It's a Ronde de Nice!!!

Mystery solved. The unknown "round kind" zucchini from Green String Farm is a Ronde de Nice -- a coveted French heirloom from the southern Provencal region facing the Mediterranean and abutting Italy. It is so delicate, so easily bruised it doesn't show up in markets very often.

Despite the exotic heritage, the fancy name pretty much amounts to saying "round thingy from Nice." Welcome to our garden little round thing! May you be as happy here as on the Cote d'Azur.

The first zucchini harvest this year consisted of a couple of  "long kind" Emperor's Jade beauties on June 25. It took a few days more for the Ronde de Nice to size up to what my uneducated eye considered harvestable size. At any rate, with all the data in hand, the records for the zucchini chronicles can now be brought up to date:

Seedlings planted:

2009 May 10 (Green Racer)
2010 Not sure, but later than May 10 (Green Bush)
2011 May 8 (Cocozelle, Zephyr)
2012 May 12 (Ronde de Nice, Emperor's Jade)

First blossom:

2009 June 8
2010 June 13
2011 June 12
2012 June 19 (Ronde de Nice); June 20 (Emperor's Jade)

First harvest:

2009 June 14
2010 June 21
2011 June 25
2012 June 25 (Emperor's Jade), a few days later, about June 29 (Ronde de Nice)

We had plenty of zucchini on hand for a driveway picnic on the Fourth of July. The grilled veggies were definitely a big hit, as was the rest of the menu: corn with basil butter grilled in the husk, tofu dogs, deviled eggs, and a red white and blue fruit salad of raspberries, blueberries, and yoghurt. The zucchini and basil were the only items from the garden, but nobody was complaining.

 And there was still plenty of zucchini left for the first batch of summertime green soup on July 9.

A Survey of Summer Bounty This Year and Last Year

Over time, these blog posts are becoming data points in an ongoing record of one backyard in early 21st century Northern California. I've heard that climate change scientists are using ordinary garden journals, from as far back as they can find, to search for anecdotal evidence of major changes in weather and growing conditions from one century to the next.

So, in the spirit of our collective human enterprise of staying alive on Planet Earth, here's a small contribution of photographic evidence from our garden in 2010 and 2011.

The photo above shows the garden gatherings from July 30 of this year, 2011. Below is a photo from the same day last year. Can I learn anything from the similarities and the differences? First, let's explore the data.

Above, clockwise from the top of the photo, are:

Three kinds of zucchini: Zephyr, Cocozelle, Black Beauty. We've been harvesting a fair amount over the last several weeks and there's almost enough accumulated to make the first batch of summer green soup. Hooray! It's barely in the nick of time because I just used up the last of the winter green soup from the freezer. Unfortunately, all three zucchini plants suffer from yellowing leaves of unknown cause, as well as myriad tiny speckles which are the tell-tale sign of spider mites. It could all be the result of a lingering cool spring/early summer -- While the rest of the country bakes, we shiver -- or it could be that the beds are simply overworked and don't have enough fertility. Or a combination. Or something else entirely.

Kentucky Blue green beans. They have come on strong in the last week. This is the third dinner-worthy picking. But the bean plants, like the zucchini, are struggling with an onslaught of spider mites. Leaves are speckled, with the bottom leaves turning yellow, then brown, and then dropping off. The beans seem smaller than last year (though it's a different variety). Again, it could be the weather or it could be a soil problem.

Italian Broadleaf parsley. It's doing fine as a companion plant in the tomato beds. This is the first picking from seedlings set out in May and all of it will go into the green soup.

Summer lettuce: A mix called Summer Salad Blend and a micro-green variety called Barbados (the small curly leaves at the bottom of the photo). These plants are doing fine, supplying our nightly salads. The bed received a lasagna gardening upgrade before the seedlings were set out on June 27, so the soil should be in good shape. The plants are starting to lengthen out and are are clearly getting ready to send up their seed stalks, which seems too soon. We've had a few runs of hot days but it's barely a month since they were planted. Why are they rushing on to the next stage of their development? Perhaps these varieties are less bolt-resistant than the summer lettuce I've planted in the past. Anyway, it's time to start preparing the next bed to insure a continuous supply of salad.

