June 30, 2003 link
I just got back from a four-day vacation, and took a quick overview of the garden. The weeds are trying to stage a comeback, and the soil is dry. Those pesky Forces of Nature—always causing trouble!
June 25, 2003 link
Last night, I visited the old woman who lives next door. She’s been living there for 35 years. She told me how the neighborhood has changed since she moved in. It’s hard for me to imagine our street when all the trees were smaller, and dope-peddlers hung-out on the corner. That same corner is now occupied by expensive condominiums. The property sold for $24,000 before the building was re-habbed.
I asked about the empty lot that became my garden. As I had already concluded, it was never a building site. In the 1970s, it was beautifully landscaped with roses, flowering shrubs and grasses. When the property was sold in the late-eighties, the new owner ripped out the garden and replaced it with…nothing. It quickly became covered in weeds, and remained that way until 2003.
The current owners applied for a building permit several years ago, but the city denied it. There is another empty lot nearby, which makes me wonder what’s wrong with this land. In a neighborhood with astronomical property values and densely-packed housing, how can two big lots lie empty for 35 years? Why are the building permits denied? Is the land unstable? Or maybe the plumbing/sewage infrastructure doesn’t service these lots?
Although the land has been mostly abandoned, it always got mowed once a year. Much like annual fires replenish the prairies, the annual mowing kept the yard from being filled with trees. So the topsoil just kept building and building with organic matter, waiting for the right person to come along and give it some love.
June 24, 2003 link
Lettuce Entertain Me. Nobody eats plain lettuce. It’s normally the base of a salad or a sandwich topping. But this loose-leaf lettuce is so good, you can eat it straight. I like to roll-up each leaf like a green cigar, and chomp it like Bugs Bunny.
June 23, 2003 link
Summer just showed up. It is now hot.
Because of the heat, I really needed to get the radishes out of the ground. They get woody in warm weather. So I pulled them all up and weighed them. There were 7 pounds of radishes.
Here’s an important lesson from my experiment: gardening is not a stand-alone activity. When you start growing food in large quantities, you’re also forced to learn a few things about cooking, nutrition and food preservation. You have to figure out what to do with all this food. What starts as a fun weekend hobby becomes an integral part of a new lifestyle—which is focused around growing and eating food.
The idea of a “new lifestyle” sounds intimidating at first, or like the kooky rhetoric of an idealist. But it’s not that big of a deal. It becomes a practical matter. When there’s food in your backyard, you eat it—and you learn the necessary domestic skills to prepare it and preserve it. You also appreciate the effort that went into raising it, so you don’t want to waste any part of it. Before you know it, you’ve saved money on grocery/restaurant bills, you’re in better physical shape, you’re eating better, and you’ve learned a bunch of new skills. More importantly, you find that “lifestyle changes” are not as scary as they seem. You’re still the same wise-ass geek you always were.
Maybe it’s too early in the growing season for me to start waxing poetic like this. But I had plenty of time to think while washing and storing those 7 pounds of radishes…
I also had plenty of time to think about eating radishes. Raw radishes are good, but only in small amounts. After a while, you just get sick of their spicyness. So I tried sauteeing them in butter with onions and herbs. Cooked radishes are totally different. They stay crunchy, but they mellow-out to a pinkish mildness. I’m going to try other cooked radish recipes.
The green radish leaves are edible too, if you cook them. They wilt quickly, so I decided to freeze them. First, I blanched them in boiling water:
Blanching vegetables for a short period of time is recommended for almost all vegetables. It slows down or stops the action of the enzymes which cause the vegetable to grow and mature. If vegetables are not blanched, the enzymes continue to be active during storage causing off-colors, off-flavors and toughening. Blanching also cleanses the surface of dirt and bacteria, brightens the color, and helps retard vitamin loss.
See what I mean about learning new things? I never considered blanching before, but when faced with wilting radish greens, I found a solution. This “growing experiment” is taking on new dimensions every day.
June 19, 2003 link
Something weird is happening here in the American Midwest: it’s cold out. The sun is shining, the skies are clear, but we’re walking around in jackets. Normally, we should be wallowing in heat and humidity. Which is better? I don’t know, but part of me is yearning for enough warmth to go swimming in Lake Michigan.
Aside from daily watering, the garden hasn’t received much attention this week. Everything’s still growing. I’ve been eating a few radishes every day.
June 18, 2003 link
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June 16, 2003 link
Now we’re talking. I accomplished so much over the weekend that I’m not sure where to begin. Let’s see…
- I doubled the size of the garden. Now I have room for the big cucumber vines and pole beans. And the best part? I’m done! There’s no more space. (That’s also the sad part, I guess—but there are limits to what one person can do in their spare time.)
- I transplanted a bunch of seedlings. What a relief. It was “do-or-die” time, and I did.
- I got help from my friends. Tom and Christine stopped by for weeding, watering, hedge trimming, shoveling and harvesting. They were a huge encouragement.
- I sampled the first harvest. Last night I made a salad with lettuce, arugula and radishes from the garden. Very satisfying. If everything survives, I should be able to eat fresh veggies every day from now until October.
- The radishes are huge. The weather has been cool, allowing the radishes to grow to racquetball-size proportions.
- I bought a scale, so I can weigh everything before eating it. This will either be fun or annoying.
