HARVEST IN MAY

         Here we are a month later and it is still cold and rainy. While this spring has been less than thrilling for us, our plants have liked it. Most of the shrubs and perennials I see seem to be thriving.

     Wan and I (actually, more Wan than I) planted our warm weather veggies (tomatoes, cukes, peppers, beans, etc) on Tuesday. On the same day we began to harvest. You will recall that we were able to get many of our cool weather crops in the ground around the first of April. As a result of this early start we are already eating the results.Our heads of broccoli are already larger than my fist, and one of them made it into a pasta sauce this week. We have also pulled radishes and rapini.

Sugar snack peas.

     Plants grown from seed always come up too densely and the books always tell you to thin them. This was a chore I always tried to avoid before I realized that thinning seedlings could become an early harvest. Now I "thin" my spinach and other leafy greens directly into my salad bowl or soup pot. The tiny greens are tender and delicious. At the store you pay extra for baby spinach, after all. Here it is free and you help your other plants grow at the same time. What could be better?

And Again: "Spring?"

    A month ago I was complaining about how cold March was. Now it is a month later and everything seems exactly the same. True, the crocuses and then daffodils finally made it up. I can even see a few tiny tulips. And the grass is a bit greener, though much of the forsythia is just now starting to pop.

     Still, one has to pay attention to notice the changes from a month ago. Many of the tasks I laid out for us last month can also still be done today. This is probably a good thing, since the cold kept many of us indoors in any case.

     One exception is bed preparation. A month ago I mentioned how you can tell if your soil is dry enough to till your flower and vegetable beds. As luck would have it, my neighbors had a new clean-out installed in their drain that involved digging a big hole in the middle of their yard. I wandered over, grabbed some dirt from the pile and discovered that it was the perfect consistency for tilling.

Post flood beds-- a bit lumpy but unbowed

     Thanks to this sheer accident I was able to till my beds during the last week of March -- mixing all the compost I had added from my drum into the bed last fall. My wife Wan and I have fun in the winter devising a new, revised map for our garden based on our experience from the year before. In March we were ready to bring the map outdoors and build our raised beds within the 22'x 28' veggie patch.

Early broccoli and Brussels sprouts

     Given that our springs are frequently cold and wet, I like to use raised beds. Raising them gives the new seedlings better drainage and allows the soil around them to warm up more quickly. Beds that are higher than the pathways also helps provide a "no feet allowed" zone to keep plant roots happy. I usually make my beds three feet wide and leave a full two feet for pathways. It is always a good idea to provide walkways big enough to keep the gardener happy as well as the plants. I cover the plants with re-usable landscape cloth and use the extra to cover the beds where things like tomatoes will go later.

     By April first I had planted snow and sugar snap peas, rapini, romaine, radishes, parsley, chard, and spinach in addition to the broccoli and friends. Most of these survived the recent flood. Any casualties will turn out to be seeds that can easily be replaced.

     Those of you who did not jump when you had a chance will now have to wait 40 days and 40 nights for the floods to recede. Well,... maybe not quite that long.

Waterfall and pond at my old house.

     While we are waiting for better weather it can be fun to look at various elements that can be added to our yards. An increasingly popular element is the natural pond. Today's ponds are a far cry from the old concrete and stone ponds of our grandparents day -- the ones that seemed to crack at least once a year and let all the water leak out.

     Today's ponds are lined with a non-toxic and flexible liner, are run with very efficient recirculating pumps, and contain both physical and biological filters to keep the water clear.

 

     A pump in the bottom of the buried container on the left pumps water up into the bottom of the waterfall container on the right. The water spills over and down a rocky slope picking up oxygen before filling the main pond basin. The pump pulls water only from the pond's surface, pulling leaves and other debris along to be caught in a net inside the pump box.

     A system like this allowed me to keep a separate little ecosystem going for 20 years now. Over 20 fish have lived among the flowering waterlilies and other plants. The sound of the waterfall combined with the colorful flashes from the darting fish were mesmerizing and worked to smooth a furrowed brow many a time.

     The maintenance chores required to keep this system going were less than that required by a lawn. Once a year you have to do a serious clean-up. This is a wet and muddy job, but you can always hire someone like me to do it for you.

     Pond plants, like other perennials, need to be trimmed and deadheaded once or twice a season. The rest of the year you have to "top off" the pond when it gets low and make periodic adjustments to keep the pond ecology in balance. For those who find turning on a garden hose straining, an automatic filling system can be added.

