deep down there is life just waiting to spring forth during the spring thaws. Seeing the new grow in early spring as your working outside to ready the rest of the garden is also encouraging to me – a promise of things to come.

the first 4' x 8' to go in the new garden

 Early last spring, there was still tons of snow on the ground around St. Patrick’s Day, when I am accustomed to planting my peas in my Connecticut garden, even down there by April 1^st if we had a harsh winter that lingered.  I was finding New Hampshire to be a different sort of experience particularly where we are located up on Peaked Hill – the snows weren’t melting, they were increasing! Three feet of snow made it impossible to even get into the garden unless I climbed the 6 ft fence which surrounds it on all side – granted all the snow would make it half as difficult but still. I had decided sometime during the winter, probably as a way of trying to keep all my seed ordering straight, that I would keep a garden journal. I’d thought about that idea for years before never doing anything about it since I journal on a daily basis every morning in my personal life. But I wanted to keep things separate so that it would be easier for me to go back and use for reference and not have to sift through my daily ramblings about my life. I find journaling to be incredibly therapeutic – a download of my thoughts to clear my mind so I can proceed with my day. In the six years of managing other people’s gardens I had notes on their gardens but not my own. Who has time for that sort of stuff when you’re taking care of 20 other people’s gardens?

Last summer was the first time in 6 years that I took care of no one else’s garden but our own. It was a treat to be able to focus on just our own garden, particularly since all those years our garden became more of an afterthought. Part of me missed going into each different space, most we had installed the raised beds in the first place. It was always fun visiting with our clients and year after year helping to start and maintain their gardens.  I would sometimes get garden envy and then Mark would remind me that I shouldn’t be envious but proud of our work in our clients’ gardens. I would be proud but sometimes envious too since some just had the exact right light and of course soil since we put it there and amended and made sure it was properly watered that sometimes we’d get there and find specimen Brussel sprouts that looked like they should be photographed and splashed across the cover of Vegetable Weekly. I don’t think there really is a Vegetable Weekly but if there was those Brussel Sprouts – I remember them so well – should definitely been on the cover. We managed to install all the raised beds before it was time for spring planting. The extended winter season actually helped us out, in that it gave us the extra time need for us to put the raised beds in and fill them before planting up our tender crops. In zone 6, usually I would have been able to plant the tender vegetables like tomatoes and peppers shortly after Mother’s Day weekend – no way that was happening up here last Mother’s Day.

The first things I recorded in the garden journal were my seed orders which is helpful, so you have an idea of what your ordered three months earlier and what you still are expecting to arrive as the spring seed orders are mailed out. During the winter months I also take a look at my garden beds and figure out what is going to be planted where in the coming season – practicing good crop rotation to prevent soil borne diseases from building up.

 According to my garden journal, I was able to plant seeds in our 3’ x 6’ Maine Kitchen Garden bed on April 14^th.  I love this garden bed with its 20 “deep beds and the side trellis area which the peas grip onto so well. The soil was cleared of snow despite snow being all over the ground around the bed still and since I was able to easily work the soil with my hands gently, I knew it was ready to be seeded.  I had set the bed up in the fall but didn’t plant in it just so that I could seed immediately upon the thaw– so it was already filled with fresh compost but I’m sure I sprinkled a fresh bag of compost to help warm things along. As a result, I had a beautiful bed of three types of lettuce and four types of peas growing nicely as we continued to build and set up the other raised beds throughout the month of May. By June 1^st we had installed four more raised beds giving us 126 square feet of growing space to enjoy. By mid-June the last of the raised beds were installed and planted.

Now that I’m looking back over my notes from last season, I’ve very glad that I have these dates and notes about the garden – it will help us plan for the upcoming season better and manage expectations. As I said having these specific notes with the dates help out quite a bit since one of the other things that I am still working out about the new garden is its microclimate.   Understanding microclimates can be game changing particularly if your garden is subject to them like my garden. But figuring out exactly what you’re dealing with can take a little time and some observation. Again, this where taking garden notes can be helpful since again who can remember all the little detail in life sometimes – no one. First off, we may live in zone 5b but seeing how we are 1500ft above sea level, the altitude along puts us closer to actually being 5a since there is an average of 3.3º decrease in temperature as you go up every 1000ft. Each zone covers only a 10º range to begin with, so we certainly probably knocked to a 5a zone with the altitude alone.  Then there are the winds which we contend with at times.  The location of our house and garden is on the side of a mountain where the highest consistent winds we have recorded are 46mph with the highest gust being 58mph. That’s a lot of wind to have to contend with and it can be brutal on your garden plants, but it most definitely effects the microclimate of a garden especially when they are that dramatic.

