Category Archives: gardening

“You mean in America they eat dead fish?”

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This question was posed to my friend Wendy when she was in China adopting the darling Scott. Wendy had been describing something to one of her Chinese hosts about eating in America, and this woman just couldn’t believe that we bought fish dead in the grocery store. Who knows what you’re getting if you can’t see the whole fish — how can you tell how fresh it is if you can’t see the eyes or the gills? Better to buy your fish live, out of a tank, like sensible people, no?

I got thinking of this because my garden is ruining me for regular vegetables from the grocery store. How long has that zucchini been dead? What’s with that lettuce — it came all the way from Mexico and now I’m supposed to eat it? What am I going to do all winter (I sense experiments with cold frames ahead)? I know, again with the Swiss Chard, but it’s up and ready to go and having never really been a fan of Swiss Chard before, it’s a revelation. Cut it, carry inside, rinse in cold water, cut up and sautee with a little garlic until it wilts, add some chicken broth and a little wine and let simmer while the chicken cooks on the barbecue. Yum. Fresh greens from my very own backyard. And if you grow it yourself, you can eat it young, when it’s a little more tender than those enormous leaves you see in the store.

Speaking of greens, I went back to Seeds From Italy and ordered some more greens — some lettuces, a radicchio/chicory mix, and nice Bill McKay who runs the site sent along a packet of an escarole-like lettuce. I can’t say enough about these seeds — the arugula was fabulous, the basil is coming up really well (and I’ve had bad luck with basil in the past — which is odd as it’s supposed to be so easy), and I’m looking forward to more authentic Italian greens. Plus, he sends along some good cooking tips as well. Great site, great product, nice guy. Go check it out.

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Breakfast of Champions

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Breakfast of Champions

Not to sound like an Alice Waters clone, but my breakfast these past few days has been local farm eggs (1 yolk, 2 whites, extra yolk makes dog very happy — it’s good to share), scrambled with some arugula out of my garden and eaten over toast with a little goat cheese crumbled on top. It’s so good that yesterday, when I was out of eggs, I found myself cranky that the local natural foods store (which always makes me grumpy because they seem way more concerned with supplements than with food — eat real food people!) was still closed, as was Matt’s Meats where they also carry local eggs. So I had to settle for diner breakfast at Martins, which was fine, it’s always the same, which is what one wants from a diner. But this morning, there are eggs, there is arugula straight from the garden, there’s a happy dog who liked his extra yolk, and glory be, there’s even a nice steady rain falling on my garden.

Vacation in the backyard was a spectacular success. My yard is really coming together … I mowed and weed-whacked the other day, and despite never having been a lawn person, I was quite pleased with how nice it looked. Although I’m sure lawn-purists would criticise the diversity of plant life that makes up said lawn — no weed and feed for me. If it’s green, and mostly grass, I’m happy. In fact, this fall I’m going to seed with Nichols Garden Nursery’s Dryland Ecology Lawn Mix which contains a mix of grasses, clovers and some tiny wildflowers like chamomile. I like a mix in a lawn, and anything that will allow me to mow less often is a good thing.

Eventually I’d like to get rid of much of the lawn and replace it with perennial beds. Now that the fence is up, I have a long bed to work with, a bed that unfortunately, thanks to the happy workers’ feet is sort of a tabula rasa, but six feet by thirty is a fun space to think about. I’m hoping the big scarlet poppies and the iris will recover, but if not, well, I’ll just plant some other fun stuff. And for the back corner, where the sacred rhubarb grows, I’m thinking about raspberry canes, and asparagus — things I’ve been wanting to grow but which I don’t have room for in the regular garden.

But for now, it’s back to the day job, back to trying to make progress on the new book, back to watching, miracle of miracles, things grow in my vegetable garden (gardening is good for those of us whose faith in things working out okay wavers … you put in those seeds, nothing happens, nothing happens, and then there are sprouts, sprouts that grow into real things. Amazing.)

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Rhubarb My Rhubarb

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Rhubarb My Rhubarb

Not only did I get a vigorous rhubarb patch when I bought this house, I got a rhubarb patch with history. Apparently, mine is patch semi-famous in the neighborhood for its sweetness. Several people have pointed out my rhubarb patch and commented on this. But the true defender of the rhubarb is Betty, my 80-year old neighbor who comes running out of her house, screeching with alarm should anyone stray too near the precious rhubarb. Apparently, Betty has been coveting my rhubarb for years, and two or three years ago when the dear departed Mrs. Warnick was in the hospital, she agreed that since she was in the hospital and wasn’t going to be able to can, that Betty might as well take some rhubarb. As I heard it “she had everyone and their neighbor over here in that rhubarb patch.” So now she’s barred from my rhubarb, which means I was going to have to do something with it because it’d be a shame to just let it go to waste.