Genovese basil. The token amount pictured above is not really a harvest, just a handful of clippings of the flowering stalks. The plants want to make seeds as Mother Nature intends, but we want them to focus on producing flavorful leaves. So I have to keep cutting them back. Despite B.'s worries, we have an ample supply for as much pesto as the two of us can possibly consume -- solely from the companion plants in the tomato beds. They are mostly doing fine but I did have to uproot about six of them which had begun to curl over and wilt, even when well-watered. I believe this is the basil version of the verticillium wilt which afflicts tomatoes, but don't have a definite diagnosis.

Poblano peppers. Two smallish ones are the first harvest. The plant is still small but seems healthy.

Sungold tomatoes. Two token offerings to the sun god from a plant that is growing quite well with plenty of still-green fruit but shows some dying off of the bottom leaves.

Satsuki Midori cucumber. One very tiny first fruit from a struggling plant which has sent up one thin vine that's less than three feet tall, marked by some dying leaves at the base. Too bad, this is supposed to be an especially delicious variety.

Pimientos de Padron peppers. A fine couple of handfuls of these yummy Russian Roulette peppers (it's said that every tenth one is so hot your head will explode, though we've never had that experience and we've eaten plenty of them.) They come from a healthy plant that appears to be gearing up for a long season.

Hansel eggplant. The two first fruits from a plant that shows yellowing leaves and spider-mite speckles. It's loaded with beautiful lavender-colored flowers, though. I hope the flowers win.

My general sense of this season's July 30 harvest is that it's running behind and is less lavish than last year.






Left to right, the harvest pickings from a year ago on July 30:

Three kinds of summer lettuce: Salad Bowl, Red Sails, Endive. As I recall, these plants were very productive, with large ruffled, furled, and feathered leaves, more abundant than this year's smaller plants. I don't remember how long they lasted before bolting but am inclined to think it was more than a month.

Two kinds of cucumbers: Armenian, Lemon. The Armenian cuke produced two delicious fruits (my favorite cuke for flavor) and then pretty much died off. I uprooted it. The Lemon, as in previous years, was lavish with fruit. We ate them in salads through the summer, gave plenty away, and made lemon cucumber pickles in early October. This year's poor little Lemon cuke is a thin single vine with a few flowers and no fruit as yet. Both cucumber plants this year are in the strip along the southeast facing fence. Perhaps it's too hot there. Or perhaps it's the soil, or the cool spring, etc., etc.

Green Bush zucchini. Although the harvest for this particular day last year is about the same as this year's, I remember the three zucchini plants to be larger, healthier, and more productive than this year's. And I think the first batch of green soup was earlier than this year because there was an overlap of winter soup and summer soup in the freezer.

Hansel eggplant: The two plants last year were in self-watering containers along the back fence. I put a lot of liquid kelp fertilizer in the water compartment of the container and the plants seemed to like it. They had the usual yellowing leaves on lower sections but grew large and bushy with lots of fruit.

Early Girl tomato (?). I'm not sure what kind the lone tomato pictured might be. Last year I grew, or tried to grow, Early Girl, Constoluto Genevese, Black Trifele, Sungold, Yellow Pear. None of them did noticeably well except the Sungold. We had to buy tomatoes at the farmer's market to make sauce for the freezer. What is this tragic love affair we have with homegrown tomatoes? No matter how they treat us we keep coming back. I think it has to do with the simple gorgeousness and yummyness of the harvest when you bring it into the house and put it on your plate. All trouble and worry is instantly forgotten.

Cal Wonder peppers. These were good little salad additions, but the plants never amounted to much. There were two plants in self-watering containers, like the eggplant, but they didn't thrive.