The weather in Chicago has finally caught up with us. We’re currently enjoying sunny 80-degree temps—perfect for early summer, and perfect for my recent plantings:
- Tomatoes are everybody’s favorite garden vegetable. I planted several different varieties. To save space, I’m growing them up poles. This involves tying them to the pole and pruning the side branches to achieve a strong single branch along the pole.
- Sweet Peppers are one of the nicest looking vegetable plants, in my opinion. They have smooth emerald-green leaves.
- Hot Peppers come in so many shapes and colors. Mine are “jalapeno” and “garden salsa”.
- Basil was growing in seed flats, until I transplanted them on Saturday.
During the next 3-4 days, I’ll plant the remaining seeds in my freshly-prepared area. Then I can stop writing these list-type journal entries. I have some topics and observations to explore in greater depth once the frantic planting is over. But it ain’t over yet…
June 10, 2003 link
Yesterday’s entry was a bit gloomy. On a positive note, the stuff I’ve already planted is doing well. The radishes are ready to harvest. The lettuce and arugula are almost there. The zucchini, carrots, parsley, collards, broccoli, onions and cilantro are looking good. Once I start eating them, I’ll be rejuvenated.
June 9, 2003 link
Ehhh. Something’s not right. Progress on the garden has stalled. I can’t even remember the last time I planted something. Based on my original plans, I still need to transplant tomatoes, peppers, cucumber, chickpeas, okra and green beans. Time is running out.
I spent all day last Saturday tilling soil in the back section of the yard. I turned over a pretty big area, and totally exhausted myself. The weeds back there have the strong thick roots of mauturity, in contrast to the puny baby weeds I dealt with earlier. Then it started raining before I could plant anything.
Fortunately, the weather in Chicago has been unseasonably cool and rainy. This has bought me a few extra days. Even if I planted tomatoes, I think they would just sit in the ground until the weather gets warmer.
I’m still distressed that things keep getting pushed back. With one final effort, I can get everything in the ground, and spread some mulch. I just need to do it. But the more I wait, the more I feel things creeping out-of-control.
Maybe that’s the lesson of my growing experiment—it’s harder than I thought it would be. Originally, I wanted to show that anyone could do it. “It’s fun, it’s easy, everyone should try it.” I thought my gardening adventures might persuade others to pick up a shovel and grow some food.
Now I realize it takes a special type of person to do this. A successful gardener needs the focus and will-power of an Olympic athlete. Not to mention patience, observation, knowledge, luck, flexibility, courage and brute force. In today’s society, that type of person becomes a commodities trader or emergency room physician, not a grower. No wonder so many small farms fizzle into oblivion. It certainly makes me appreciate those special people who choose to grow healthy food for pennies when they have the character traits to make millions.
So here I am: struggling to meet the challenge of “farming” in my own tiny backyard, while trying to keep up with other important things like my job, my friends and my sanity. Do I have what it takes?
June 4, 2003 link
Building a garden involves cooperation with nature, but sometimes it seems like you are working against nature instead. The “forces of nature” are insidious and persistent, and will take over if you let them. Only with a counteractive force of vigilance and persistence can the gardener find the correct balance that allows him to cooperate with nature for mutual benefit.
The Forces of Nature include the obvious suspects:
- weeds
- weather
- water
- soil conditions
- pests
I’ve encountered them all, and done a decent job of dealing with them…so far. All these are physical concerns—which can be countered with hard work and ingenuity (excepting weather). At least you can see your enemy when it’s a pigeon or dandelion.
I’ve also discovered a few less-obvious Forces of Nature—which are far more sinister. These abstract Forces act upon the gardener himself, and don’t necessarily have a physical solution. They include:
- time constraints
- other commitments
- illness
- laziness
- distractions
For the past two weeks, these Forces of Nature have prevailed. Memorial Day weekend was filled with friends and fun, but it didn’t leave any time for the garden. Then a nasty cold/cough combo knocked me out for several days. And like everyone else, I need to make a living. Not to mention the dark Forces of laziness and procrastination, or the allure of summer movies.
June 3, 2003 link
Mulch Madness! Apparently, I’m not alone in underestimating my mulch needs. It appears to be a common mistake. I found this today in James Lileks’ daily journal:
I put down the cedar chips this afternoon. Opened the bags, dumped them on the ground, spread them out. Ten bags. Ten big bags. After the second bag I realized something that everyone who’s ever dumped out a bag of mulch realizes:
I am short a few bags.
To be specific, I am short forty bags.
June 2, 2003 link
Eighteen cubic feet of mulch doesn’t go very far. That’s what I learned on May 25th. I had bought as many bags of shredded cedar bark as my car’s back-seat and trunk would hold (6 bags). After spreading it, I had filled in most of the main pathway through the garden. I didn’t have enough to cover the spaces between vegetables rows, or even to cover the main path to an acceptable depth. I’ll have to make a few more mulch-purchasing trips in order to get enough.
I should measure my garden. Then I can calculate how much mulch to buy. I found this on HGTV’s Web site:
Mulch is sold by volume—usually in bags containing three cubic feet; however, gardens are measured in square feet. To know how many cubic feet you need to cover a certain number of square feet, you need to understand what a cubic yard is. One cubic yard of mulch will cover a 100-square-foot garden to a depth of three inches. One cubic yard equals 27 cubic feet. You would need nine three-cubic-foot bags to cover a 100-square-foot garden.
But just for simplicity’s sake, think of easy-to-remember round numbers: for a 100-square-foot garden, you’ll need 10 bags of mulch, or one bag for every 10 square feet. That will give you an extra bag of mulch—not a bad thing.