Tower Garden before the windbreak

At first, I thought maybe the positioning of the house would protect the garden a bit more from the winds. But I quickly realized that this was unfortunately not the case and had Mark search for a solution ASAP!  Early in the season it wasn’t so much of a problem with the seeds and the small plant starts but as things started to grow, I knew it would become more of an issue.  The Tower Garden plants were having the roughest time of all the plants since those little plant starts are lifted into the air 3’-5’ – there was no escaping the brunt force of the winds being that high up.  Luckily, Mark had found a solution and had ordered two 6' x 15'’ panels of windscreen, similar to what you see on the side of fences at beaches and tennis courts to cut down on the wind.  We put up the two panels up on the north east side to block winds where we had the two Tower Gardens set up. I discovered within a short time the effectiveness of having the windbreak and also that it helps to keep the temperature up in that area of the garden as well. This totally makes sense since wind chills can lose temperatures by an entire zone range of 10º very easily, particularly up here. Given that fact, before the garden can be considered closer to a zone 4b garden with temperatures as low as -25 °F to -20 °F. I’ve seen those temperatures on our weather station thermometer on more than one occasion in our relatively short tie here.  The plan going into this season is to get more of the windbreak material to put up on the remaining north side of the garden fence.  We predominantly get northwesterly winds, but southerly winds come in from time to time, but they tend to be warmer and less violent. Hopefully we will be able to have everything in place going into this season with the new windbreaks in place early on. Snow build up can always delay things and New England weather can be so unpredictable at times, giving you all four seasons in one day.

two of our 4'x 8' raised beds, one is 16" deep the other 11"

This fall it snowed early starting in October we had 8” of snow by the time I left for Connecticut in the middle of November. I had left for Connecticut to visit with my parents and siblings leading into the holiday, Mark had stayed up in New Hampshire to take care of a few odds and ends before he was planning on coming down to join us. In the ten days between when I left for Connecticut and Thanksgiving Day we received 18.5” of snow on top of the original 8” we had on the ground. The weather stayed cold, it was frigid with below zero temperatures, let alone wind chill. Needless to say, Mark stayed up at the New Hampshire house to keep the home fire burning and enjoyed Thanksgiving with two of the kids who were able to easily divert there to join him. They deep-fried a turkey while the sitting in the garage all bundled up watching the deep fryer which they placed in the driveway, protected from the wind on the coldest day of the year. By the time I drove home on the Saturday after Thanksgiving I drove back into full on winter. Two days later we received another storm which delivered another 14.5” on top of what we already had and by the end of the year we had 51” of snow total! Welcome to New England.

November 27, 2018

We eventually did have a thaw, a week before Christmas of course – taking away the blanket of white snow that had been covering everything for a month.  Shattering peoples’ dreams of a white Christmas. For me it gave me the opportunity to do some of the things I had been planning to do in late November but never had the chance thanks to the early snowfall that stuck around. My plan had originally been to cut back my asparagus ferns when I returned from Connecticut, but that didn’t quite work out. A few days after Christmas, I went out to the garden with my garden shears and the dogs and a trug. We had received a couple of inches of fresh snow which is what probably forced me out in the first place – I didn’t want to miss the chance to trim back the asparagus before we got more snow making it impossible. It’s the first year of this asparagus bed and it seemed like it was getting off to a rough start.

We have a bed of asparagus down in Connecticut which I started 5 years ago. I love growing asparagus – it’s one of the few perennials in the vegetable garden and it teaches you patience since you have to wait 3 years before you can enjoy a full harvest. But once you do – OMG! It’s so worth the wait. It’s also a very pretty addition to the vegetable garden with its soft ferns and pretty red berries.

Asparagus ferns with one corn stalk thanks to the chipmunks

Looking out the window I see the clouds gathering over the mountains – we had enjoyed a nice sunny dry period but that’s all about to change with a big storm promising to engulf the New England states this weekend and deliver us possibly as much as 3 feet of fresh powder.  I can’t help but think I should take some of the homegrown-homemade potato soup out of the freezer to enjoy this weekend. That’s another vegetable I love to grow – potatoes even if it is a little bit ore labor intensive initially than most to get started. If you have ever grown your own potatoes, you know what I mean. If you haven’t you should give a go because you are in for a real treat. First there is so much more variety to choose from, just like with other homegrown vegetables – and nothing like what you can buy at the grocery store, even Farmer’s market.  Some of my favorite varieties include German Butterball and Nicolas. I swear you cut these open and it’s like it’s been pre-buttered and oh, so creamy! Perfect for the potato soup I like to make which is actually from the Pioneer Woman.

