The garden is IN!!!

Yeah!!!!
Drizzly rainy today, but Liesl and I did finally get those potatoes planted! Everything else went in last weekend: direct-seeding as well as starts bought at the greenhouse (Bok Choi & mesclun lettuce is always a treat for early June; kohlrabi & leeks will be harvested in late summer ). I direct-seeded arugula (Rocquette), which I'm glad to say finally is commercially available in the US. Other direct-seeded greens (lettuce, kale, spinach) are up, but the carrots are slow as ever -- the radish serves as indicator where their rows are. I RESOLVE TO DO A BETTER JOB THIS SUMMER IN WEEDING AND THINNING THE CARROTS -- ok, I said it!

The only starts I started indoor myself (in the garage in early May) were sweet peas, and those did transplant well. I'm also growing container tomatoes & peppers indoors , and those will go outside soon -- whenever the sun comes back out and I get around to finish putting up my Mother's Day present:

Spring has Sprung!

Just turned the corner, so to speak, on Spring. The leaves on the trees are out -- there's that definite tinge of green as you look at the hillside. Birch are always first, but some of the smaller cottonwoods have opened up their leaves. The BIG cottonwoods haven't leaved out yet.

Gardening news:
Around the May 1st I started direct-seeding mustards, kale and spinach. On Mother's Day I seeded carrots w/ radishes as markers. Been keeping these covered these beds with plastic.
Today, Youngest and I planted some more: Arugula, Mache, dill, and a few flowers.
We've had some clear cold nights in the beginning of May (so far, last frost was May 9th -- we had to scrape the car in the morning!)
Indoors, I've got 2 pots planted with tomato plants. "why bother?" Because one of these years we may actually get enough sun in the summer to grow some decent tomatoes... Hope springs eternal!

Another exciting news: got a shipment today from Fungi Perfecti! I'll be growing shiitake mushrooms indoors, and pearl oyster mushrooms by spiking cottonwood logs with inoculated "plug spawn". New adventures in gardening !!!

Potatoes/ Kartoffeln

Potatoes are one of the "workhorses" of my kitchen. We get Alaska-grown potatoes in our CSA box every week, plus I (try to) grow my own every summer.

Given that potatoes are from the New World (a.k.a. America), how did potatoes become so prevalent in European cuisine? Here's a little background from Germanfood.about.com:

Potatoes are a large part of German culinary culture, even though they didn't appear on the German table until 1716. Their earliest introduction was a half century earlier in Bavaria, but they were thought to be poisonous, so the peasants wouldn't adopt them until Karl V ordered them to grow and eat potatoes or have their noses cut off.

My favorite potato to have around are red potatoes, which are waxy or "fest-kochend" in German, which means they are low in starch and hold together well after cooking:
think German potato salad (my recipe here). And I prefer smaller sizes to the HUGE American monsters. I save them for roasted potatoes (see my recipe here).
The most common way that a German housewife serves her every-day potatoes is:

Pell-kartoffeln (peeled potatoes, cooked in their jackets)

whole potatoes (red or other waxy), small or medium-sized, washed
water (barely covering potatoes)
salt
optional: butter, fresh parsley

Boil potatoes for approximately 20 minutes, or until fork prick test indicates doneness.
Drain the water and return pot onto stove (without lid if ready to serves soon) to let skins dry.
Peel one potato at a time by holding on a fork while removing skin, using a small paring knife to make a cut and then remove all the peel. This is a somewhat time-consuming task right when the cook is busy getting all the other dishes ready for the table. Sooo-- this very boring but necessary task is often delegated to children, husbands or other bystanders with nothing better to do. Digression: Forgive my stab at men ("husbands and other useless bystanders")! Men are great cooks and account for probably 50% of my readers , but growing up in Germany, I never saw a man actually cook anything! In fact, when my dad retired, the only dish he knew how to cook was Pell Kartoffeln, which he likes to eat with Quark. I doubt his repertoire has expanded much -- it is still his favorite dish!

Optional: coat in butter and sprinkle fresh parsley over them.

For tips on growing potatoes, here are a couple of articles to consult come springtime:

http://gardening.about.com/od/vegetables/p/Potatoes.htm
http://www.the-organic-gardener.com/growing-potatoes.html
http://tipnut.com/grow-potatoes/

The last is a really cool method for growing potatoes vertically:

The end of this year's garden

Well, gardening season is indeed over. The one and only sunflower that bloomed is all droopy now after the frost hit last week, and I've harvested what I could and started turning the soil. So, time now for the end-of-the-season account of what grew well and what didn't.

Weather note: after a nice start, this summer turned way too rainy & cloudy in July, never letting up until September.

