These are a few of my favorite things

My favorite non-garden-related blog is Ask A Manager, on which Alison Green dispenses the wisest workplace advice I’ve encountered anywhere. Yes, it’s a sad fact that we gardeners sometimes have to--horrors!--have actual employment to pay for our plant addictions. Anyway, Alison recently wrote a post called, “things I like,” featuring, well, things she likes. That post started me thinking about garden-related things I like, which, combined with the fact that I haven’t posted anything in awhile (too busy gardening) inspired the ramblings below.

My favorite garden-y things

Dollar store seeds, a/k/a those little packets of common varieties from American Seed. You won’t find anything exotic, and the amounts are small, but the cost (around $.25/packet) is--ahem--dirt cheap, and the varieties are often old, proven ones that will do well in most gardens. Look for them in your local dollar store, Wal-Mart, or Big Lots. They’re from Plantation Products, the same company that supplies N-K and Ferry-Morse seeds.

Vintage trowels. Cheap trowels from the aforementioned discount stores tend to be poorly-made and either bend or break easily. You can buy a higher-quality trowel from a good nursery, but expect to pay at least $20 for it. I snag old, usually very well-made trowels from estate sales. Sometimes I have to pay a whole dollar, but the last batch I found were $.50/each. Win!

Cook’s Carnivorous Plants, my favorite carnivorous plant nursery (Yeah, I know - how weird do you have to be to have a favorite carnivorous plant nursery? It could be worse: I could have a favorite serial killer.) I was lucky enough to visit Dean Cook and his amazing nursery in person many years ago. He’s knowledgeable and a genuinely nice guy, and he has the best prices I’ve seen anywhere for carnivorous plants.

Tigerella tomatoes. A little bigger than a cherry tomato, a little smaller than a salad tomato, tigerellas are sweet and tart and firm and juicy and utterly wonderful. They also have orange stripes and look adorable. You can find seeds from quite a few suppliers, including Baker Creek.

Compost. I used to live about a mile from a landscape supply company that sold compost from municipal composting programs. That was the only fertilizer/soil amendment I used for most of my garden, and the results were amazing. The places around here sell manure and bark mulch, but I haven’t found a good source of compost-by-the-truckload, and I’m feeling the loss. Fun fact: my son did a science fair project in elementary school, in which he grew tomato seedlings with plain potting soil, plain potting soil + Miracle-Grow, and plain potting soil with a topdress of compost. The seeds grown with compost had a better germination rate and were taller and thicker than either of the other groups. Compost is magic.

Fruit trees. I like ornamental trees, but many fruit trees are just as pretty when they bloom--and they make yummy fruit. If you want a pretty deciduous tree, consider a fruit tree. Look for varieties that are especially ornamental, like the Red Baron peach. You won’t be disappointed. The pic below is of a peach tree (not a Red Baron) I had in Southern California. It needed a bit of pruning, but the blossoms were gorgeous.

Daffodils. Now that I’m once again living somewhere where winter is a thing, by March I’m craving a glimpse of color in the garden. The daffodils provide that and stand up to snow, ice, and wind without batting a petal. This picture was taken on a snowy morning a couple of weeks ago. By evening the snow had melted, and that daffodil was standing tall and proud.

Lasagna gardening, a/k/a sheet mulching. I mentioned this technique in a post last fall, but it's so useful it's worth mentioning again. I live in a volcano field (seriously - there's an extinct stratovolcano a few miles from me and a bunch of cinder cones in a semicircle around me), and the soil is terrible. I have a few inches of topsoil, followed by 1-2 feet of red cinders the consistency of coarse sand. So raised beds are essential if I want to grow anything that isn't native to this alien world. I build my raised beds using the lasagna method, layering organic matter on top of the soil. I don't till, and I sure as heck don't double-dig (double-digging, like jogging at 5 AM, is for masochists). I don't even single-dig except when digging a planting hole. Cardboard sheets, manure, compost, barn litter, hay, and straw get layered onto our crappy soil, and nature does the rest. It's a lazy gardener's dream--and it works. See the books below for more info and give your back a rest.





Winter sowing: I already wrote a post about winter sowing, but like lasagna gardening, it's so useful it's worth another mention. When I wrote that post, I had just a couple of sad-looking little containers on a snowy table. Here's that same table now--and there are even more containers in another corner of my deck.



And a lot of those containers have cute little seedlings in them--like these do:



Like lasagna gardening, winter sowing is cheap and easy--and I'm all about cheap and easy (cue the bathroom wall jokes in 3...2...1...) Plus, the seedlings are often tougher and hardier than the spindly ones I've started under lights or on a windowsill.

I'm sure if I sat here longer, the weeds would eat my house I'd think of more things I love, but this will do for now. What are some of your favorite garden things?

A gardener's spring staycation

I decided to celebrate my birthday this year by taking a few days off. We talked about taking a short road trip, but then I saw the weather forecast: highs in the 60s and almost no wind. Hello, gardening staycation! I have spent the last 5 days digging, planting, shoveling, and pruning. Only a gardener would consider that a vacation.