a multitude of Smart Pots for potatoes

Which reminds me I need to order my seed potatoes for this upcoming season. I tend to go nuts when I order seed potatoes since they all look and sound so good. Last season we grew 21 grow bags of potatoes of Desiree, Kennebec, Nicola, Yukon Gold, Yukon Gem, Viking Purple, Mountain Rose, and Red Gold. By the end of the summer, we harvested 20lbs of potatoes averaging almost a pound per bag.  We made potato soup with a lot of the potatoes so that we can continue to enjoy our harvests throughout the cold winter months and enjoyed plenty of fresh prepared potatoes through the fall. I like to order my seed potatoes from The Maine Potato Lady, Park Seed and Territorial Seed Company.

Gardening, particularly growing some of our own food has really changed life for us.  We feel better and each year that feeling is verified with what our physician sees when we have our annual check-ups. The combination of working outside in the garden and what we are actually consuming which is fresher, tastier, organically grown and highly nutritious food, has helped to make all the difference. Plus, we have not had to worry about some of the food recalls on vegetables that some.  The recent scares regarding romaine lettuce have us trying to figure out where we can set up one of our Tower Gardens inside so that we can enjoy growing fresh lettuce and spinach all throughout the year. Growing your own lettuce and spinach can be so easy it makes a lot of sense to try to, particularly a food safety become more of a concern.

So as the winter weather promises to deliver a one-two punch to us this weekend – it will be the perfect time to sit down with my notes, seed catalogs and dreams and plan out this year’s garden.

Happy gardening!

p.s.

If you are interested in starting your own garden, please check out our Homegrown Harvest website where we sell a variety of raised bed garden kits which are very easy to put together. I do not receive any compensation for any of the other recommendations that I have provided in this blog post.

Dreams of Fresh Vegetables

Happy New Year! The New year always brings with it the thoughts of fresh starts and new beginnings, dreams of fresh vegetables...

It’s January 26th and we just had our first snowstorm of the 2016 season over the weekend The National Weather Service had been touting it a ‘historic’ storm making me skeptical that we would even get any snow.  As it turns out, we had about 16 inches dumped in our backyard and NYC broke historic records but Snowstorm Jonas only ranked #2 in that area overall.  Officials were worried about the potential for flooding as Saturday was also a full moon event and thankfully the winds switched from coming from the northeast to north alleviating much of the well-founded concerns. They predicted the worse of the storm would by in the Washington, DC area, which certain did get hit but the storm cruised up the coast and targeted New York City before heading out to sea.  Queens hit the hardest had upwards of 30”+.  As it turns out Snowstorm Jonas took 30 lives from start to finish, putting states as far south as Georgia and Tennessee on state of emergency. As of last night news, many people in the outer boroughs of New York were still trapped in because of snow-clogged streets.

Marley checking out the garden

Everything looks okay here

Looks like it could use more hay

The aftermath of #snowstormjonas

A thick blanket of snow

The day before the storm I took a walk in our backyard to survey everything before the fresh white blanket would cover everything.  I put some hay down on a few beds and containers I had neglected earlier this winter or looked a little thin, particularly for what was heading out way. I enjoyed the quiet before the storm and started to think about last year’s garden as it pertains to this year’s garden.  Remembering the beds filled with vines of cucumbers, squashes and cherry tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers and heirloom tomatoes. Right now it’s a blank canvas.

Since Christmas there as been an influx of seed catalogs being delivered to our mailbox. I love sitting with a stack of these catalogs on dreary winter days and dream about the delicious and beautiful possibilities we can have in our garden.  It’s difficult not to want to fill up the garden with delectable varieties of heirloom tomatoes. My eyes widen as I glance through the beautiful and enticing photos, wanting to plant more and more every year.  We had a client this year who bought so many plants for her garden that we had to make the garden grow space bigger with grow bags since she didn’t have enough room in the raised beds.  This year I purposely didn’t open any catalogs up until I drew out my detailed plan for year’s garden first.  We use crop rotation as a method of organic gardening. Crop rotations lessen the chances of soil borne diseases from building up.  We always amend our soil before growing but planting things in the same place year in and year out leads to trouble.  Things may continue to grow but not as prolifically and may even die off once they have started depending upon how severe the soil situation has gotten.  Same place year in year out leads to nothing but trouble and more work for the home gardener, which can be easily avoided by implementing a simple crop rotation. 

I printed out a copy of last year’s garden to remind myself of things – it’s difficult keeping 20+ clients gardens straight and I tend to forget about my own record keeping at times. There is a fabulous garden planner online called Mother Earth News Vegetable Garden Planner - we highly recommend it! 

