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...

Waiting

Waiting

Posted by Heather Harris

I am very bad at waiting. This is of course a failing of human nature. It seems odd that God would make us so horribly impatient when everything requires patience. Maybe it's because a lifetime to us is nothing in the context of cosmic time. Maybe that's why dogs are so slobberingly, deliriously excited for you to throw a stick during fetch. In dog years, by my unscientific calculations, the thirty seconds that you are toying with them, faking tosses and laughing at their stupidity, is like waiting for three minutes. I don't know about you, but three minutes of a practical joke at my expense, repeated over and over would drive me a bit loony too.

I am currently waiting for a call on a job interview that I had this week. My phone is glued to my hip. Under "Recent Calls", which I keep checking compulsively despite the fact that not only does my phone ring when a call comes in but it also flashes blue, vibrates, and pops a notice up on the screen, my most recent call is from my sister 13 hours ago. To a dog that would be like five days. My finger nails are wearing out from the percussive tapping on every surface where I wait. Somewhere in the deep wrinkles of my brain, I know that the artfully crafted kindergarten lesson I taught at the interview was awesome, but as the minutes tick on, I imagine every minute flaw as the reason a call isn't coming in. Surely I was a complete moron and just didn't know it.

Without waiting though, how would we know hope? And hope, while extremely difficult to muster as my silent phone lays black and lifeless at my side, is a far better feeling than the inbred, backwoods cousins of impatience: annoyance, dread, despair, and self doubt.

I was certain three days ago that my cucamelons were done for. My kale, planted on the same day, was 8 inches tall. My peas were blooming, the massive scarlet runner beans were winding their way up the trellis like something out of Jack and the Bean Stock. My cucamelons had not even poked through. My husband enthusiastically pointed to a wild tomato seedling and said, "There's one!", in much the same way that he keeps saying, "They'll call!" Zucchini seeds were popping up, CARROTS were popping up. Wandering visitors kept stopping at the empty box of dirt saying, "What's in there?" I'd say as hopefully as possible, "Oh, those are my cucamelons. They haven't come up yet..." Then I would quickly distract them with the freakish bean plants before they could ask any more questions. And then, just when I was about to rifle through my dirty, half empty pile of seed packets to find something else to plant in there, two of the tiniest little leaves you've ever seen from a squash seed emerged from the soil. The next day, green seedlings were sprinkled all over. Turns out it can take four weeks for those dang things to germinate. Once again, seeds proved that they will, in fact, grow, in their own time, and there's nothing we can do about it. What looks like a pile of dirt in May will be so overgrown and claustrophobic in September that you will beg for the first frost so that it will all rot away and you can finally catch your breath.

And so, I wait...

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.

Italian Dreaming on a Wet, Northwest Day

Italian Dreaming on a Wet, Northwest Day

Posted by Heather Harris

I have a problem. Its origin is a term abroad in Italy when I was the very romantic age of 20. One should never taste their first glass of wine under a jasmine covered pergola on a warm evening at a 500 year old Tuscan farm with fire flies and a locally sourced five course meal.It really does a number on your head. Your expectations for life blow way out of proportion. And you can't get the warm, reddish glow of the sun setting on the rosy stone and gravel paths out of your head.

And thus begins my problem. My dream garden design is a  Mediterranean, warm, drought tolerant, geometrically precise, gravel strewn masterpiece. Something like this:

My reality is a Northwest, damp, water-logged, chaotic, grass choked field.  A yard much more likely to yield a garden like this:

It's lovely and all, but I'm not sipping wine on that bench. I'm drinking a hot coffee, bundled up in four layers with an outer rain parka.  

