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...

October Tasks

October Tasks

Posted by Heather Harris

Fall is here and it's gray, misty, and wonderful. I always feel claustrophobic by the end of summer, as if the leaf laden branches, hunching sunflowers, and rotting tomatoes are sitting on top of my chest squeezing the last drops of life out of my overheated, weary body. But once the leaves start to fall and the dead stalks fall over, I am re-energized and can finally start the millions of things recommended by all of the "What To Do in Your Garden in October" lists, which is pretty much everything. The tasks are incredibly daunting and could require a second mortgage on your home as well as hiring a full time gardener. A sampling: Plant a winter vegetable garden, mulch everything, plant all of those perennials you've been drooling over, plant all spring bulbs, reseed your lawn, establish new flower beds, feed soil with bone meal, rake and collect leaves, harvest and dry seeds for next year, clean up the vegetable garden, plant trees, shrubs, and anything except a watermelon. I decided to go with cheap child labor and just shoot for a few of the tasks that absolutely can only be done in the fall.

1. Reseed the Lawn I hear that this can be done in the spring, but I have yet to see that work. To be truthful, this being the first time that I've reseeded the lawn in fall, I have no idea if that works either, but seeing as spring planting has been a disaster, it's either fall or gravel, Those are all the options I have left. It seems that if preschool children can grow grass in Dixie cups in dimly lit church basements, that I should be able to get it to grow in my yard. Not so. We have tried that fluffy green grass stuff that the pros use and factory engineered seeds guaranteed to sprout overnight, all to no avail. Our problem is we always seem to spread the seed right before the one hot and dry week we get in the spring, and I am really bad with watering routines. Or any routine. This time I bought the cheapest grass seed at Bi-Mart that I could find and employed my preschooler, Luke, to shake it out in haphazard fashion all over the yard. I'm very hopeful...

2. Bed Clean Up As with most gardening tasks, I started with bulb planting in mind, but took a detour down to the vegetable garden (looking for my trowel, which I blamed the kids for losing, but it is just as likely that I left it somewhere) and before I knew it I was hip deep in a pile of weeds, my fingers were caked in dirt (I couldn't find my gloves either) and the kids had  rakes and hoes doing God knows what to the areas I had just weeded. Actually, Lily turned out to be quite a raker, as long as she could talk nonstop the whole three hours that she was helping me. On my weeding frenzy, however, I unearthed the crown jewel of my vegetable garden that I have been searching for all summer long: a CUCAMELON! Remember back in seed catalog season when I excitedly expounded on the darling little cucamelons that would be wending their way through my garden, spreading their charm everywhere they went? Well, let's just say that it's October and I have a total of one cucamelon. But, oh it was soooo good! I really shouldn't have tasted it because now I am under the delusion that I should try it again next year.

3. Bulb Planting I did eventually run out of weeds, at least in the places I chose to look, and returned to the intended task of planting bulbs. I always forget how long bulb planting takes. The netted bag even has "Easy, Affordable Fun" written right on the front. It's easy, but I wouldn't say it's fun. I had about 100 bulbs. That means you dig one hundred little holes. Ponder that for a moment. That is, unless you buy a lot of bulbs and you can just dig one huge trench and dump them in, but then I would have to question the "Affordable" part. By this time my little helpers were totally bored by the yard projects and were contentedly bickering on a fence just close enough for me to hear, but not close enough to be of much use should I need, say, a another bag of bone meal from the garage. This is, in my experience,
 the end to every day of gardening with children. I wonder how much a gardener charges?

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 Tale of Two Gardens

A Tale of Two Gardens

Posted by Heather Harris

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

I'm pretty sure when Dickens started to write the first lines of a Tale of Two Cities it was late August because never have his words rung truer to me than right now. I just spent the last week at "New Teacher Orientation". After 10 years of teaching I'm starting all over again. Yay? This meant that for three days straight, I was engaged in a never ending loop of the exact same one minute conversation each time the "Facilitator" cheerily said, "Find someone at a different table to share your thoughts with!" Each conversation went something like this:

Me:"Hi, I'm Heather."
 Teacher:"Hi, I'm _______ from_____ "(some exotic state like New Jersey)
 Me:"Awesome."
Teacher:" Is this your first teaching job?" (code for "Do I need to worry about you being better than me or are you a loser first year teacher?)
Me: I taught two years in Hawaii and eight years in Hillsboro (take that!)
Teacher: "Oh, Hawaii must have been awesome!"
Me: "Well it was challenging but rewarding" (code for, " I don't have enough hours in the day to explain that place to you, you silly person.)
Teacher: "What do you teach?"
Me: "Kindergarten"
Teacher: "Ohhhhhh." (Simpering sweet cooing sounds)
Me: Pray to God we're moving on to the next activity.