Nickel French Beans. One of the winners from last year's garden: two beds worth of lush, heavy bearing bush plants. I put some of my scarce homemade compost in those beds, so maybe that helped. We never got tired of eating the flavorful, long thin beans lightly steamed with almonds and a little butter. This year's first planting of seeds didn't come up -- the soil was still too cold, I think. The second planting didn't do much better. I ended up adding some pole beans to the bed. All the plants are showing the same signs of heavy spider mite action, but haven't started losing leaves yet. They have flowers but no beans so far.

Plums. Ahhh, the plums. Now there's an interesting contrast, one year to the next. Last year we had as much as we wanted to eat and I was starting to research how to make plum leather or something that would preserve them without added sugar. This year most of the crop seems to have been eaten by the tree rats. I saw one, one evening, silhouetted against the darkening sky as it ran along one of the branches. I can hear them sometimes rustling and squeaking in the undergrowth and the overgrowth. All I can say for sure is that in June the trees were heavy with visible fruit and now there is nothing. Maybe the long wet spring with ample green growth led to a bumper crop of tree rats. I sure hope the pesky little critters (they look like large mice) don't like pears!

Yard Chard. Some stray leaves from volunteers that pop up all over the yard wherever there is a water supply. There are a couple of plants like that this year, but they are out of the way and don't get watered enough to be useful.

The Bench. Ahhh, the bench. It looks so nice in the photo, and always made a perfect setting for harvest photos. Now it is no more. One of the locust trees fell over in June during an unseasonable burst of rain and wind and broke the bench in half.

A broken bench, disappearing plums, struggling plants: my subjective impression is that this year's garden is more troubled and less productive than last year's. However, after looking at the photos it seems like the similarities outweigh the differences. There are the same kinds of plants in pretty much the same amounts, with some slight differences in varieties, timing, and quality. From one year to the next there is plenty of fresh produce coming into the house to be marveled at, shared, and consumed with delight.

Nonetheless, as I learn to keep better records maybe I can start to figure out why some crops thrive and others struggle.

And, like the garden diarists of previous centuries, one never knows how or when humble efforts might be useful in the grander scheme of things.

Daytime Nibblers

At 9:30 in the morning a couple of days ago, while rushing around trying to leave for work, I saw a mother deer and her two young ones nibbling leaves in our exceedingly leafy front yard. I had to stop and watch the quiet scene.

Luckily the camera was right at hand. The photos of that fleeting moment were taken through the screen door, lending them a dream-like quality which captures my wonder at this brief incursion of wildness into my time-to-get-going mindset.

The mother noticed movement or saw light reflecting off my camera. By the time I pressed the button she was heading out of the yard with her more alert child right behind.







Little Clueless kept nibbling until he finally noticed he was all alone. "Hey, where did everybody go?"







"Wait for me!"

The little family group headed across the street to nibble undisturbed in our neighbor's yard, closer to the creek that serves as a handy boulevard for local wildlife. And we all continued with our daily rounds.

One Day's Harvest

All this came out of the garden today:

Assorted lettuces: Black Seeded Simpson, Red Sails, Endive
Cucumbers: Armenian (just one), Lemon
Zucchini: Green Bush
Tomatoes: one little Early Girl
Peppers: Ace
Beans: Kentucky Blue (pole beans)
Plums: yellow and red (don't know the varieties)
Chard: assorted volunteers

Mr. Potato Head: The Sequel

Ahhh, the best laid plans . . . .

The second Mr. Potato Head, it must be said, is disappointingly similar to his progenitor. What that means is that the whole crop of Russian Banana Fingerlings isn't dramatically bigger than what was put in ground to produce it!






And here is the entire crop of Yukon Gold potatoes.

What went wrong? It's hard to know for sure, but I did notice that in both potato containers the spuds grew only in the bottom layer of loose, rich dirt. Perhaps adding the layers of straw was not a good idea. The straw ended up getting packed in pretty tight and may have reduced air circulation. Next year I will try filling the containers only with soil and compost.