So, I have started my experiment of creating a Northwest Mediterranean garden on a small scale with the vegetable garden. Of course, there are five redwoods at the southern end (yes, someone planted five of the fasted growing, largest trees in the world in my yard) , but the color of the branches exactly matches the needle thin Italian cypress trees growing all over Tuscany, so they'll do. And alas, there is no rosy pink crushed rock at Portland Sand and Gravel, but they do have every imaginable size in gray, so I will just have to compensate with copious amounts of terracotta pots. Greg laid out a perfectly rectangular plot using Ed Smith's "Magic Triangle" (well really the Egyptians came up with it, but I'll give Ed the credit.) Thank God I have a husband with the patience to measure, because Lord knows I don't. We have the square vegetable beds laid out geometrically, and I left room in the center of the garden for a black, iron bistro set, so that hopefully, I will be sipping wine on a summer evening, surrounded by the bounty of my raised beds, while delighting over a caprese salad made with my own heirloom tomatoes.  I'm thinking a Chianti...

                                                Luke helping shovel all of the dirt.

                                Dirt in, April seeds planted, gravel ready to go in this weekend!

Garden Pests

Garden Pests

Posted by Heather Harris

As I have begun to move from the anticipation stage of my vegetable garden into the actual realization of it, the giddy excitement of imagining a perfectly manicured and abundantly productive french potager is giving way to anxiety, fear, doubt and exhaustion. A bit like leg three of my recent journey to Belize.

So far, my little seeds, that should have germinated two weeks ago, have just barely poked their feeble heads above the cold, clammy earth, only to feel the cruel pelt of sleety rain. Many have been severed by the slimy munching of adolescent banana slugs. How easily I have forgotten the forces of evil that ooze up out of the ground at the exact same time that life is trying to spring anew. 

Below I have outlined all of the problems that I imagine will completely destroy my garden this year. Of course this never happens, but right now, as the rain drips down, and the slugs build their forces on the perimeter of the raised bed, it seems like the only possible outcome. I have also rated them as "Certain Threat", " Possible Threat", and "Just in my Head" to help you with your anxiety level as well.

Slugs and snails

Rating: Certain Threat

Since I have begun vegetable gardening I have seen these spineless, gooey devils destroy an entire crop of strawberries, munch off the tops of all my pea starts, and suck out the juice of only the ripest, biggest, most beautiful heirloom tomatoes. They are the only menace that has made me forgo organic practices, and dump copious piles of slug bait wherever they are likely to strike next. I hate slugs.

Deer: 

Rating: Possible Threat

Last year in our new house, I had just one little raised bed with mostly tomatoes in it. The deer would come out and sniff around, but left it alone, apparently hoping to get drunk off of fruit that was fermenting on the ground instead. I know I should scare them away, but they are so beautiful to watch. This will probably come back to haunt me...

Gophers:

Rating: Possible Threat

I'm pretty sure that you can see the gopher hills in our yard on Google Earth. If gophers had maps, our house would be their New York. When I was digging out the raspberry bed, I became concerned that I might just fall right through the ground because everywhere I dug, I found another tunnel. I have yet to see one destroy any plants, but we put chicken wire on the bottom of the raised beds just in case. Our cat has also developed a talent for catching the little diggers, so maybe there's hope!

Children:

Rating: Certain Threat

Not only do kids like to climb on raised beds, launch balls into raised beds, and dig in raised beds for hidden treasures, they love to eat things that are growing before you even know they are there. I have tasted three raspberries, one blueberry and two sugar snap peas in my ten years of gardening. The kids assure me they're great.

Ducks:

Rating: Possible Threat

Ducks are awesome pets, except when the lettuce has just reached it's peak deliciousness. One year I went out early in the morning with my scissors in hand to harvest the first crop of lettuce, only to find an entire row of massacred stubs that had been marauded by the ducks a few minutes earlier. They do, however, eat their weight in slugs so I guess I can't be too mad. They are also pretty lazy, and jumping up into a raised bed is like a marathon for them, so I think the lettuce should be pretty safe...

Weather:

Rating: Just In My Head

Every year I'm certain that this is the year that summer won't come. Rain will last forever, the soil will never reach that magical 70 degree mark, and dark clouds will forever keep the sun from shining on my tomatoes. And yet. every year, summer does actually arrive, even if it's August 1st. That doesn't keep me from worrying. 