So what do I have to show for the last 5 days?  

• The pit in front of my house is now a little deeper. This pit will eventually become a pond, assuming my back doesn’t completely give out before I get it dug. Impressively ugly, isn’t it? A side note: never take garden pictures at midday. The light makes everything look like a postapocalyptic wasteland, My yard isn’t really this ugly, even with the icky pond pit.

• I planted a bunch of stuff--pansies I overwintered in a sheltered corner, delphiniums I started from seed last summer, stargazer lily bulbs, phlox and daylilies bought bareroot from Big Lots, blackberries (‘Navaho’ - thornless and they don’t need supports - woo hoo) bought bareroot from Sam’s Club, and Rudbeckia and milkweed (also bareroot from Sam’s Club).
• We have 2 new raised beds in the kitchen garden we started building last fall. This afternoon’s task: unload the truckload of topsoil/manure mix and start filling them.
• We set 2 more fence posts to finish the fence around the aforementioned kitchen garden.
• I pruned a bunch of trees and shrubs.
• I did the first outdoor seed sowing of the year--beets and radishes. Now if I can just keep them watered till they germinate and get tall enough to mulch, I might actually have something to harvest.
• And speaking of watering, I’m learning how to install drip irrigation. Without it, watering my high desert oasis will be a full-time job. I think I’m figuring it out, but installing each t-connector and elbow seems to involve a lot of swearing.
• And finally, I scored some cool garden art for very cheap at a yard sale, including the perfect piece to disguise an ugly metal pole. Said pole used to hold a satellite dish and is inconveniently located in my new kitchen garden. Soon it will be covered with a cool wrought iron piece and a bunch of morning glories. I’ll post pix of that piece soon. In the meantime, here’s a cute frog from the same sale. It cost me all of $1. The husband says it looks like Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard. I think it looks more like Jabba the Hutt on vacation in Florida. Boss Jabba will grace the shore of the pond--if I ever get the damn hole dug.  

Being home for several days in a row has given me a chance to watch the subtle changes from day to day as spring starts to take hold here in the Arizona highlands. Some of the crocuses are blooming, and I’ve watched the daffodils go from barely peeking through the soil to a few inches high. One is almost ready to bloom. Last year’s bargain basement mums from Wal-Mart are mostly coming back too. The green onions growing on my front porch in containers have sprung back from their winter pout (heck, I’d pout too if I were covered with a foot of snow for 3 weeks), and my bee balm is trying to take over an entire half whiskey barrel.

And no, you’re not drunk; that barrel in the back of the container grouping really is crooked (or if the barrel looks straight, then you are drunk).

Tomorrow the fun ends for a few days, because it’s time for me to go back to work. But the days are getting longer, the nights are getting warmer, and spring is springing. Hooray!

Find (or make) your microclimates

My complaints about the weather are a standard theme on this blog. I’m a transplanted Californian; winter confuses me. Now that I live on Hoth in Flagstaff, I’ve had to learn about stuff like snowblowers, de-icers, negative temperatures (what the !@#$% kind of hell are those?) and microclimates. That last one is especially important if I want to ripen tomatoes or keep anything alive through the winter. So I’ve spent lots of quality time observing in my garden to see where the warm spots (not many), the windy spots (the entire yard), the extra cold spots (most of the yard), and the dry spots (also the entire yard) are. This kind of close observation is part of what makes gardening such a fascinating hobby. The really ambitious can go a step further and create microclimates. I’m going to try that this year for tomatoes, since I get tired of having to ripen my entire tomato crop in the house every fall.

So, how do you find or create microclimates in your yard? I’ll share a few articles on the topic, then give you one of my shortcut methods for finding the warmest spots.

• The Chicago Daily Herald offers a Q&A with a master gardener on the topic. The piece provides a short, simple overview of microclimates. If you’re new to the concept, start there.
• Less Lawn offers a slightly more detailed introduction.
• So does Today’s Homeowner, and their article includes a link to a Garden Site Microclimate Evaluation Form from the University of California-Riverside Cooperative Extension.
• A post from Good Life Permaculture in Australia offers some creative ideas for creating microclimates.
• And for much more detail, check out this PhD dissertation long article from Mother Earth News.

Microclimates can make the difference between a beautiful specimen and yet another dead plant. In my yard, my front porch faces south and includes lots of concrete plus the giant heatsink known as my house. We’ve had temps down to -1F (or as I refer to any temperature below 0, !@#$% freezing), but I still have pansies and snapdragons alive there--in containers, no less. I’m guessing that means my porch is more than a full zone warmer than the parts of the front yard that are further away from the house.