But there was still enough to bring to the table. Putting both crops together yielded just enough potatoes for our Fourth of July mini-feast of deviled eggs, fruit salad with yogurt, veggie burgers with garden lettuce and -- ta da! -- potato salad.

Looking back to April when I was calculating Days to Maturity and planning future menus, it's clear that nothing is guaranteed:

April 23: "So I'm anticipating a Yukon Gold potato salad in early June, ten weeks from planting time in late March, and, about five weeks later, in mid-July, one of B.'s fabulous potato pizzas made with Russian Banana Fingerlings."

Here's what really happened:

The early season Yukons (70 to 90 DTM) were harvested on July 3, 97 days after planting, a week longer than the maximum expected growing time.

The late season Fingerlings (105 to 135 DTM) were harvested earlier, on June 27, 91 days after planting, which is two weeks less than the minimum expected growing time.

I harvested when the plants were yellowed and falling over. There were hardly any immature potatoes in the containers, so waiting longer would not have made a difference.

As I said, the best laid plans . . . .

Visualize Whirled Peas

Pictured above is my share of the entire pea harvest. Peas Alfredo is very easy to put together -- at least in my opinion, not having been the one to do it. I did cook the peas, though. They just need a minute or so in water that is boiling enough to move them around. Whirled peas -- get it?

Then cooked pasta is coated with the rich cheesy Alfredo sauce, the peas are ladled out on top, and voila -- a delicious concoction that truly could contribute to harmony among nations, if only there were more of it. Fortunately, there were only two of us at dinner.






The entire pea harvest consisted of one cup of nicely sized Caseload Shelling Peas. Well worth it, to my mind, especially since this is the first ever genuine pea harvest our garden has ever produced -- after years of trying. My half-cup share felt like a personal breakthrough. Next year: two cups!





Here's the pea patch on June 13. This is pretty much the whole show. There wasn't a lot, but each nice fat pod yielded five or six nice fat peas.







This seedling, a couple of inches tall, was photographed on April 14. The peas were planted on March 19 and harvested on June 14, so Days to Maturity was about three months or 90 days.

At the time of planting I remember thinking it was too late for peas but I was wrong because this crop -- if "crop" is not too grandiose a word for one cup of peas -- has been the most successful we've ever had.

Was it the unusually cool spring? Did planting late mean the ground was warmer and the seeds didn't rot? Were conditions just right to enable the little seedlings to grow fast enough to outpace the night critters that like to shear them off at ground level?

Whatever the magical convergence of variables happened to be, we are grateful.

Unexpected Marvels

The garden is not about beauty. The garden is about creating a quiet, serene place of refuge and doing something purposeful as a family, with bonus points for helping the planet, living sustainably, reducing our carbon footprint, saving habitat, becoming locavores, doing the right thing in the great crisis of the twenty-first century. But a garden can't help being a place of beauty, both planned and utterly spontaneous. I didn't expect to marvel at the growing tip of a Trombetta di Albenga squash silhouetted against the sky like the prow of a Viking long boat. But there it is.


I did fully expect to admire the hollyhocks, but was completely unprepared for their collaboration with the morning glories in a spiral dance called "Rhapsody in Pink."



This random assortment of a single afternoon's findings ended up together in the same collecting dish merely by chance. Who knew that the volunteer blue potatoes, the sparking Sungold cherry tomatoes, the crinkled green pimientos, the purple plums, and the yellow plums would create a color palette to delight the eye?


And who knew that the same assortment -- well, almost the same, with zucchini replacing the plums -- coated with olive oil, garlic, and rosemary and gently roasted, would delight the eye all over again at the dinner table? Actually, that was not so much of a surprise.

Haricot Verts

These are Tavera bush beans, a variety of French filet beans, sometimes called "haricot verts" (which is, I think, simply French for "green beans"). They ripened all at once on about ten bushes, an experimental planting that has yielded these lovely results. It's easy to see why the French would favor these elegant haricots, long, thin, and elegant as runway models.