Breaking Ground

Breaking Ground

Posted by Heather Harris

I blame the frogs. Their wild, raucous sex blasting through our bedroom windows for the last several weeks had me fooled into believing that spring had arrived on March 7th. The clouds parted for a few precious hours, giving me just enough time to plant all of my early seeds (kale, lettuce, peas, chives) in the one raised bed that is already out in the garden, and to do some serious damage with my pruners. Of course, it doesn't take me too long to do damage with pruners. Clipping and snipping away at blackberries and other brambly nuisances is a passion of mine, and while I'm blissfully chopping and whacking my way across the yard, I always forget that there will be a massive pile of sharp, thorny junk that I will  have to cram into my much-to-small debris can when I'm done. The best day of my life was finding out that the Happy Valley garbage men collect yard debris every week! Sometimes I just leave the pile for awhile, hoping it will "dry out" and shrink up a bit, making it easier to cram in later. Ha! On March 7th, however, this was not an option because come hell or high water I as going to strip the sod off of my much anticipated vegetable garden plot on March 8th, and the pile of blackberry canes were directly in the way, so heave-ho into the can they must go.

Well it turns out that March 8th did not get the memo about spring. It did, however, deliver hell and high water. It started so well with the rental of the best agricultural invention since the cotton gin: the sod stripper. I don't know if you've ever tried to remove sod in the more traditional way of using a shovel, but it is the worst gardening activity, hands-down; especially if you were born a woman and lack heft and/or brawny muscles. I have to jump onto the shovel with both feet and then pry the giant clods of earth up, using the ground and shovel handle as a lever and fulcrum. Then I heave the thirty pound clumps up and into a wheel barrow, wheel it somewhere trying not to tip the whole dang thing over, and then figure out where the heck I'm going to put them. After all, the point is to get rid of the grass, not relocate it.

I was not going to do that for
 1,080 square feet of grass (or should I say I wasn't going to make my husband do that). So we rented the sod stripper. It's a sexy name for a sexy little tool. It looks sort of like a rototiller, but it has a long horizontal blade that slips just under the surface of the sod and slices the grass right off the top, so that you get a long strip of rollable turf, just like what you get when you buy it at the store. The only problem was that it decided to pour rain ALL day long. The ground was already well saturated from the last few weeks of rain, but without the grass covering, we had turned the garden plot into a slippery, boot sucking mud wallow. And we had 1,080 square feet of water-logged turf to roll, heave,cart, and unload into a sod mountain at the back of our yard. It was not fun. Let' s just leave it at that. However, the whole time I was slogging through the muck, I was imagining the chore without the sod stripper, and imaging myself impaled, out of choice, on the dull end of my shovel. So it could have been worse...so much worse...

Ed Smith, Patron Saint of the Vegetable Garden

Ed Smith, Patron Saint of the Vegetable Garden

Posted by Heather Harris

Three times a week I get forty-five minutes all to myself. Forty-five beautiful, usually interrupted, minutes. Luke, my four-year-old takes and nap, and my six-year-old takes a "play nap". What is a play nap, you ask? It is an incredibly brilliant invention of my mine that requires my daughter to stay in her room for forty-five minutes, doing whatever her weird and creative mind would lead her to do, as long as A) I don't hear it, B) It doesn't make a mess big enough that I need to come and deal with it, because God knows it will make a mess, and C) She doesn't come out of her room asking me for anything. Almost always one of these conditions is not met, but I'll take what I can get.


The first five minutes of freedom are spent getting tea ready and scrounging some piece of chocolate out of the pantry, or a kid's treat bag. The next thirty minutes are spent reading a devotional. This week I read one about Francis of Assisi. That is one weird dude, but for some reason I really like him. Maybe because I'm quite certain he would appreciate a good garden. He might even preach to my stubborn carrots. The last 10 minutes are spent daydreaming, planning, or pinning about my garden. This week I returned to my dear friend, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible. The cover has nerdy Ed Smith, holding a bountiful wicker basket of vegetables, in a button-up short sleeved shirt, denim jeans, and a straw hat with a vaguely wild fabric band, indicating, perhaps, that there is a little uninhibited side to Ed. He has helpful section headings like, "Some Kernals of Wisdom with your Kernals of Corn." Like Francis, I'm inexplicably drawn to Ed and his WORD system: Wide Rows, Organic Methods, Raised Beds, Deep Soil. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Amen, preach it Ed! 

