Tucking in the Garden...Too Late

Tucking in the Garden...Too Late

Posted by Heather Harris

 I'm getting a very bad feeling that I've been a lazy gardener and now I will have to pay. I woke up this morning on an bright, sunny, gorgeous day with miraculously nothing planned for the entire Saturday, and thought,"Today, I can finally clean out my vegetable garden and put it to sleep for the winter, just like a good little gardener should". I did not, however, consult any common sense.

Yesterday, I literally used my trowel to hack into an inch and a half of freezing rain that completely glazed my mini-van like a hand-dipped ice cream cone. Once I'd chipped an access hole into the windshield, I couldn't find the ice scraper, so I had to use the white spatula that came with my KitchenAid. Needless to say this was a long, agonizing process that ended in just enough window clearance to drive, although I'm pretty sure if a cop saw me, I would have been pulled over. It was all apparently traumatic enough for my daughter to regale her classmates during Writer's Workshop with the whole story.

I live in a valley, "Happy Valley", to be correct, but it is trapped high between two ancient volcanic buttes at the western end of the Columbia River Gorge. Thus frigid cold winds whip through my yard anytime the East Winds blow, meaning that ice can hang around our house for a very long time, long after the suburbanites in the lowlands have donned their shorts and shades.Last night I had to warn dinner guests to tread very carefully down our walkway because it was still an ice skating rink.

Why all of this did not register as less than ideal gardening conditions is beyond me. I just thought it would be cold outside. Well, it turns out that the five giant redwoods that someone with little foresight planted by the creek block all of the low sun rays this time of year and my vegetable plants were in much the same condition as the mini van. I attempted to yank out a tomato plant, but it didn't budge, its roots held tight in a giant soilcicle. The "bright lights" swiss chard reflected sharp rays like shattered stained glass on the floor of an abandoned church, the reds and oranges encased in a thick coat of ice. Tomatoes lay like broken, over-sized marbles discarded by neglectful children after a long forgotten game.





It appears the garden went to sleep without my nurturing tuck-in and much like a child, I expect it to wake up very grumpy...

I Just Love "Scorch Wither and Putrefy!"

I Just Love "Scorch Wither and Putrefy!"

Posted by Heather Harris

Disclaimer: This blog post made a lot more sense when I wrote it two weeks ago. Then I lost half of my writing because basically I'm a moron, and due to major mental trauma from the most hellacious start to a school year ever (and I'm an expert on this topic) I gave up all hope of having any energy to rewrite it until now. So for a minute, pretend you're back on that 90 degree day in September and it hasn't rained in weeks. Forest fires are raging in the weirdest of places.Okay, are you there? Proceed.

Two weeks ago...

 Crispy brown leaves are sailing around my yard, riding the thermal heat waves like sun addled buzzards. What is normally termed "fall" around here should this year be referred to as "scorch, wither and putrefy". My birches, usually a golden yellow by the end of September with heavy raindrops slowly melting off their tips are just  brittle and brown. If I didn't know better I would assume they were dead. Even the cursed buttercups are crunchy and shriveled.  I'm sure we've had  hot and dry summers before, but this is a little crazy, and it has led to some very peculiar outcomes in my vegetable garden that I would never have predicted and in fact prove most everything I've written in this blog thus far false. I will now take this opportunity, on a 90 degree day in late September, to   obliterate any helpful advice I have offered to you in the past. Also, I will prove that any advice I put forth that did hold true, is precisely the advice that I myself willfully ignored, to my own detriment.

1. There is such a thing as too many tomatoes.  I know that I have gone on at great length about my unreasonable love for buckets of ripe tomatoes and openly scoffed at anyone that said they had grown too many. I simply didn't believe it. At least not in a garden in the Pacific Northwest. Impossible! Well, I have in fact produced too many tomatoes. What I failed to realize was that people were not simply stating that they had grown too many tomatoes to use, they were saying that they had grown too many tomatoes to process. Picking, boiling, peeling, chopping, straining, canning and freezing tomatoes is very messy, space hogging, and time consuming; not to mention an incredible attractant for fruit flies. I have lugged in a huge wire basket brimming with tomatoes every other day for the past two months. I have fire roasted them, canned them, crockpotted them, turned them into salsa, soup, pasta sauce, and in a final act of desperation,  just crammed them into Ziploc bags and frozen them, and still there are more! I know that I will probably run out of tomatoes before next summer, but I HAVE TOO MANY TOMATOES. (I'm not complaining though. I'm just in the seven year itch of my love affair.)