This was repeated at least 380 times during the three days and every single person Ooohed or Aaahhed  patronizingly when I mentioned I teach kindergarten. Now I never took the position for any sort of social or vocational standing. I know its a challenging, great job, with little societal merit, but do I need the cutesy sigh? I contend that I do not. The kids are cute, the job is not. Now don't get me wrong, the rest of the training was awesome, and I feel like it's the greatest district I've ever worked for already. But who likes meeting new people, especially colleagues, for three straight days?


The end of August is when I am reminded that I'm no longer a full time gardener, blissfully planning my day around mowing, weeding, hedging and harvesting. I am now a teacher, attempting to wrap my head around the needs of my students, family and garden all at the same time. The garden however, decides that this is exactly the time of year to pump out enough vegetables to feed the whole block. All of my hard work has come to literal fruition, but I'm too dang busy to enjoy it. Instead I frantically pluck beans, slice off zucchinis, and wrench tomatoes from the vines, tossing them into the fridge or onto the counter, hoping that somewhere between my cookie social, the kids' open houses and Greg's registration night I'll find time to preserve a hundred pounds of tomatoes.  Is it really possible that one week ago I was camping along the Clackamas with nary a care in the world? August...It's the best of times, and its the worst of times...

Rumspringa

Rumspringa

Posted by Heather Harris

I have returned from a week of camping in the high desert of Oregon, just long enough to let my garden shake of the minimal control I exert upon it and enjoy a rumspringa of sorts, under the lax care of a middle schooler.  She was given instructions to water every other day, and leave the rest to me when I got home. Before leaving, I carefully picked any zucchini that were bigger than a matchstick, harvested all the beans, chopped down the kale (again), plucked any tomato that looked close to red, and nestled everything on the top of my 120 quart cooler for a brutal week of being pummeled with ice, crushed by hunks of bloody meat, and exposed to 100 degree blasts of dry desert air. Not exactly the storing method recommended in any gardening book. As I left, the tomato vines were securely lashed to their cages, weeds had been exterminated, and all the greens were razed.

Turns out it was a hot week at home, and my middle school hire was very effective with a water hose. Not only was everything still alive ( even my hanging basket with lobelia!) and twenty times its original size, but there were things growing that I did not plant. Well, didn't really plant. I realize that I have always given the impression that I am a carefully detailed and exacting gardener (ha), but you will be surprised to note that I do a lot of my gardening on accident. Despite the fact that I read all kinds of advice on growing vegetables, I rarely intentionally follow any of it. If it seems too elaborate of a technique (for me anyway), I check nature. For example, " Tomatoes prefer to be watered from the ground. Their leaves do not like to get wet." Really? Since when does the rain burble gently up from the ground, considerately avoiding the delicate leaves of a tomato? Most of the time I just forget the multiple steps suggested to me in the literature, and do only the parts I can recall. After all, I'm not trying to make a living or survive the winter. (Thank God.)

The success I do have is generally accidental. This year, most of my real planning was centered around aesthetics. I put nasturtiums on four sides of my center boxes so that they would spill out and surround the little bistro table. I planted scarlet runner beans so that I would have red flowers climbing the birch trellises that I made this winter. I planted pink zinnias and sunflowers to break up the green. As luck would have it, these lovely flowers were placed in the same plots as my zucchini, which require pollinators to take the male pollen to the female flowers. Hummingbirds and bees are joyfully skipping from flower to squash blossom.







I also like to bury things in the winter and see what pops up when it gets warm. I often forget that I've done this. Apparently I chucked a few pumpkins in the large bed after Halloween because I now have huge pumpkin vines wending their way through the cherry tomatoes, that I also did not plant, supported by the sunflowers that I selected for their deep magenta color. In fact, I inadvertently planted potatoes, dug them up, planted lettuce in the bare spot, and then grew giant pumpkin leaves to protect them from the hot August sun. Now if someone in a book said, "Plant a rotting pumpkin in November and bury a few moldy cherry tomatoes, then plant Yukon gold potatoes in February, plant a sunflower seed in the middle of the plot in June, dig up the potatoes in July and plant some lettuce," I never in a million years would have tried it out. But it turns out I have this crazy little ecosystem pumping out vegetables all by accident.

So, if I can grow all of this stuff by only paying attention to beauty and experimentally burying rotting stuff, you too can pick what you like to do in the garden and politely nod your head to all of the advice with three hundred steps to success, and then merrily go your own screw ball way. You will surely grow something.