Betty and her daughter Rebecca have been known to provide a running commentary for everything going on in my yard, which is annoying, to say the least. And which is why there is a crew of adorable twenty-somethings in my backyard today digging postholes, and why next week I’ll have a glorious six-foot privacy fence. But this morning has been characterized by several rounds of squawking over the property line, and I’ve had to go get Steve, who lives across the street, and who actually owns the property next door to me, which since the lot lines split back and front, has one house on the alley with Betty and Rebecca in it, and one house on the street with a family who shall heretofore be known as the Clampitts. Hence the fence.

So, knowing the fence guys were coming, and since the rhubarb patch is on the property line, I cut it all the other day, and yesterday I made rhubarb-ginger jam. I checked with the Fannie Farmer cookbook for some general jam guidelines, and then just sort of made it up as I went along. I cut up the rhubarb, and threw it in my big stockpot with about 3 pounds of green grapes left over from this weekends Birthday Barbecue for the NG’s 35th. I also added about a pound and a half of strawberries that were getting kind of old, and a package and a half of leftover candied ginger that’s been kicking around the back of the fridge. Then I sliced up two big pieces of ginger into coins … probably about eight inches worth of ginger root, and stirred them into the slowly softening fruit mixture. The cookbook said you were supposed to measure everything carefully but the proportions looked like about 1:1 fruit and sugar, so I dumped about 2 pounds of sugar in and let it all cook down until there was no watery stuff on the top anymore. This took a very long time. Then I canned it … I followed the directions carefully and sterilized everything and even boiled the full jars for 15 minutes (10 minutes plus 1 minute for every 1000 feet above sea level). The seals all popped down, and I put labels on the jars, and this morning I had toast with a little goat cheese/creme fraiche mixture topped with Rhubarb-Ginger jam. It’s not terribly jammy, more the consistency of apple butter, but it’s lovely and tart and just a little gingery.

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Blooming Lilacs and a Runny Nose

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Blooming Lilacs and a Runny Nose

I have fifteen-foot-tall lilac bushes running down one side of my property line, and they’re gloriously in bloom this morning. It’s not eight yet, and the temperature is a balmy, sitting-on-the-porch-in-shirtsleeves sixty degrees. The sun is shining. The grackles are searching for bugs in the grass by the street. The puppy is lounging on the wicker sofa next to me.

I love my life.

Yesterday, I put the garden in. Such an old-fashioned phrase. I planted five varieties of tomatoes, and put their protective green wall-o-water hats on them. Since I started them indoors way back in March, they’re pretty tall, so I buried them deep where those early leaves can become nice sturdy roots. I also planted a couple of Italian melon plants, and an Italian eggplant, also in the wall-o-water hats. I can’t say enough good things about Seeds from Italy where I bought the melon and eggplant seeds, as well as arugula and basil seeds — the basil and arugula are coming up great guns, and this morning I had a little toast with goat cheese and fresh arugula out of my garden for breakfast. (Just writing that gives me a squidgy feeling, how precious, but on the other hand, something cool is happening in America when the goat cheese is local here in Montana).

I also built pea trellises out of copper plumbing pipe — they look really nice, and I’m looking forward to them turning nice and green. The soldering iron the hardware store guy sold me didn’t work, so I just threw in the towel and put them together with some nice thin strips of duct tape — it looks just like a weld from afar, and it’s not like I’m running water through them. So, I’ve got two kinds of peas planted, some haricots verts and some French flageolet beans. Its starting to look like a real garden out there, not just a bunch of big wooden boxes filled with dirt.

And my nose is running. I don’t know if it’s the lilacs, or the trees leafing out, or perhaps the drifts of hair my two dogs and one cat are shedding all over the house, but since I really hate the drugs they give you for this stuff — they either make me sleepy and stupid or so wired I can’t see straight — so I’m just wandering around my lovely yard with a box of kleenex. It’s not that big a deal, really. Who cares about a runny nose when you’ve got forty feet of blooming lilacs?

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Snow on the Lilacs

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Snow on the Lilacs

Good thing I didn’t plant the tomatoes on Friday, when the sun was shining, when it was 70 degrees and my apple trees were blooming and the lilacs were this close to opening. Good thing because today it’s snowing. Snowing like winter, big fat wet flakes falling outside my window, two inches on the lawn, and the poor lilacs are all bent over from the load. Everything will be fine, this is expected, it’s Montana after all, and although the official last frost date was yesterday, the 17th, everyone knows that if you put your tomatoes out before Memorial Day you’re just asking for it.

