Living off the garden

Well, the blogging pause lasted longer than expected, even by me. I posted my intention to go dark at the end of June, and here it is mid-August. It’s hardly the same garden. In fact, it’s hardly the same as it was two weeks ago, when I left for my second trip to Toronto this summer. At that point, most of this plot was bare dirt.

So—what exactly is an Heirloom, anyway?

Back by popular demand! Part II of the appeal on behalf of Garden Organic, in its effort to save rare and endangered vegetable cultivars. Part I appeared yesterday--technically, the day before yesterday, but I refuse to call it that, since I've only slept once since posting that part. Onwards--

Source: Garden Organic, on-line newsletter, Endangered Seed Appeal, March 2009.

So, you want to know what heirloom vegetables are? Sit down nicely, children, and granny will explain.

Once upon a time back at the green dawn of the world, all seeds were open-pollinated by wind, gravity, or insects. Horticulturalists (once they came along) developed a particular flower or vegetable strain by painstakingly selecting plants that had the look or smell or taste they liked, saving and planting their seeds, and when they sprouted, discarding seedlings and plants that did not have the desired traits and saving seeds from those that did.

Plea to Preserve the Gardening Past

Source: Garden Organic, on-line newsletter, home page, March 2009.

The Heritage Seed Library needs your help keeping heritage vegetables alive in a world where fewer varieties are available every year and hybrids dominate seed catalogues.

The only organization of its kind in the UK, the Library is dedicated to preserving and spreading open-pollinated vegetable seeds. It sponsors a seed swap, puts out a catalogue each December, and provides seeds for school gardens. It’s constantly working to identify and cultivate more heirloom varieties, which it then makes available to members.

Aphid Alert II: Indoor tomatoes

(Scroll to the bottom for today's story in honor of Black History Month. It's not a happy one, but it matters. I've removed the video clip at the end of that section as it downloaded too slowly for some computers.)

WARNING: This post contains graphic photographs of pests on leaves.

Our December report on the aphids infesting the Manic Gardener’s indoor tomatoes has continued to fascinate viewers everywhere,  so we recently sent a crew for a follow-up story. The unfortunate events surrounding this interview have been vastly exaggerated, leading to the promulgation of false information across the web. (The Manic did not lift up our camera-man bodily and throw him out of the house, though she may have tried.)

We are happy to inform you that our EFG (Exposing False Gardeners) personnel sustained only minor injuries. The camera, we regret to report, was destroyed and all visual footage lost save these few photographs. (Final results from the lab indicate that it was the bricks, not the orange juice, that did the damage.) Fortunately, the audio survived, so we are able to offer you the transcript below. We hope that this clears up all misunderstandings.

EFG has no plans to return to the home of the Manic Gardener in the foreseeable future.

At last report, the woman known as the "Manic Gardener" was holding off a SWAT team with a combination of unripe tomatoes and pure invective. As one team member was heard to say, "The mouth on that woman!"

Here is part of that fateful interview: 

Greenhouse Blues

I hate to spring this on you so suddenly, but there’s really no point in tip-toeing around the matter: I have a greenhouse.

 
Why has this not been mentioned here before? I could say that the moment never seemed quite right, or that something else always seemed to get in the way, or that I hoped to perfect it before unveiling it. All these things would be true if inadequate explanations for my silence.

In the spirit of complete disclosure that now possesses me, I’ll point out that it’s not particularly green at the moment, this greenhouse, because I couldn’t finish establishing the beds

A play starring—the potato?

(Had a few technical glitches getting this image to appear as intended--sorry. Half the text was cut off when it posted this morning. That's the problem with a program that won't let you preview a post as it will actually appear. (ARE YOU LISTENING, TYPEPAD?) I must remember not to set something to post automatically when I'm trying anything new. I dumped the original and reposted this version.) 

Dedicated gardeners know that vegetables rule, but even we’d probably be surprised to find the potato cast as the evil demon in an off-Broadway play. Of course after Attack of the Killer Tomatoes anything became possible, but still...

Apparently Sybil Kempson refuses to let such things stand in her way, for she has potatoes plotting a revolt against humanity in her play “Potatoes of August.” At least, that’s how the two wives in the play see it, though the husbands have a different view. Or rather, that’s how the NYTimes review represents the wives as seeing it, though according to it, the husbands think their wives have lost it.

If you hurry, you can decide for yourself, since it will run for another week of so.

Aphid Alert! Indoor tomatoes--again.

BREAKING NEWS
Near the end of last winter the blogger known as the Manic Gardener, (a rather obvious play on her own name, Kate Gardner) wrote not one, but TWO posts about problems with growing tomatoes indoors and how she was never going to make that mistake again: she had learned her lesson, she had seen the light, she was a reformed person, a cured addict: “tomatoes belong outdoors, not in.”

Yet the aphids pictured above are on a tomato leaf, and the photo was taken today, in the home of the aforementioned Manic Gardener. What conclusions can we draw?

And you thought YOU were putting on weight--

Okay, all you pumpkin growers, with your little gourds weighing in at ten, twenty, even thirty pounds, that's nothing. Get a load of this--but be careful, because it'll crush you if you're not. Apparently these babies can put on forty (that's 40) pounds per day (that's every day).

 

Image from NPR.

That, folks, is a pumpkin, grown by one Steve Connolly of Warren, R.I., briefly the record-holder world's heaviest pumpkin, at  1568 pounds, until a previously undiscovered crack disqualified him. As a member of the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers, it sounds like he's found his niche, but is it big enough for him and that pumpkin?

Go to the NPR page, and you can see a whole row of monster pumpkins awaiting the weigh-off, and listen to clips including information about exploding pumpkins. I greet this "information" with some skepticism, having been taken in by NPR's story about exploding maple-sugar trees a couple of years ago. Of course, that story did run on April 1st.... And yeah, I do know that "gullible" isn't in the dictionary.

Potato Harvest in a Teacup

I dug up the last of the potatoes a couple of days ago.

These are the ones I actually stuck a shovel through; the rest I'll wash only just before eating. It was beautiful out—in the sixties right into dusk, with that warm, low, autumnal sunshine striking through the trees.

Home from Newfoundland

A week or so ago I said good-by to my parents,

farewell to Newfoundland,

and came home to find that both crops

and livestock

were thriving in the care of #1 son, who had graciously undertaken the task. This is the fellow who dashed outside in the midst of the hailstorm last July (when winds reached 80 miles per hour), wrestling tarps up against the house foundation to forestall flooding. So we felt comfortable leaving the house in his hands.