July Update

July Update

Posted by Heather Harris

It's time for a mid-summer update. I am currently in Sellwood, in a caboose turned tea shop, an earthen mug in hand, sipping a chai concoction made with maté in honor of my host sister in Argentina for the World Cup today. It's really the least I can do to show my support. No kids are in sight; only women with ostrich skin purses, iron teapots, lap tops, and long, billowing skirts. Ahhh, summer.

Much like the skirts, my garden is in full, blowzy profusion right now. Peas hang their ripe fruit unabashedly from every inch of my twig trellises. Scarlet runners are entwined with pole beans, waving their vermilion blooms like a red light district. Tomatoes are swelling with hopeful promise of things to come, and the nasturtiums are wantonly dangling their leggy blooms off the edge of every raised bed. It's really quite a sight.

The chickens have yet to lay an egg (Big shock. I swear if I ever see evidence that chickens actually lay eggs, I'll pass out. I have however, answered the age old question: The chicken definitely comes first...long...long...long before the egg.)  They also have charmed their way into getting set free from the coop every day which, as you will recall, is in complete violation of one of my chicken rules when we took on the new hens. So far they are happy to scratch under our massive fig tree all day. All day. How long must a day feel to a chicken? They are probably too depressed to lay eggs.

The deer have multiplied over the winter. One even has twin fawns. And defying all logic, despite their daily romps through the yard, they have yet to nibble on one single thing from the entire garden. I know. Crazy. Our neighbor complains regularly that they are mangling his landscape plants. My only guess is that they stuff themselves on his roses, and, like a dessert menu presented when you've gorged yourself on a five course meal, they just sniff around our garden and then responsibly decline. I think I'll get my neighbor some replacement roses, and maybe a big, fat, juicy oakleaf hydrangea, just to be neighborly.

The cucamelons are my summer heartbreak. One seed germinated a month ago and is now a whopping one inch tall. The other seeds decided to pop up after an incredible two and half months in the dirt.This is what happens when I order a plant native to Mexico from a seed supplier in Arizona. Not a good strategy for all you novice gardeners out there. We'll see if anything happens before the first frost strangles them.

And that about sums it up. My maté is almost gone, and a dude just propped his mum tattooed arm a little too close to my table, so I think it's time to go...

Preserving

Preserving

Posted by Heather Harris

June is hands down my favorite month. School is out, summer is in, the vegetables are growing, and fruit is ready to be jammed! It also used to be Portland dining month, but someone must have decided that was just overdoing it, and moved it to miserable March this year. After all, who needs an incentive to venture into town on a warm night and taste all of the local produce bursting out of the industrial chic cafes in June? But March? I'm thinking I might need a little help to get me to try the beet and parsnip confit.

But thank goodness, there is this beautiful thing called preserving, which means I can enjoy a lovely strawberry jam in March (if I managed not to gobble it all up by mid-July), almost as delicious as eating a fresh berry in June. Then I can bypass the early spring radish steak special altogether!

June is only half over and I already have cherries plucked from the yard, Rainier's snatched from a roadside stand on the Puget Sound, apricots and jalapenos from the grocery store, and strawberries the kids and I
picked at a local farm, all lovingly sweetened and pickled lining the shelves of our pantry. And my rhubarb was actually beefy enough after four years of cajoling to harvest and mix in with the strawberry jam! The vegetable garden is currently overflowing with kale, but kale marmalade doesn't sound too appetizing. You'll have to wait for Portland Dining Month 2015 for that treat.

An afternoon of canning can leave you a bit parched though, so I have two little recipes below without measurements (this is a gardening blog, not a cooking one) to refresh you after a hot, sweaty, and curse-filled day of canning, using the leftovers stuck with jam glue to your countertops. Just scrape it off and enjoy! Happy preserving!

God-jam Strawberry Vodka and Tonic

Muddle a few over-ripe strawberries in a tall glass with some mint (or whatever edible greenage you have laying around)

Pour on some vodka, amount depends on how the canning went. (Also refreshing without vodka, but who's day of canning went that well?)

Stir in a little lemonade concentrate.

Toss in some ice and top off with tonic.


Cherry Massacre (Very similar to above recipe)

Muddle those last few pitted cherries in syrup that you couldn't quite cram into the last jar with some mint or other greenage etc. in a tall glass.

Pour on some tequila (see how I mixed it up there!) Again, amount depends...

Stir in some leftover sugar syrup.

Put in some ice and top off with tonic.