This is the entire harvest, so far. They are amazingly delicious -- tender, sweet, and flavorful! Just blanch them for a few minutes, whole and untrimmed, in vigorously boiling water, and serve with a bit of butter, salt, and lemon.

Harvest Kitchen

Last weekend was hot, high 80s. The cats were stretched out full length in the coolest spots they could find.

Not far away, a member of a supposedly more intelligent species was holed up in a stuffy little kitchen sweating over a boiling pot of beans. Or, to be exact, a non-boiling pot.

"A watched pot never boils," so goes the old saying. That was my first mistake, no doubt, in my week-end adventure of preparing a huge pile of Kentucky Wonder and Blue Lake beans for the freezer.

"Put the beans into a pot of boiling water and blanch them for three minutes," read the instructions. When I dropped several bowlfuls of chopped beans into vigorously boiling water it stopped boiling. I assumed the water needed to come back up to a boil before I started timing three minutes. Wrong. But I wouldn't know how wrong until later.

It took about eight minutes for the big pot filled with beans to come back to a boil. Then I let them boil for another three minutes. Wrong. Wrong.

"Plunge the beans into cold water with ice, to stop the cooking." That step proceeded as indicated. The beans looked beautiful and tasted even better. Completely delicious. After draining them, I couldn't stop snacking. That should have been a clue right there.






"Dry the beans," the instructions continued. "How?" I wondered. I spread them out on a bath towel and patted them dry, popping more than a few into my mouth. So far, so good -- or so I thought at the time.



The next step was to pack the yummy little beanies into freezer containers. The batch filled nine pint-sized containers. I put them into the freezer feeling very pleased with a most productive afternoon in my harvest kitchen. Did I mention the double batch of green soup? Lots of big pots were steaming up the kitchen that day.

Several days later we tried some of the beans for dinner, just to see how the freezing worked. Ewwww, bland and tasteless! Somehow I had managed to remove all trace of flavor.

With a little searching on the internet I came across a blog comments conversation -- can't remember where -- that addressed the issue of how long the beans should stay in the water. The suggestion was to make sure the ratio of boiling water to beans is such that putting the beans into the water does not stop it from boiling. The beans should not be cooked, just plunged in boiling water long enough to disable enzymes and kill bacteria that could cause them to spoil in the freezer. Live and learn. Now I know that beans that taste utterly delicious are beans that have been over-prepared for freezing.

It's not as if we don't have plenty more beans to experiment with. Next time will be better. But what to do with eight more pints of frozen, flavorless beans. Minestrone, anyone?

Wondering about Peppers

Over at a very inspiring and informative Northern California blog I've been following, Kendra of A Sonoma Garden, is wondering about her pepper plants. To her practiced eye they are mysteriously bereft of fruit and pathetic looking when compared to her photos from this time last summer.

So I rushed out to take a look at ours. Out of three varieties, two are showing some fruit. I don't have any documentation from last summer but remember it as a normally good year for peppers -- at least by our standards.

The Pimientos de Padron plant (on the left) is more than a foot tall, albeit rather spindly, and has one pepper that is actually harvestable, since they are supposed to be picked "when about the size of olives." Picking just one of these little conversation pieces is, however, like eating one potato chip. They are meant to be sauteed in batches with olive oil and salt and served as "tapas," a generic Spanish term for bite-sized yummies. They are mild and savory and much prized in Spain and are now a gourmet item in the foodie mecca of San Francisco. There's just one little proviso: every twelfth pepper or so is NOT MILD AT ALL. Eating them is a game of Spanish roulette.

H. and his friends in Berkeley were greatly intrigued and, having the try-anything-once mindset of young adults, took most of our abundant crop last summer. We ate the rest cooked into B.'s Yorkshire-pudding-like egg-and-cottage-cheese "puff." I always made him test them out first, not wanting to have my head explode at the dinner table. We never found a really really hot one. They are delicious once you get over the feeling of wariness.