2. Slugs are not a threat. When we saw our house for the first time and I was literally twirling around the yard in delirium, exclaiming,"This is it!" there were three members of God's great creation that were in obvious abundance, even to my romantic sensibilities: blackberries, buttercups, and slugs. I am not exaggerating that there were at least three ugly, black, buffalo-backed European slugs per square foot. You couldn't twirl around the yard without stepping on them. At the start of summer I went to Coastal and bought a $15 box of slug bait, resigning myself to the fact that I was going to spend more money on slug extermination this season than supplying a 400 head wedding with champagne, for surely that box of bait was going to last three days. I dumped it out around the base of my 15 tomato plants and I haven't seen a slug since. Not one tomato has suffered a slimy, oozing hole. Unreal.

3. Chickens are Idiots. Of course I new this, but for some reason we gave it another go. The first casualty, Hazel, just sat down in the middle of the yard one day and died. No clue what happened. The second, Ginger, was drug out of the coop late at night by a far superior intellect, namely that of a raccoon, and despite my wild, "Get the hell out of here you evil raccoon" dance, she was left maimed at the base of our maple while the raccoon slowly, and mockingly, retreated up the tree. We nursed her for a few days, but she died as well. Checkers, chicken number three, decided that the fig tree was a pretty safe place to roost for the night, much safer than her securely locked coop, and was apparently taken by a coyote. At least that is the conclusion of my forensic team (Lily and Luke) who found her feathers down by the creek and some coyote scat on the other side. Yes, they can tell you what coyote scat looks like. For those keeping track at home, that is chickens 8, eggs 0 for the Harris household. What is wrong with us?

Well, lessons have been learned, ignored, and proved wrong this year, but overall the vegetable garden project has been a great success. My neighbor's pine tree that blocked our view of his pond resort even fell down (I swear I had nothing to do with it) so now I can look out over his yard from my garden bistro table as well. Now it is on to the next project, and you all know how interesting things get over here when the rains start. Will it be a retaining wall, hugelkultur, or a massive gravel dump? Hmmm...

A Smashing Good Time

A Smashing Good Time

Posted by Heather Harris

The first really warm days of the year happened last week. That was really bad timing because I had 15 tomato plants sitting in a tidy little row by my sliding glass door, lifting their sad little arms towards the light, begging me to plant them. I was faced with the same problem I have every year: Are my seedlings better of growing sickly in their little start pots while I wait for the magical "Mother's Day Weekend", the date every sage gardener says is when to plant tomatoes, or are they better of being planted in the nice fertile garden beds, where most assuredly some nasty cold front will roll in right before Mother's Day weekend?

I voted, as I always do, for planting. After all, if they die in the pots I only have myself to blame. If they die in the garden I can blame just about anything else: weather, gophers, my cat, the kids...mollusks.

As usual, I couldn't just stop with planting tomatoes. I looked over my lovely garden and my eyes kept screeching to a  halt at the weed choked cinder block pile lying just beyond the edge of my vegetable paradise. Someone long ago decided to stack cinder blocks, two bricks high, in a horseshoe shape in the boggiest part of the yard. What was it? Who knows. Maybe a really ugly flower bed designed for skunk cabbage, maybe an ill-conceived dike, maybe a pig roasting/rotting pit? No clue. But it was ugly, functionless, and falling apart. In the lovely sunshine I thought, "Today's as good a day as any to move it out." That is right about when I heard the glass shattering screams of my daughter coming from down by our creek. I was certain she had stepped into a bees nest. My four-year-old son ran up to me, as I ran down to the banshee wail,  shouting, "Lily fell in the creek!" Out from under the redwoods lumbered Lily, arms outstretched, like a really loud, wet zombie. If she was a zombie she would be a loud one.

She was drenched from head to toe. Apparently she had grabbed onto a branch to catch a frog on the other side of the creek and the branch broke. You can picture the rest. I tried to be motherly, but really I wanted to laugh and/or explain how her dunk tank adventure was taking up precious gardening time. I kept it in though, which I suppose is what being a mom is all about. I shed my gloves and rubber boots and got her into the bath tub and then trudged back down the hill to address the cinder block problem.

