First things first

Last year, Jan and I built a 4′x’4′ raised-bed garden along the side of our house. (Our yard has a lot of trees, and that’s pretty much the only consistently sunny spot.) We were very modest in our goals, and wound up with decent harvests of purple beans, lettuce, and Swiss chard.

This spring, we decided to expand our garden—not least because Sylvia was very interested in the project and had helped choose some flower varieties to plant. We added a 4′x8′ raised bed next to the first one, and filled both of them with mushroom soil, which is readily available in this area (southeastern Pennsylvania grows most of the mushrooms in this country) and has been described as “rocket fuel for plants.”

A wet, cold spring gave our seeds some problems, but now that the warm weather is here things are taking off a bit. We have zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, and some other flowers (I don’t know what they are—it was a packet of seeds that Jan’s dad sent to Sylvia from the Netherlands). There’s a bit of chard and Italian parsley, and two bean plants.

When Jan and I gardened at our apartment, we had a seed-starting setup (complete with heat mats and grow lights) in the tiny spare bedroom. Our plan is to do this in our basement, but we didn’t manage to clear out the clutter soon enough this season. So we went to our local farmer’s market and bought some tomato plants and several basil plants. My end-of-summer goal is to make and freeze a gallon of pesto.

A few more photos from our recent trip to Longwood Gardens:

All three of us have birthdays in May. Sylvia’s is on the 6th, mine is on the 8th, and Jan’s was yesterday. He and I are the same age for fifteen days, and then he leaps ahead again.

Jan always takes Sylvia’s birthday and my birthday as days off of work, but yesterday was the first time in a long time that he took his birthday off, too. We celebrated by heading to Longwood Gardens (which is where we’d spent my birthday, too).

It was one of those perfect spring days: sunny, clear, breezy, neither too warm nor too cold, not humid. The garden wasn’t very crowded, and the flowers put on a great show. The best part for me was just watching Sylvia be happy there. She loves that place, and it’s such a wonderful location for roaming and exploration and just being.

Last week, daytime temperatures were in the 20s. I wore my flannel-lined jeans all the time, and put on a hat, scarf, and mittens whenever I went out.

This week, daytime temperatures are in the 50s and 60s (with one day’s high at 69!). I believe that general warming trends are harbingers of bad things to come (Al Gore is right, people!). But I love those one or two balmy days you get in January (always in January—why is that?) that offer a quick break from winter. Some wishful (or extremely cold-tolerant) types go so far as to wear shorts and t-shirts on those days. Me, I’m just glad not to have to wear a heavy sweater and wool socks for a little while. And I’m also glad when it’s mild enough to permit non-bundled-up playtime outside—and a game of hopscotch.

Spring really isn’t that far off. Look what’s been arriving in my mailbox over the past few weeks. Now that Christmas is over, I expect a deluge of these things.

I love flowers.

In the spring and summer, I’m happy to see them outside my windows. The winter, however, is a different story. I can’t afford to have cut flowers around often, and we don’t have many good spots for houseplants, so I usually content myself with forcing paperwhites on a windowsill in the kitchen. A few years ago, I got very ambitious and potted up crocuses, hyacinths, and all sort of other bulbs that require hardening, but they took up a lot of real estate in my refrigerator for a long time, so now I just do paperwhites.

I buy a bag of them in October or November and force just one or two of them at a time, placing them in mason jars with smooth river rocks on the bottom. The first of this year’s bulbs started flowering a couple of weeks ago, right around Thanksgiving, and I expect to have enough bulbs to last until the daffodils start appearing in my yard in the spring.

Some people don’t like paperwhites because of their smell. If you have a whole bunch of them, yes, their fragrance can be cloying. But just one or two at a time produce a mild perfume that wafts through the air and reminds me that green spring will be returning soon.

Last week we had summer-like temperatures, but now, as the air is cooling, it’s obvious that autumn is truly here. There are a few flowers left in my yard, such as these anemones, which were planted by my Dutch father-in-law, a horticulturalist who knows the Latin names (but not always the English ones) of pretty much every plant in my area (and in lots of other places, too). It’s an autumn-blooming perennial. When I see its stems start to rise from the ground in late summer, I wonder, “Will the flowers arrive before the winter?” And they do–and it’s a joy to see these delicate white blossoms that seem to float in the air.

And then there are the hydrangeas. We have one large plant near the patio and three smaller plants in other places; they all produce blue-green blossoms. I didn’t cut a whole lot of them this year, so the plants are covered with flowers that have been slowly drying out over the past few weeks–fading to pale green and eventually turning into brown paper.

The early days of autumn are always a surprise to me. The river birch along the back fence is one of the first trees to shed its leaves, and it does this even as most of the trees are still quite green. A handful of golden brown leaves scatter themselves across the lawn…and in the blink of an eye, it seems, the grass is obscured by a carpet of leaves (and it’s a thick carpet: last year we composted forty paper lawn bags of shredded leaves) and all the trees are bare.

What do you mean they’re not quite ready?

I want to eat them now!

Just a few more days…

We’ve been eating lettuce and salad greens from our little garden for several weeks now. The bean plants started producing flowers a couple of weeks ago, and the first beans appeared last week. “It’ll be a while before they’re ready for eating,” I thought. Silly me. I had completely forgotten how beans can grow like crazy, rivaling only zucchini in their ability to take over a garden, your kitchen, and eventually your entire house.