The second pepper plant (on the right) is a sweet bell called Cal Wonder. We've never grown it before. It's just under a foot tall and looking pretty decent. The third plant (not pictured) is another sweet bell, Yolo Wonder, which is about the same size as little Cal but has no fruit showing as yet.

And that's the story so far.

This is a report from one of the thousands of micro-climates in the Bay Area. Whatever is affecting Kendra's peppers does not seem to be a problem here, a bit closer to the coast.

However, we also do not have ripe tomatoes. And, as usual, I'm worrying about the yellowing leaves on most of the tomato plants . . . .

Diversity and Permanence Mean Abundance for All

Hooray for diversity. It's Mother Nature's way of keeping things interesting, complex, dynamic, and -- most important of all -- balanced. The balance of nature is no joke, as we are all finding out now that our species has thoroughly upset it. Despite the sobering odds, we can help restore the balance right in our back yards.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area every little valley and hillside has its own micro-climate and unique habitat. We lucky locals get to be amateur horticulturists, if we are so inclined, trying things out and seeing what works in our personal piece of paradise. This fine-grained variation is generally true of California, where Sunset Magazine had to develop its own set of more than twenty climate zones because the limited number of USDA options aren't up to the job of covering the wide array of West Coast growing niches.

Diversity helps create the permanence of a rich ecosystem of mutually supportive living things. That's why our modern habitat gardens are not the tidy rows of mono-cropping we senior citizens may have pulled weeds in as children. More and more, our aesthetic ideal is a colorful jumble of different kinds of plants and different varieties of the same plant.

The goal of a permaculture gardener anywhere in the world is to work with existing natural surroundings to create a self-sustaining food forest. First you have to learn what is there already so you will have a better idea of what might be added.

Know your ground; become familiar with its patterns of sun and wind and rain. Know the soil and understand how water flows across the surface and collects in the low places. Understand what wants to grow there on its own and which insects and creatures have already set up housekeeping. Only then can you intelligently assemble just the right mosaic of trees, shrubs, vines, perennials, herbs, flowers, and -- oh, yes, last but not least -- vegetables. If you do it right, after several years the whole thing "pops" and becomes an intricate web of life that just goes on growing on its own. You can wander through your garden of Eden plucking this and that with nary a care and without breaking a sweat. That's the theory.

I've never seen an actual food forest although I've read about some in this area. There is a famous one down in Point Reyes Station -- I'm not sure if it's open to public these days. Our garden is just a patch of rented ground with about 14 rather unsightly black plastic raised beds (easy to carry around, easy to assemble, relatively inexpensive). After seventeen years of observing I have only a hazy idea of what is happening here, nowhere near the permaculturist's high standard.

But you don't have to be a high roller to get into the game. Our little micro-climate is, at certain times of year, such as right now, a modest middle-class Eden. The plum trees and blackberry vines that were here before we moved in are bearing ripe fruit. The ancient pear tree is resplendent with its not-quite-ready-to-eat harvest, with no effort on our part except some minor pruning now and then.

There's nothing like eating a handful of just-picked warm juicy plums on a summer afternoon or, on a sunny morning, picking fat blackberries and putting them directly onto a bowl of breakfast cereal.

We love the pears during the thirty seconds that each one is at the peak of ripeness -- and love the pear tree for its beauty all through the year.

Little by little by little I am coming to know this habitat and even though I'm not proactively building a true food forest I do cultivate many different varieties of herbs, flowers, and vegetables. We are doing our best to preserve a thriving and diverse community of plants that attracts myriad insects, butterflies, and birds along with the occasional possum, raccoon, and deer. There's plenty for everybody.

Diversity and permanence mean abundance for all.

Trombetta di Albenga!