And I have to say, I’m enjoying a snowy indoor day. This week was a little much. We had a raucous night Tuesday watching the debut of my friend Bill Campbell’s documentary, Season of the Grizzly, on the Animal Planet, and wound up on the porch in the glorious late evening light eating outdoors and drinking far more wine than we should have. Wednesday was the opera in Bozeman, Aida, which was fabulous — really. They bring in singers, and the orchestra was terrific, and the music was so good that the local kids’ goofiness as dancing girls and extras was charming and not annoying. But it’s a long opera, and it was 12:30 before I got home. Then Friday was the Fur Ball — the Humane Society benefit, which was fun and all, but I am not an extrovert by nature, and by Friday night I was getting tired and grumpy … So a snowy spring day where I can curl up inside with last week’s NY Times, with George Eliot, with Reading Lolita in Tehran, and try to refill that creative part of my brain so that tomorrow, when the new iBook comes to replace my dead PowerBook (totally crapped out on Thursday — but the local guy got it to come back to life long enough that we think we can get my data off it), so tomorrow, despite the day job, and the garden chores that need to get done (I’m planning pea trellis made from 1/2 inch copper plumbing pipe), I can get back to the novel. Get back to the novel with a clear head, get back to the novel like a person who has had a day off.

I went outside a while ago and cut an armful of snow-covered lilacs. They’re in a tall vase below the portrait of my grandmother in my now-perfect living room. It’s funny, the Proustian-memories some things bear. My dad’s birrthday was yesterday. For a while when I was a child, my parents had a farm northwest of Chicago, and there was a sort of lawn-courtyard formed by an enormous ring of lilac trees. And every year they’d bloom in time for my Dad’s birthday — I don’t know whether he actually did really love the smell of lilacs, or whether it was one of those things I got in my head as a kid, that Dad liked lilacs. I remember cutting armfulls of them, and taking them down to his office in the old guest house by the road. Later, after my parents divorce, things got a little weird at the farm, we’d go out on the weekends and stay in our old house that now had almost no furniture in it, but the woods and the creek and the pond and the lilacs were always the same, and we loved them the way only little kids can love a piece of ground. So here it is, the middle of May, and I’m back in a part of the world where there are lilacs. Happy Birthday Dad, I’m thinking of you as the lilacs warm up inside and spread their scent all over the inside of my little Montana house.

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Another Day, Another Garden Bed

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Another Day, Another Garden Bed

Woke up this morning to sunshine, which was welcome. Although come to think of it, yesterday was sunny, it was just intermittently snowing and hailing through the sunshine. But this morning, blue skies and happy dogs. A good way to start a Sunday.

Planted one more raised bed today. The plastic sheeting over the raised beds seems to be working quite well. This morning when I went to shake the puddles off the two existing beds, I discovered they’d frozen overnight. But underneath, carrots and arugula are sprouting, and the shaky-looking transplants I put in last week are looking more sturdy every day. It also seems to be really warming up the soil in there nicely. Today I planted another raised bed with kale, golden and early wonder beets, Yu-Tsai — which looks like Chinese spinach although the package tells me it’s actually rape, yellow Gai-lan, which is sort of like a Chinese version of broccoli raab, and parsnips. Watered it well, covered with semi-clear plastic, then sat on the comfy lawn furniture and read last week’s New York Times.

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A Perfect Rain

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A Perfect Rain

We’ve had two days of perfect spring rain. No downpours, just soft, soaking perfect rain. For those of you who don’t live in the West, it’s important to remember that we only get 14.5 inches per year, on average, and the past couple of years we haven’t even gotten that, so the general mood is one of deep relief and nascent hope for a good season this year. Here on my little backyard farm, the pathetic-looking chard and parsley plants I transplanted on Monday are looking good. They like real dirt. They like soft rain. They’re looking kind of perky, and the chives are looking good too. I planted the first of my raised beds on Monday — one has parsley, chives, chervil, two kinds of arugula and cilantro (and will get thyme and tarragon later, the oregano is going in a container because it’s so invasive, and I have tons of mint already in the front flower garden). The other bed got spinach, mache, frisee endive, carrots and those lovely long French breakfast radishes. I covered the beds with a sheet of plastic, to make a sort of cold frame, although the rain’s been so great I’ve only been covering them at night in case of frost. With this lovely rain, I think I’m going to plant a bunch of the wildflowers that don’t like to be transplanted, since nature seems to be cooperating and keeping the ground damp. It’s spring, and the world is puddle wonderful here in Montana …

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Everybody Likes Cake, Part 2

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Everybody Likes Cake, Part 2

Yesterday I moved a dumptruck load of compost into my new raised beds. I do not recommend moving a dumptruck load of compost by oneself, especially if one is, as I am, a small-ish woman who is no longer the strong thing she was in her twenties. It was hard. It was really hard and I had to get it all done yesterday because had been dumped in such a way that it blocked open the big gate to the alley. The dogs were pretty good about it, but every once in a while, something interesting would happen out there and the puppy would overcome his fear of the Big Blue Tarp and dash out into the alley. Once there, he would become deaf, forget his own name, and I’d have to stop in mid-wheelbarrow-load to go fetch him.