Carrots: puny, as we had neglected thinning and weeding.
Peas: good crop
Leeks: good, worth growing again.
Celery: forget it!
Swiss chard, Kale: good crop
Kohlrabi & Brussel sprouts: got eaten by some worms, never amounted to anything.
Potatoes: love'em, easy to grow, but remember to hill them!
raspberries: did great in their first year of transplant!

early summer crops
radish: fine
lettuce: bolted
raddicchio: yum
mustard greens: did well
beets: greens did well, but didn't get roots
dill, cilantro: watch them!
squash: forget them unless guaranteed more sunshine. they just rotted away...
tomatoes (in pots): surely you jest. Got just a few, but they tasted mealy!
chickweed: excellent crop, ha ha!

strawberries and other gardening news

Been harvesting strawberries from the garden -- smallish, pale-ish, but really sweet and yummy.
These are strawberries that came with the house: they grow all over my flower bed, and even on the gravelly hillside behind the house -- they're tough, and reproduce profusely by runners. This spring I did a major thinning of their numbers, ripping out about half of the plants, and now those that remain are growing bigger and better...
In other gardening news: the greens are doing well -- we got lots of chard, some lettuce varieties, kale and other members of the cabbage family growing nicely. Carrots are coming along slowly.
The peas are tall, zuccini not so much.
The weather has been cool lately -- not much in the way of sun (what sun?) -- it's not looking like much of a tomato year. In fact, I'm starting to wonder why I even bother with tomatoes...
We love to eat ripe tomatoes, but at the rate ours are growing, winter will be here long before ours produce fruit and ripen...

Photo credit: http://www.seedsofgrowth.com

Radishes & greens in the cold-frame!

Came back from camping to a thriving garden (Thanks, L, for watering!)
Starting the "Greenhouse-raised-bed-winebottle-style" really paid off.
Here's what I did in early May: The winebottles are full of water, corked and secured with duct tape: their purpose is to provide some passive heating of the soil.

I seeded all kinds of greens: Swiss chard, Mustard greens, radishes, spinach.

Mid-May, I started adding a few bedding plants (bought, I admit), and added more chard, kale, bok choi, lettuce varieties such as raddicio. Gradually, I started replacing some of the winebottles with bedding plants!

I still covered my garden with plastic every day -- besides providing warmth (protection from wind), I needed to keep out the local wildlife: snowshoe hare!

Now it's the end of May, and I'm harvesting radishes and the first outer leaves of chard...

Gardening on my mind

The raised garden beds are under 16" of snow. But gardening is on my mind as the days get longer. It won't be long now... until I start itching to start vegetables indoors, from seed -- and invariably many of them fail!
I don't have the best success starting plants indoors (no grow lights or heating mats), but I try a few every year, nonetheless. Sometime between Mother's Day and Memorial Day, I end up at the big commercial Greenhouse down the road and buy bedding plants, by then having realized that the sad little plants on my window sill will not amount to much in our short growing season...
Another thing I need to remember is not to start planting outdoors too early: many plants should not go out until June, which seems sooooo late. Instead, REMINDER: check the soil temperature!!! I'll probably be experimenting this coming spring with covering my raised beds w/ plastic overnight to help prevent the soil from radiatively cooling overnight.
Last year I planted my red potatoes somewhere around May 20th, and they just sat there doing absolutely nothing. I replanted in early June with fingerling seed potatoes, and then sometime later in June they both started putting down roots and leafing out. By then, the weeds were established very nicely, thank you!

Before snowfall, many moons ago, I found myself debating covering the beds up with plastic to keep them somewhat more weed-free (ha!), and decided on a couple of different treatments: I covered the potato bed with plastic, and tried another with newspapers weighed down by rocks, while the remainder was left uncovered --those will melt out first and I want to try making them into coldframes by covering them with clear plastic in the spring. It sure would be nice to have a greenhouse someday!

Been doing a bit of reading about what to seed directly into the garden. Here in Alaska, the traditional ones include kale, carrots, lettuces, peas, snap peas, beets, spinach, beans and potatoes.

Last summer I successfully grew leeks from starter plants I found at P&M greenhouse -- I do want to grow leeks again (as I've admitted on this blog before: I adore leeks!), perhaps even from seed? Here's a article by Jeff Lowenfels for how to start leeks. He writes that some of his readers

"are complaining that I encouraged them to plant leeks early and now the plants are not only spindly and flopping over but the tips are browning. If you grow leeks from seed, both of these are common occurrences. The solution to correct both symptoms, as well as preventing both, is to cut off an inch or two of the tips with sharp scissors. This will not affect the bulb part of the plant nor the bottom stem of the leek, and these are what you eat when you harvest leeks. "

Too bad that the gardening column is no longer found in our ever-shrinking daily newspaper -- instead we have to go to the web for that local knowledge -- see the sidebar on my blog for Gardening in Alaska (TALK DIRT TO ME), which is on the Anchorage Daily News website.