I went to pick up the first one, and discovered the mud was not going to relinquish it so easily. Black, dense muck was packed into the holes of the heavy cement block, and weeds were growing up through it, lashing it tightly to the block underneath it. I let out a sigh, grabbed my trowel and began hacking away at the water-logged soil. I managed to get one out and heaved it into my yellow wagon. Then I pried the other one out and threw that in with the other. The only problem was that I forgot to remove my finger from the side of the cinder block, and managed to smash it between the two blocks. I mean really smash it. The kind where it doesn't even hurt because you know you have bigger problems, like finding the nearest emergency room. I grabbed it with my other hand, not really wanting to look, and woozily tromped back up the hill, feeling a little queazy, and a lot mad. Lily came skipping out of the bathroom, all of the creek drama forgotten, and showed immediate concern. She was ten times more motherly than I had been moments before with her. I peeled back the digits that were clenching my wounded index finger and investigated it. Not good. It was swelling quickly and abnormally. I'd broken my foot before, and this had all the hallmarks of bad news. Greg was gone at a class in Portland and not answering my telegraphed emergency texts. Hurt. Stop. Think I should go to emergency room.Stop. It's my finger. Stop.


I ended up loading the kids into the car, drove with one hand down the road while resting the other on the ice that Lily lovingly prepared for me, and then sat through two hours in the emergency room with snot nosed, typhoid ridden children running around playing with Luke and Lily. The doctor looked at my x-rays, and said, "I have good news. It's not broken", and then proceeded to wrap my two fingers together with a $100 piece of tape. Oh, Luke and Lily got an apple juice, so maybe it was just a $98 piece of tape.

Anyway, some lessons were learned from this. One: Lily is a better mother than I am. Two: Don't move cinder blocks without another grown up around (I've already ignored this lesson. 10 more blocks to go!) Three: The tomato gods will seek their revenge, one way or another, if you plant before Mother's Day!

The Three Amici

The Three Amici

Posted by Heather Harris

The gravel is in! Now for the tomatoes...

Greg and I celebrated Valentine's Day yesterday. Yes, I know it's April, but we're like that. A holiday is just a recommended time for celebration.  It can be enjoyed anytime. Birthdays are known to go on for weeks. Thanksgiving is a 5 day family extravaganza in Sunriver. Our tenth anniversary hasn't even happened yet, but we've already been to Belize! As long as the event is noted, it can really go anywhere on the calendar.

Anyway, for Valentine's Day Greg and I got each other tickets to Shovel and Rope, the best band ever. Well, actually, the tickets were for Drive-by Truckers. Anyone heard of them? Me neither. So, in true Portland hipster fashion, we went for the opening band, and then mocked the bland, monotonous guitar jamming of the main event. We didn't even stay for them to finish. We're so cool.

When I wasn't mocking the band, because honestly it was exhausting to yell witty comments over the blaring guitar solos for very long, I was sipping my IPA dreaming of, naturally, tomatoes. Tomorrow is the big day, the true main event. Tomorrow is the Tualatin Valley Garden Club's Annual Plant Sale. Row upon row, stall upon stall of gorgeous, green, leafy tomato starts will be glistening in the morning dew, their peppery scent wafting through the air, waiting for my eager fingers to pick them up, put them back. No wait, pick that one up, put it back. Oh wait, that one looks good! No, what's THAT over there?! This is not an event that I take husbands or children to. It can take awhile.
               
There are three darlings that never get put back on the saw-horse supported table. My three amigos (amici?): Lemon Boy, Speckled Roman, and Principe Borghese. Now how they ended up in my wagon the first time is just pure luck, but I will now knock over grandmothers, dogs, and chubby toddlers to snatch them up.

 Lemon boy is the most delicious, yellow tomato ever, and it ALWAYS produces lots of tomatoes. It is the first to ripen up as well, even before the so called "Early Girls". I don't know about you, but my "early" girls like to party the night before and sleep in. Not Lemon Boy. He's up bright and early.








Speckled Roman is my newest find. It produces huge, beautiful red plum tomatoes with yellow, marbled speckles. I've never eaten one raw, because they are so perfect for canning. I swear one tomato can fill a quart jar. They are also wonderfully reliable, but unfortunately a true delight for the loathsome slug. I can't tell you how many giant, perfect tomatoes I've angrily chucked across the yard because some nasty invertebrate found it first. Slug bait-it, people.

The last, Principe Borghese, is my oldest friend. Originally chosen solely because of the romantic name (not a strategy I would suggest for selecting the best tomatoes. Do as I say, not as I do), this large cherry tomato is great for drying and freezing. I've also had them re-seed in my garden and come back all over the place the next year. They produce early and keep going until late October. They're not real tasty fresh, but again, great for preserving.



Of course, this is just the start of my wagon load. Many, many more will eventually pile in. The boys will have to move over and make some room. Last year the checker laughed at me and said, "That's probably too many tomato plants. You know they get pretty big, right honey?" Oh, silly man. There is no such thing as too many tomatoes.