Since I am very near the start (dare I hope for this weekend!?!) of peeling back the sod from my vegetable garden plot and finally getting the project going, I dusted off my old trusty friend for a refresher on the basics of preparing a garden site. I crossed my fingers and prayed that I had selected a location that Ed would approve of.  Here' his advice:

1. Let the Sun Shine In: My site is pretty much in full sun all day, although the neighbor's collection of rare and bizarre trees block the late afternoon sun. I don't think I can cut those down though.

2. Judging Which Way the Wind Blows: Seeing as we are on the east side of Portland now and everyone talks about "The East Winds" I'm guessing that that is the direction the wind comes from, although to me, when our huge Norway Spruce is blowing like an angry harpy, it would seem the wind comes from every direction. If it is from the East, then the plot has no protection, but when the harpy tree blows, I don't think a wind break is going to do much good anyway. However, Ed does say that a site that slopes to the south, which mine does, will warm more quickly in the spring. Hear that, tomatoes?

3.Nobody Likes Wet Feet: The slope also leads to a lot of water at the southerly end of the garden site, (hence the overabundance of my mortal enemy, the buttercup) but I think it is just beyond my last bed and I'm hoping that raised beds will take care of any soggy problems. 

4. "A Bird in the Hand..." This heading title, while very Francis of Assisi, is a bit of a metaphorical stretch. I think what he means is that you want your garden close to your house, or at least within view, so that you think about it and enjoy it. My garden could be in East Idaho and I would think about and enjoy it, so I don't think this one is a problem, but luckily for me I have a full view of the site from my sliding glass door. 

Thank you Ed! Once again you've assured me that everything will be alright. And now, if this blasted rain would just let up so I can get going!

Planting Seeds

Planting Seeds

Posted by Heather Harris

* WARNING: This post contains profanity. (Or does it?)


The other day I was teaching my after school group of fourth graders, and said, "Okay everybody, type MobyMax into your search bar to find the math program we will be using today." Typing began, and slowly a head rolled up from the hunched body slumped nearest to me ( a seating placement that was no accident). Two shifty eyes peaked out from the side of his head, and he said, just loudly enough for his classmates to hear, and just quietly enough to feign genuine concern, "Why does my tablet say Moby...dick?" And then just a glimmer of a well-practiced smirk flashed across his face. He looked up at me oh-so-innocently while nine other students jerked their heads up anticipating what could only be a great show.

What they didn't know was that I'm a hardened veteran. " Oh, Moby DICK!" I exclaimed, loudly enough for the class next door to hear, "Moby DICK is a very famous book! You might get to read Moby DICK when you get to high school!" Eyes grew three times their normal size and then quickly dove back down to the tablets. Silent, on-task work prevailed for the rest of class because the last thing any of them wanted to hear was their teacher shouting that word again. Victory!

And here's where I get to planting seeds. What may not seem evident at first, is that while I was masterfully executing classroom management, I was also planting a seed. This disengaged pupil of mine may  now have just a glimmer of  hope that somewhere in his future, in the mystical land known as High School, he might get to read a whole book about dick, and not just any dick, but a Moby dick. And that my friends, might just get him to pay a little more attention in reading class tomorrow. Ahh...planting seeds.

Of course I don't just plant metaphorical seeds. I plant real ones too. What I love about seeds is that they are the cheapest and laziest way to get something to grow in your garden. I've tried starting seeds indoors so that I could put strong seedlings out in spring, but they always ended up meeting a cruel fate. They'd mold, they'd get straggly, or they'd get knocked over by curious children or an idiotic dog. So I've given up on that for now. I am now becoming an expert on seeds that can just be plunked directly into the dirt and left to do their thing.