Garden Successes & Failures

Before I forget, I want to jot down the successes and failures of this year's garden so far:

Oriental Peas: Liesl started seeds indoors in those soil "plugs", then planted them out after Memorial Day. They did very well! Harvested daily for couple of weeks in July. Ripped out plants at beginning of August to make more room (and give sunshine) to Hubbard squashes and sunflowers.

Tomatoes: doing well in their (the bigger-the better) containers. The first ripe ones will hopefully be ready to eat soon -- they're the grape-sized fruit of the variety "Tumbler". I bought these at the Mile 5.3 Greenhouse, originally because I asked for a variety that I could grow in hanging pots. I won't get these again, however -- fruit too small, growth too messy for growing as standing porch plants.
The other variety I got were Beefsteak tomatoes, and they're looking great -- nice and tall plants that need a cage. Fruit are nice & big, but still green right now. Last year I had good success with a heritage variety I can't remember -- certainly open to experimenting with more varieties.
Is it economical to grow your own tomatoes? Probably not especially, unless you get fairly small (and therefore cheaper) starter plants-- the good-sized hardened-off plants they sell at the Farmer's Market for $20 each just don't produce $20 worth of fruit, in my experience! BUT, to an Alaskan gardener, growing your own tomatoes is a challenge you can't resist...

Potatoes: definite success, and very economical. LOVED planting, caring for and digging them up. So far, I've only harvested a few, but they're prolific and taste GREAT.

Carrots: Always a good one for Alaska -- sweet from the midnight sun!

Spinach: I do love to grow and eat it, but it does often bolt before I get much of a harvest out of the planting. I seeded a second crop in July -- and we'll see if that pans out. Economically ok as the seeds don't cost much.

Lettuce: this year I did not grow any from seed, but used starter plants, and more successful than previous years where I ended up with them bolting before getting any decent lettuce. Definitely worth the cost of the starter plants.

Bok Choy: grown from starter plants, great success!

Beets: grown from seed directly into the garden, and the first seeding (end of May) is doing great, but the later ones are barely growing -- go figure! Next year, try starting indoors.

Celery: grown from starter plants, doing great!

Leeks: grown from starter plants, doing great!

Zuccini: grown from starter plants, but disappointing harvest. It's a weather thing -- they need more sunshine and warmth than Alaska can offer. Next year, plant in a greenhouse/frame or not at all!

Kale: grown from starter plants, doing great! Continuous harvest of outer leaves for 2 months now...

Swiss Chard: same as kale, but since I planted them in containers on the porch, they did not produce as well as if I'd planted them in the raised beds.

Kohlrabi: grown from starter plants. Did well, but they do take up alot of real estate for something only 2 of us eat. Maybe plant these more densely.

Brussel Sprouts: grown from starter plants. They haven't even produced any "Martian Heads" yet -- so the verdict is still out.
Turnips: direct-seeded in garden. Nothing much yet.

Cilantro: direct-seeded in garden in late May, doing great!

Dill: same as cilantro.

Parsley: grown from starter plants, doing great! plant more next year.

Chives: mine overwinters, so keep growing it...

Mint: overwinters, keep from letting it take over the garden by keeping it contained!

Strawberries: this sweet but pale variety came with the house, and been growing and spreading in my garden (and the wilder hillside) for the last 10 years. Keep the runners under control, divide plants that get too big or old, and keep on giving it more real estate -- they are delicious!

Weeds (thanks for the idea, Patty P.): doing well, esp. the chickweed! Also got horsetails, grasses, yarrow, dandelion, plantain, and a few other things I can't i.d. But since I did a decent job of staying on top of the weeding, it's not been too much of a problem. For example, I grew many crops closer than the recommended spacing -- so there was little room for weeds once my potatoes, etc, filled in... Next year, do more mulching, if only I can find good sources of mulch other than my very weedy lawn...

Gardening w/ youngsta

Youngest and I were working in our garden last night. She has her own box, right next to mine, and she's still learning to recognize weeds -- but learning FAST. But her carrots needed thinning, and that turned out to cause a bit of a crisis, it seemed.
Here's our conversation, as I remember it:

Y: But I don't want to pull the baby carrots!
M (Me or Mom): But they're all crowded in there! We need to make some room for them to grown their yummy orange roots by pulling a few of the punier ones.
Y: How would you feel if someone came along and pulled you out by your roots just because you're a little puny?!"

That stumped me! I started wondering if having her own gardening plot was such a good idea, when she promptly started yanking out a few carrots in the thicker patches, doing a great job making room thinning her row: "Ahh, Mom, I was just pulling your chain!" she laughed.

But she did admit she liked growing plants that did not have to be "beheaded" like the Bok Choy in my garden -- she prefers herbs like parsley and chives (she's always been my little helper who runs out to the garden with a pair of scissors when I need a little of this or that for dinner), and harvesting the snap peas (fruit, not whole plant) will be more to her liking. She was a bit horrified earlier during radish harvest -- there was nothing left!!!