So, by the time the Darling Brother returned from Bozeman, I was very cranky. I was deep in a nobody-loves-me-and-I-had-to-do-this-all-by-myself funk. The Darling Brother returned from Bozeman with a cute little white bakery box tied up with a pretty purple ribbon. Clearly the work of the Nice Girlfriend. Of course, I snapped at the D.B., who nonetheless did the last four or five wheelbarrow loads for me, and told me to go put the cake in the fridge. It was for Easter morning and the NG had spent quite a long time picking out just the right one. I put the cake in the fridge, we had a beer each on the comfy patio furniture, and between the beer and the late sunshine at 6:30 pm, and the fact that it was still a balmy 50 degrees, all was well once again.

So this morning I made a pot of tea and opened the little cake box. It was the most adorable little yellow layer cake you’ve ever seen. It has candied violets and mint leaves on it. It has little tiny rosettes. It tasted very good. It was a very nice little cake, and like all cakes, went a long way to lifting spirits. Everybody likes cake.

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Forsythia and chickens

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Forsythia and chickens

It was sort of a crappy day here in Montana … weather looming, dogs digging up the weed-barrier-cloth I laid around the soon-to-be-raised-beds and shredding it all over the yard, and I was just off all day. So I did what all good Americans do when feeling out of sorts, I got in the car, drove to Bozeman, and went shopping.

But what I love about living here is that shopping includes stops like the Big R Ranch & Home Supply where you can buy everything from clothes to dog food to garden supplies to Bantam Chickens. I want chickens so badly, but I think I have to wait until next year. I don’t have a chicken coop yet, and I think it’s probably unfair to the baby bird dog to torment him with chickens at this point. But looking in the bin at the Polish Crested, Golden Laced Wyandottes, and Blue Cochin chicks, I really really wanted to buy a handful of each and bring them home to peck in my yard all summer. Next year …

So the next stop was Cashman Nusery where I bought some more seed flats, some sweet pea seed and innoculant, and a forsythia bush. Well, it’s a bare-root plant, so it’s hardly a bush at this point. It’s more like a forsythia twig. A forsythia twig with roots. But give it a couple of years, and where that messy wild clemantis used to be in the corner of the yard, there will be a big open forsythia, heralding spring each year with sprays of yellow blossoms.

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Garden Update

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Garden Update
I have sprouts! Two of the five tomatoes have sprouted, and the thyme seems to be coming up as well. The grow lights are on and as always, I’m weirdly surprised that seeds actually sprout.

While avoiding war coverage last night, I stumbled across a rerun of my new favorite show, Ground Force, on BBC America.The conceit of Ground Force is that loved ones write in requesting a surprise garden makeover for someone, the show gets the recipient out of town for a weekend, and makes over their garden. So imagine my surprise when flipping channels to discover that they flew to South Africa and made over Nelson Mandela’s garden!

It was so astonishing. Apparently, for the millenium, BBC asked them if they could do anyone’s garden, whose would they do? And they chose Nelson Mandela — he’d just built a new house, and there was no garden outside his office. The team was very clear, they wanted a lovely space outside his office, where he could see plants, and a water feature (using the millstone upon which his mother milled corn), and have a space to walk around, and to sit. There was a really touching segment on Robben Island, where apparently Mandela convinced the jailors to allow the prisoners to grow a small vegetable plot, and this was one of the things that kept his spirits up during the twenty-seven years that he was imprisoned there. So these three cheerful gardeners descended on his new house, and with much reverence and awe, built a lovely garden for Mandela. Who loved it. Who gently chastised his wife for tricking him saying “We agreed that we would have no secrets.” She hugged his head and said that the secret just made the surprise more joyful. I was all weepy.

It cheered me up in light of this current war, and the terrifying assault on civil rights, to remember that it was only in 1990 that Mandela was freed, and to remember the many many years during which it seemed he would never be free, that Nelson Mandela’s freedom was too much to hope for, that apartheid would never crumble. And to think about how strange that seems now. And how even though there is this enormous cloud of darkness, Nelson Mandela is free, and has a beautiful garden in which to formulate the words that may help us all to see that freedom is the only way.

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