I was out of town for the weekend, and when I inspected the garden this morning I discovered that it had been very very busy during my absence. In addition to lots of purple beans (which will be part of tonight’s dinner–yum), there’s the first cosmos blossom. Something’s been chewing on it a bit, but Sylvia didn’t notice at all–she thought it was fascinating and wanted nothing more than to touch it. It’s surrounded by tons of buds, so it will soon have companions.

And how about those tomatoes? I do like a nice fried-green-tomato sandwich (using cornmeal for breading and provolone for, um, cheesing), but I’m going to spare these fellows and let them find their destiny as bright red, end-of-summer tomatoes. On my plate. Some smaller tomatoes have shown up on the plant, and there are still tons of flowers waiting to turn into tomato-y goodness.

Finally, here’s a view of the chard-and-lettuce section of the box. The lettuce has lasted longer than I expected (I can’t remember if I bought a bolt-resistant seed mix…I probably did), but the nine-million-degree temperatures we’re having this week will probably signal its end. The chard is looking good, and I’ll probably use some of it soon to whip up some pasta with goat cheese, raisins, and sauteed chard.

Before we became homeowners, Jan and I lived in an apartment where we had a huge garden. Our apartment was the top (third) floor of a beautiful, old, Victorian house. On the first floor lived our landlord, Ron, with his wife and teenage son. On the second floor lived Frank, a middle-aged computer programmer and bachelor who actually lived in only three of his six rooms. The remainder served as storage for his voluminous Collection of Crap, including parts of dozens of 8086 machines, unread copies of Entertainment Weekly dating back ten years, and loads of other things he never used but couldn’t bear to part with anyway. Ron told me about one time when he helped Frank clean his apartment, and in the bedroom/living room alone Ron found over one thousand ballpoint pens as well as a dozen or so brand-new, white oxford shirts (still in their packages!) that Frank had purchased years ago and completely forgotten about because they had gotten lost in the chaos.

Our rent was ridiculously cheap, partly because we had to walk through Frank’s apartment to get to the stairs that led to our own, which was originally the servants’ quarters.

Behind the house, wedged in between the in-ground swimming pool and a parking-lot-sized slab of asphalt, was a garden plot roughly forty feet by twenty feet, edged with railroad ties. Ron had built it many years earlier with hopes of growing tomatoes, but I don’t think he ever planted a garden. Fortunately, he was more than happy to let us use it–and his garden hose for water–in exchange for being able to pick tomatoes every once in a while.

The first year Jan and I planted a garden together, we were very ambitious: we filled it up with vegetables, flowers, and herbs. It was so delightful to eat the fruits of our labors. That August we canned enough tomato sauce to last us through the winter, and we made (and froze) a gallon of pesto. (Seriously.) The following summer we started house-hunting, and the weeds took over a good chunk of the garden. The tomatoes didn’t do well, but we did have enough peppers to make hot pepper relish, jalapeno jam, and habanero vodka. (Just smelling that stuff will singe your nose hairs.)

We’ve been in our house for three and a half years but just hadn’t gotten our act together to start a garden until now. A big part of the problem has been the fact that our backyard is ringed by huge trees and thus is very shady. Our side yard gets good sun, though, so a couple of months ago we ripped out a rose bush that was completely out of control as well as about nine million hostas. I felt a little bad about tearing about plants, since I love to see things grow, but since we still have nine million hostas elsewhere in the yard, it’s all right.

As you can see, we’re starting small, with a 4′x4′ raised bed. The corners are these cool bracket thingies that hold the boards and have a spike going into the ground. We filled the bed with organic manure and compost (I had hoped to get some mushroom soil–plentiful here in eastern Pennsylvania, mushroom-growing capital of the country–but impossible to get in the small amount we needed) and planted a variety of seeds. From left to right, in the front row, are Swiss chard (the “rainbow” variety, with yellow, red, and white stems), a lettuce mix, cosmos, rudbeckia (which, alas, didn’t sprout), and dwarf sunflowers. In the back left are bush beans (we opted for the purple variety, figuring they’d be easier for Sylvia to spot amid the leaves). On the back right is a tomato plant that we did not start from seed but instead bought at our local farmers’ market.

With the exception of the rudbeckia, everything is doing great! We’ve been enjoying the lettuce for a few weeks, and the bean plants are already flowing. Sylvia is pretty interested in what’s going on here, so we’re hoping we have a budding gardener on our hands.

Every spring, when the forsythias, dogwoods, magnolias, lilacs, azaleas, daffodils, and tulips put on their annual show, I’m reminded of these words penned by Emerson. Of course, this phrase is part of a longer passage about humanity’s inability to escape death, but I still like it in the context of thinking about spring and nature and renewal.

My SP10 hostess, Kerry, has asked everyone in her group to post about their favorite flowers. That’s a really difficult task, because I’d be hard pressed to name a flower I didn’t like. I even find dandelions sort of appealing.

Right now, though, I’d have to say that my favorite flowers are these giant red tulips growing in my front yard. Jan and I moved into this house in the fall a few years ago, and shortly afterward his father, who is Dutch and lives in the Netherlands, came to visit. While he was here, my father-in-law, a horticulturalist who knows pretty much everything about plants, planted about three hundred tulip, daffodil, and crocus bulbs around the house, mostly in the front. Squirrels dug up most of the crocuses, but every spring we get to enjoy a magnificent display of yellow and white daffodils, followed by tulips in almost every size and color imaginable.