To select seed, I find anything that was either developed at Oregon State to meet the fickle demands of an Oregon growing season, or an heirloom that was brought over from Russia, preferably Siberia. This is the same strategy I use for selecting tomato plants. If some babushka got a tomato to ripen in Siberia, and it was good enough for her to save the seed and try again, then it's good enough for me.

I buy my seeds from a seed catalog, which is to say that I go a little overboard. In a store, you see how many packets of seeds you have loaded up in your cart, and the reasonable part of your brain kicks in and tells you, "That's probably enough." You throw in three more packs and then you're done. With a seed catalog, there is no visual clue that you have outdone yourself, yet again. You start with an organized list of the things you need, then you get blissfully distracted by all of the amazing plants you never noticed before, and before you know it you have enough seed on your order form to supply a forty acre farm. Yet somehow it always comes to $50.00. See what I mean about cheap!

And every year there is always the darling, new plant that I can't live without, even though it probably does not pass the "plunk-it and forget-it" test, it's never even heard of Siberia and was most likely taken directly from somewhere on the Equator and placed in a seed packet for my torment. This year it's the cucamelon. I ordered it in December because I was afraid they would sell out. It is an absolutely adorable cucumber that looks exactly like a miniature watermelon. It is supposed to be intensely crunchy, with just a hint of lime. I'm in love. But I'm not alone. Check out the Sutton gardener video below. He might just be the hunkiest gardener waxing about the most sublime vegetable that has ever been caught on tape.

I put a list of everything I ordered for this year's garden below, just in case anyone actually reads this blog for useful information, which I'm not necessarily recommending. But if you're a "plunk-it and forget-it" kind of person like me, then most of the seeds should make you quite pleased. (I can not yet vouch for the cucamelon,). Of course the Grand Dame of my garden, the tomato, will not be planted from seed, so don't panic that you don't see it on the list. My lust for boxes full red ripe tomatoes will not be left to the capricious whim of nature. Let's not be silly...

Cucamelon
Chive Seeds
Cilantro Slow Bolt
Dill Dukat
Oregon Blue Lake Pole Bean
Scarlet Runner
Baltimore Carrot
Purple Haze Carrot
Neon Color Mix Chard
Fennel
Bak Choi-Mei Qing Choy
Cascadia Sugar Snap Pea
Jackpot Zucchini
Sunburst Scallop
Echinacea
Cosmos
Empress of India Nasturtium
Jewel Peach Melba Nasturtium
Italian Parsley
Moulin Rouge Sunflower
Supreme Mix Sunflower
California Giants Violet Queen Zinnia

Graph Paper

Graph Paper

Posted by Heather Harris

The Project has begun. You could say it really started in June with the frantic plunking of eight tomato plants into a solitary raised bed. Or maybe the hurried toss of a few dahlia tubers by the deck late in the spring. But no... I think the project really began today. For today I took out the graph paper.

I NEVER take out graph paper. It runs completely contrary to my willy-nilly nature. My husband, weirdly, has graph paper as his notepad. Can you imagine?! All of those serious little boxes staring at you while you're trying to daydream, doodle, or deliberate? The only reason I even own any is because I thought I might take up cross stitch as a means to improve my undeveloped attention to detail. I don't think it worked.

However, as I tromped out into our soggy field to measure the perimeter of the new vegetable garden (I use the term "measure" loosely, since I am also adverse to precision with a tape measure)  I came to several sobering conclusions:

1. This yard is freaking huge.

2. My vegetable garden will have more square feet than my first house.

3. Greg (my husband) is going to kill me when he sees how many tons of gravel and dirt he is going  to be shoveling.

4. This is only Phase 1 of 3,678 phases to complete the garden of my dreams.

5. This "Project" is going to take 20 years and 5 million dollars.

And

6. I'm going to need graph paper.

And thus, The Project has begun...