With each new gardening season it's fun to test out a new variety or two to tuck in amongst the tried and true heavy producers. Especially appealing are heirlooms with exotic foreign names: Pimientos de Padron peppers (Spain), Japanese Black Trifele tomatoes (Russia, for some reason), Biondi di Lyon chard (Italy). I can travel the world without leaving my backyard.

Several years ago I planted some seeds from Renee's Garden for an Italian climbing squash: Trombetta di Albenga, which basically means "little trumpet from Albenga." Albenga is a town on the Italian riviera not far from Genoa. The squash does climb and its fruits are indeed somewhat trumpet shaped. And I know they come from Albenga because there is a clip on YouTube of proud Albengans showing off their local produce. It is all in Italian but it features a big basket of these strange elongated vegetables.

The only misleading part is the diminutive "-etta." Be warned. These things are not little. They are mighty Jack-and-the-Beanstalk vines with huge leaves and dangling fruit that gets so big it won't fit into the refrigerator.

All summer long, with mingled fascination and horror, I watched two humongous vines grow and grow. Somehow the whole season passed and I never managed to actually cook any of the odd and alien greenish-yellow pods. Like a movie that goes straight to DVD, they went directly from garden to compost, with some brief detours into the house where they sat around until becoming compost-worthy.

Those intimidating plants might very well be nourishing this year's two vines -- grown from the same seed packet, several years old. Both of the new plants are thriving and this season I am determined to see how the squash cooks up.


Update: (February 7, 2011) We finally got around to using Trombetta in a recipe. As promised, it has a delicious, subtle, artichoke-nuanced flavor when sliced thin and cooked gently.

Mid-Summer TLC for Tomatoes

It's time to add some booster fertilizer to the tomatoes, which are sucking nutrients out of the soil at a prodigious rate to fuel their splendid growth. It's also a good opportunity to catch up with installing the water-saving system that should have been put in when the plants were seedlings.

I use three-foot by three-foot Grow Beds, ten inches deep, for all the vegetable plantings, and have never been able to figure out how to install the long hoses of drip irrigation. And I find all those little plastic fixtures way too complicated. It's a good thing I love the soothing chore of hand-watering with a hose! Water is always an issue in our rainless summers. Our city is not on water-rationing yet in this ultra-dry California drought year but we have been asked to cut back.

Last year I read about sunken clay pots that are used in developing countries to bring water directly to roots and allow the roots to draw water through the porous clay as needed. The water percolates through the clay as the surrounding soil dries out. Nifty! The pots are specially made for that purpose -- beautifully shaped large round amphora-like jugs with narrow necks. It's a very ancient practice going back millennia.


A local equivalent that works well is to use clay flower pots with their drainage dishes and some black rubber stoppers from the hardware store (who knows what their actual purpose might be!). The rubber stoppers can be jammed into the hole at the bottom of the flower pot to create a permeable closed container. You have to be careful to get the right sized stopper for the particular pot.




I tried this last summer and liked the results so I'm gradually adding more pots. I dig a hole next to the chosen plant, trying not to disturb the delicate roots. In this picture you can see why this job is best done when plants are small: numerous white threads of disturbed rootlings. I plop the pot into the hole and gently pack the soil around it. The last step is to fill the pot with water and put the drainage tray on top as a lid. Voila!: an underground supply of supplementary water. It's not enough to take the place of hand watering, of course, but it helps keep the soil from drying out completely. Tomatoes like steady moisture. I read somewhere that they are like children: with warmth and consistency they thrive. Eventually, the hole will be completely lined with a spider web of tiny white roots.


Today, after putting in the irrigation pot and before putting down a couple of layers of mulch, I dug in some organic fertilizer (Whitney Farms Tomato & Vegetable Food 5-3-3), sprinkling it around each plant several inches from the stem and digging it in. It's important to water thoroughly both before and after applying fertilizer. I'm not sure why -- probably it has to do with root burn -- but it's a process I observe faithfully. Like all gardeners I have accumulated a number of rituals that have to be followed no matter what.