We love growing things that we can preserve and can– allowing us to enjoy our harvests well after the season has passed.  Last year we made a lot soups, as well as our traditional sauces.  Some of the new things we tried were huge hits with the family and will be added to this year’s roster of things to grow.  I highly recommend growing something new and different each season – even if you think you are not fond of something try growing it first before you make up your mind completely.  I say this because for most of my adult life I thought I hated summer squash that is until I grew it myself.  Perhaps its because I was a city-kid and didn’t always get the freshest of vegetables or perhaps the variety of squash available to me in the mass market of grocery stores offered a bland variety which traveled well and looked good but had little flavor. I tend to think it is more the latter since studies show that the produce we purchase at the grocery store has traveled on average 1500 miles before reaching our hands!

Some of the repeated favorites that had a second or third go round in our garden included growing our own potatoes.  After a few years of growing potatoes and last year doing it both in grow sacks and in the raised bed – I will always grow our potatoes in grow sacks – we harvested many more in the sacks than we did in the garden. Plus it was a royal pain in the ass to harvest the potatoes from the raised beds – having to carefully hand dig them up so as not to harm the potato.  The grow bags I simply dump the bags out over our sifter we made for sifting compost and collect the used soil to spread somewhere else for reuse.  Again the flavors from the different varieties are unmatched by anything available in the grocery store – plus growing potatoes has got to be one of the easiest vegetables to grow, particularly in grow bags where you can eliminate some of the pest problems that can plague in ground grown potatoes.  We also grew corn last year – our third year growing corn. Last year’s harvest was pretty good but I think this summer I will go back to the Three Sisters bed and couple corn up with beans and squashes.  The 3 Sisters is an ancient Indian organic farming method that employs the usage of companion plants to benefit one another. The beads provide nitrogen for the squash and corn while the corn provides support for the beans to grow and the squash protects the soil from weeds and protects the crops from critters with their thorny vines.

Last summer we tried a whole bunch of new things including spaghetti squash and sweet potatoes. Loved, loved, Loved – the sweet potatoes! Yes we grew our own sweet potatoes – two different varieties New Jersey Yellow and Okinawan Purple. Many people confuse sweet potatoes with yams and I will address the differences and confusion in another blog post very soon. We also grew Brussels sprouts – these delicious treats took a while to mature but it was well worth the wait.  I even cut down the last of the stalks right before the storm and harvest a number of baby sized Brussels sprouts; what they lack in size, I am sure they will make up in flavor.  I have definitely noticed that the flavor in homegrown food is so much tastier than anything bought at the store.  When I first started growing carrots and these little things came out of the ground as opposed to a 6 inch long carrot – it didn’t make much of a difference when it came to taste – it was like concentrated carrot!

New things this season I would like to include would be melon – although we’ve grown watermelon before, the sugar box small ones in containers in the past quite successfully – I would like to try growing a cantaloupe.  Varieties like a Golden Jenny catch my eye; described by the Rare Seeds catalog as “an outstanding golden meated version …short vines go wild with succulent sweet 2 lbs beauties… Early and productive.” Who wouldn’t want to grow those?! Or another variety called “Collective Farm Woman” described as an heirloom from the Ukraine that the “melons ripens to a yellowish gold and the white flesh has a very high sugar content. Ripens early even in Russia and tolerates comparatively cool summers.” We had cool summers for the last two seasons, so this perks my interest.  I get lost in descriptions of some of the possibilities – words like succulent, sweet and prolific pull me in.  I love the stories associated with some of the varieties and the names like Drunken Woman Frizzy Headed Lettuce, Paul Robeson and Mortgage Lifter catch my eye as I peruse the pages of food porn.  Learning the history behind the fruits and vegetables adds to my enjoyment of planning out the gardens.

One thing I plan on including in the garden this summer is a sunflower garden. I love to include sunflowers since they add a certain majestic beauty to the garden. I’m looking to include many varieties with colors ranging from the pale yellows of a Giant Primrose to the bold reds seen in a Red Sun.  Along with the sunflowers we’ll include pole beans that will happily run up the strong stalks and help them stand tall throughout the season. 

Flowers are an important part of the garden and including edible flowers such as sunflowers, nasturtiums, pansies and many other varieties can do double duty in the garden providing nectar for pollinating bees and color to the garden as well as delicious treats to add to your own meals. 

There are 6 weeks until spring officially starts, I know they will whizz by in the blink of an eye despite being cold and snowy.  Time waits for no one and it’s the perfect time to dream and plan.

"A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms. - Zen Shin