Raised bed garden pictures

Finally, got the camera downloaded, and here's some pictures of our new vegetable beds.




We started building them mid-May: here's youngest daughter, dramatically watering her very own vegetable box: hers is the one with the bamboo tipi for the peas to climb. Notice the plastic behind the second box -- we still had fairly cold nights in May, and I tucked them in every night until right before Memorial Day.
As you can see, we naively starting the project with store-bought soil -- but we quickly realized how expensive that would get, and found other sources of topsoil and manure (see post Gardening with animal excrements).

Now forward 3 weeks, and you can see how much the veggies have grown. I've already harvested the outer leaves of the Bok Choi!







Next, here are my potatoes, enjoying a lovely to-dressing of horse manure.









And lastly, take a look at our attempt to keep the moose out of the brassica family (cabbages, kale, etc) -- Moose are very fond of raiding cabbage patches (typically the night before the harvest), so we're hoping this set-up (frame with removable mesh on top) will at least keep honest moose out of mischief -- although I fear that a determined moose will be able to "dine" if they tried hard enough. I hear moose are deterred by soap, so I might attach some bars of soap to the front of the box.
Wish us luck!

Dreaming of gardening...

It's mid April, and we're still getting the occasional snow showers: we woke up to 2 inches of new snow on Easter Monday (an official holiday in Germany, but here we had to drudge to school & work & dentist!), but it was all gone by the time I had my brand-new gold tooth!

Be glad I'm too lazy to post pictures right now -- it can be a pretty ugly sight around here: dirty piles of snow on the side of the road, covered with road grime. People are starting to find many long-lost treasures (?!?) in their yards, like presents from the canine friends... In some parts of Alaska the melting snow reveals an assortment of old cars and refrigerators...

This last week pretty much all the snow cover in our yard finally melted away. I see DIRT, and dirt means gardening -- but I can't really get started yet. My attempts at starting seeds indoors have not worked out the best in past years: besides the fact that I get extremely busy with teaching in the spring, I lack the space, lights, warming mats, etc and do a good job. All I get are spindly little things that I can't seem to harden off properly -- so I end up buying starter packs in May anyway....
So instead, I dream, reading about gardening, late at night while sipping some wine! I also have several notebooks full of notes from previous years -- my old gardening journals full of notes, and I review my dreams and failures from past years.

What might my garden look like this summer -- ideally I'd finally build myself a bunch of raised beds, and the moose would voluntarily make a wide path around them -- right?

Raised beds and container gardens are definitely the way to go around here, given the late start we get on warming the soil. NOTE: These pix are from an extension service -- I"m just dreaming...I got rocks and weeds where my dreamboxes would go. It will not be until well into May that we can even plant vegetables into the ground, but I like to start a couple of tomatoes plus all my herbs in late April: I baby them -- keeping them inside until the really nice days arrive, but always bringing them back in when nights are cool, or the wind starts blowing... Once it's nice (June, July?), my tomatoes pots grace the front entrance on either side, making me look like a more successful gardener than I really am!

Last year I did built a make-shift raised bed over a part of the septic system -- that's where I had successfully raised potatoes the year before, and I was really excited. SOOO, my daughter and I dug up rocks, and put a bunch of work into it -- only to have to be torn apart when we had to call a backhoe to dig up and fix a disconnected septic connection. SOOOO, once again, that part of the yard is just mud and rocks! (At least from a distance, they do look a little like freshly turned-up taters...)

We have close to 2 acres of land, but alas, most of it VERY steep and completely overgrown with alder, etc. The little bit of the yard that is flat is dedicated to a raised sand filter septic system, which is not exactly working as it should -- so it makes no sense to put a garden on top of that right now, even though it would be the ideal location!

In front of the house I have some garden beds that do quite well -- lots of flowers, but also rhubarb and strawberries. Other than snipping chives for potato salads, Rhubarb pie is my first harvest from my garden every year. Right now, I see a tiny bit of red on the rhubarb, and the tulips are just poking up a little bit of green. It seems a little later than past years -- but as my husband the weatherman points out, most people tend to have a poor memory of weather -- I may remember the kids looking for Easter eggs in the grass, wearing short sleeves (while other years it snowed, don't forget!), but then the actual date for Easter varies from year to year! Time to dig out my gardening journals & see what I recorded in past years:

Entry from April 19th, last year
This past Wednesday we had our 3rd big snow of April -- but most of the new snow is gone now. Rhubarb leaves are starting to uncurl -- just within the last few days.

Entry from April 25, 2005
Rhubarb leaves are the size of an adult's hands. Tulips are a foot high, and chives (overwintered) are ready to harvest.

I'll keep you posted, and will present you with a European recipe for the best rhubarb pie!