The first mulch layer is newspaper -- double sheets folded once to make a thin covering that worms absolutely love. They will snuggle up underneath the newspapers in droves and hopefully do all kinds of nice things for the soil.

The second mulch layer is dark compost -- Mango Mulch is what's shown here -- one to three inches thick. Ritual demands that it be kept several inches away from the plant stems. I think it's to give the stem plenty of air and keep it from rotting, but, again, I'm not sure why this has to be done. If all goes well this tender loving care will give the tomato plants everything they need to flourish.

Full disclosure: every year, no matter what rituals are followed, all my tomatoes get some kind of mysterious symptoms on the lower leaves. It's never enough to interfere with a bountiful harvest but always enough to make me fret and worry and wonder what's going on. There are so many different afflictions of tomatoes that I've not been able to make any positive identifications. These leaves are on the Sungold cherry tomato plant and the Better Boys are showing a similar condition: yellowing with brown spots that get larger and larger. And these are the hybrids which are supposed to be disease resistant!

Each year, however, I learn a little more and try out new things. That's part of the fun -- a big part.

Waiting for Tomatoes

Zucchini, beans, and basil on their own do not signal the full-on season of plenty -- despite refrigerator shelves sagging under the weight of this week's harvest. We are waiting for the tomatoes to give us that sense of overwhelming mid-summer abundance. Almost every day we poke around in the tomato jungle to inspect the growing green globes for any promising indications. The sungold cherry tomatoes are almost ready, the plant is about six feet tall and poking through the overhead lattice, a few fruits at the bottom are sunny and golden. The Black Krim are sizing up -- plants four feet tall, fruits not quite tennis ball size -- but have a way to go before the fruits get their characteristic dusky hue. The workhorse Better Boys are five feet tall with lots of green fruit ranging from golf balls to tennis balls.

Planting history:

Variety: Better Boy hybrid
Source: Rivertown (Soda Rock Farm) seedlings
How many: 4 plants
Seedlings planted out: May 3







Variety: Black Krim organic heirloom
Source: Whole Foods (Sweetwater Nursery) seedling
How many: 1 plant
Seedlings planted out: May 10







Variety: Sungold hybrid cherry
Source: Rivertown (Soda Rock Farm) seedling
How many: 1 plant
Seedlings planted out: May 10

From Blossom to Bean to Belly

You can really see the progression of growth here on this very fruitful spur of what I think are Blue Lake beans (note to self: always label the seed pots!!!). Blue Lakes are rounder and plumper than the more flattened Kentucky Wonders. Lined up on this spur: blossoms at the tip, a teeny tiny beanlet just starting out, and some maturing beans almost ready to pick. The last couple of weeks we had a few beans at a time, enough to grace a soup. Now we have a mixed bagful of both varieties, enough for a centerpiece dish: green beans almondine. Yum.

Planting history:
Variety: Blue Lake pole beans (probably)
Source: Squirrels Seeds
Seeds planted: March 29, 2009
Seedlings planted out: May 10, 2009
First harvest: Sometime around June 30

Still Life with Buddha and Lettuce

In the Buddha's corner of the garden some newly planted Red Sails summer lettuce seedlings are resting quietly in their impromptu shade house -- a quick construction of bamboo stakes stuck into the dirt with an old lace curtain draped overhead.


The metal grid is to keep the cats out. All sentient beings have their place in the grand scheme of things, of course, but if the salad-loving beings are to have their salads there has to be gopher wire at the bottom of the basket, cat grids on top, and sun protection overhead. A lettuce fortress.





The sun-shade method also works on a slightly larger scale. Here is a three-foot square Grow Bed also planted in Red Sails and covered in lace. No gopher underwiring and no cat grids, though.








Planting history
Variety: Red Sails
Source: Botanical Interests Seeds
Seeds planted: June 14, 2009
Seedlings planted out: July 4 and 5, 2009