     In short, despite appearances, having a pond is something that works even for lazy people like me.
     

SPRING?

     We actually had a mild winter in 2013. Despite, for example, the fact that we had next to no snow most of the season we were able to make up a bit for last summer's drought. This is because most of our precipitation was rain.

     Those balmy days are now forgotten as we stay locked in a deep freeze for the entire month of March so far. Our average temperature this month  has been a full six degrees below normal. Quite a change from the 80 degree days of last year.

     If you can stand the cold there is actually a lot you can accomplish this time of year:

     Now is a great time to do a yard clean-up before bulbs and perennials start getting in your way. If you use an organic weed-killer, now is the time to make sure you have some on hand. You want the weedkiller to go down once the crocuses come up in order to beat the first weed seeds trying to germinate. I noticed my first crocus today.

     Now is also the time to begin pruning your trees and shrubs -- especially if you want to downsize them significantly. You do not, however want to prune shrubs like forsythia and lilacs that bloom in spring. You would be cutting  off their buds. For much more on pruning you can look back at some of my entries from last season at this time.

     I am already yearning for fresh garden vegetables. We are months away from the favorites like tomatoes and peppers. But cool weather crops like peas, spinach, and many other leafy greens, are closer than you think. As of St. Patrick's Day, the barrier to planting seeds for these plants is not temperature so much as soil moisture. Our ground is still water-logged, and messing with it now will damage it. To test, dig a hole about six inches deep, grab a handful of soil and squeeze it into  a ball. If it makes a good mud ball, the soil is still too wet. If it wants to fall apart, you are in good shape.

2012

freezing rain leftovers

    Now that it is all over, what can we say about 2012? For those dying to know, I can report that I finally harvested my parsley patch on December 19. That was the day before the first hard freeze that would have killed it or forced me to run out with tarps to cover it. I used up the last of it in a Chimichurri sauce for our Christmas day roast beef.

     Outside my own little patch of dirt we can report that 2012 was the warmest year in recorded history -- in Chicago, in the U.S., and in the world at large. This is more than a fluke. Last month also constituted the 334th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average.

     Chicago was spared much of the more freakish weather upheavals that took place elsewhere on the planet. Our main problem was drought. And despite the late 2012 rains that we received instead of snow, we ended up the year with a ten inch rain deficit. One or two decent rains this month have done little to reduce that deficit, and now we are heading into yet another 10 day period with no precipitation. Unless we see an awful lot of rain in February, I plan to bring out my hoses earlier than usual.

     The good thing about today's cold snap (otherwise known as normal winter weather) is that if it lasts long enough we might finally start killing off some of the insects, fungi, and other "critters" that have plagued us after the last two mild winters. I prefer my global warming in small doses.

Best Wishes

Chicago Neighborhood Lights

Best Wishes for the Holiday Season

                              Scott

That's a Wrap!

     Friday marked the last gasp of my veggie garden. (Well, almost). We still had freshly-picked snow peas and broccoli for Thanksgiving dinner, and I picked another three pounds of Brussels sprouts over the weekend. But by early this week the thermometer was showing 20 degrees. Time to quit while we were ahead.

     I don't try to re-cycle all my yard waste at this time of year either. My plants did a pretty good job at keeping bugs and diseases at bay all season. I don't want to give the critters a head start for next year. The exceptions are my snow peas. Besides being legumes and binding nitrogen into the soil they have seldom brought unwanted problems into the garden. I chop them up and till them right in.

     Meanwhile, the composter to which I had stopped adding a few weeks ago has now done part of its job and is ready to contribute to the winter garden as well.

     So the compost, the snow peas and a nice layer of oak leaves have been tilled into the soil as the garden surface loses its raised beds and reverts to a flat surface.

     ...Or most of it has. My parsley bed for some reason still looks gorgeous, so it is sitting there as a 3 foot by 5 foot emerald patch in a chocolate-brown bed. And we are once more experiencing a "heat" wave of highs in the 60's. This time our patch's lease on life will depend on what we can still fit in the freezer. We fixed a bunch of tabbouleh last week and will make some more tomorrow. We are also freezing some more parsley pesto sauce for winter pasta. And this year I finally realized that we can also freeze Argentine chimichurri sauce for all the meat we will be grilling this winter.

     Fortunately, our freezer is not that big, so the garden really will be put to bed this week. By now some of you must be sighing with relief. So am I. Time to give some of my tools a rest.