And that brings me to one of the quickest ways that those of us in snow country can identify at least the warmer and colder microclimates in our yards: observe and take pictures of the snow melt. We got about 2 feet of snow last month (“What the !@#$%?,” says the Californian) with drifts as deep as 4 feet. I spent most of the 2+ weeks it was on the ground scowling and snarling at it. That didn’t make it melt faster, but other factors besides my bad temper did have an effect. Take a look at this picture, taken about 3 weeks after the snowfall:

That’s a great visual demonstration of house-as-heat-sink creating a warm microclimate. The remaining snow in the picture is a few inches deep, and over by my new potager, the snow was about 7” inches deep. How do I know this? Because I sunk into it every. damn. time I carried something to the compost bin. But I digress. My point is that taking pictures of the snow melt around your house can give you a visual reminder of where the warm spots are, so you can take that into account as you plan your garden. You could also note the reverse, where the snow sticks around until you want to take a flamethrower to it to make it go away already. Those are the places you don’t want to plant anything that’s only borderline hardy in your zone.

I went a step further and tried to note where the biggest drifts were, because that tells me something about the wind patterns in the yard. That might be useful information too--if I can ever plant anything. As I write this, my garden is once again buried in snow. !@#$%.

Winter garden--now with 50% more snow!

We are just starting the third of three storms in a row to hit Flagstaff. There's about a foot of snow on the ground now, but the pictures below were taken when there were only about 6 inches. I'm not really a winter person, but I love how grasses and seed heads look against the snow. The winter garden is all about shape and texture and contrast. Now that I live where winter is a thing that keeps me from gardening for months, I'm trying to get better at finding beauty in the garden in all seasons. It's not too difficult on peaceful mornings after a snowfall.

My favorite bit of yard art looks even more whimsical in the snow:

Mums peeking through their snowy blanket:

Ornamental grasses and a mostly-covered boulder:

More mums:

Grasses and a softened boulder:

I think this is some kind of spirea:

Native grass:

Another boulder and the back side of my favorite yard art:

For some reason, this corner of the yard makes me think of Frost's "Stopping by Woods." There's a dry creek bed flowing through the evergreens and cottonwoods, but the snow has reduced it to white undulations. 

Found in Phoenix: roses from the bargain bin

For those who haven’t heard, Arizona is weird. No, I don’t mean our politicians (though if the shoe fits…). I mean our climate. Or climates, as we have quite a few. I live just outside Flagstaff, where winters are cold (USDA zone 6, the same as parts of Ohio), and we get quite a bit of snow, all because our elevation is 7000 feet. 140 miles south is Phoenix, which has hardiness zones 9b and 10a and is hotter than the surface of the sun all summer. Like I said, Arizona is weird. The point of this little discourse on the weather is to explain why I was able to find bareroot roses on clearance while we’re still shoveling snow. I had to run an errand in Phoenix a few days ago and found these beauties for $3 each at Lowe’s.

Gold Glow:


Blue Girl:



Olympiad:


Arizona: 



Our ground is still frozen and partly covered in snow, so we potted these guys in nursery cans and tucked them in our warmest, most sheltered spot since they're already leafing out. The poor things are going to be displeased the first time they experience a Flagstaff winter night, but they should survive. Once I can actually dig in our dirt, I'll put them in the cottage garden I'm creating and hope the grasshoppers don't eat them down to the nubs. 

Interwebs roundup: winter projects

‘Tis the season for armchair gardening--or in my case, desk chair gardening while planted in front of the computer. Bonus points for scowling out the window at the rain and/or snow and/or wind that keeps me from doing real gardening.

Winter is a good time for various garden projects that don’t require a pickaxe to get through frozen ground and that will not result in frostbite. Here are some of the best ones I’ve found in my cruising of the interwebs:

Make a Worm Composter for Less than Five Bucks - Attainable Sustainable

Simple project to create a worm composter from plastic buckets. This is a great project, especially since worm composters sell at nurseries for about $100.

Build a D.I.Y. Lighting System - from You Grow Girl

Gayla Trail explains how she built a DIY lighting system for overwintering tropical plants and starting seeds using materials readily available at hardware and home improvement stores. Or, if you’d like to build the shelves from scratch, check out Build Your Own Simple Seed Starting Shelves from Common Sense Homesteading.

How to Make Birdseed Christmas Ornaments - from eHow

Yeah, I know - Christmas is over. But you can make these in any shape you want, so think of them as homemade bird feeders rather than Christmas ornaments. Bonus: the first recipe on this page contains no peanut butter, so if you (like me) have family members who are allergic to peanuts, you can still do this project.

How to Plan Your Garden - from We Got Real

A nice introduction to planning a vegetable garden. I recommend looking at lots of other sites on garden planning too (and Pinterest. Of course Pinterest) for ideas. I’ve been spending some of these cold winter days planning a pond.

How to Make Upcycled Canning Lid Plant Markers - from Homespun Seasonal Living

A great use for used canning jar lids - requires only one tool (an awl) and 3 other items (jar lids, twine or yarn, and a permanent marker). Now that’s my kind of project!

And then there’s one of my favorite winter gardening activities: reading gardening books. Here are a few best-of-2016 lists to jumpstart your winter reading:

• Best Books of 2016: Gardening - The Financial Times
• The Best Gardening Books of 2016 - The Guardian
• Gift Guide 2016: Best Books on Gardens and the Outdoor Life - Gardenista
• The Best Gardening Books of 2016 - BFC Green
• Top 10 Craft and Gardening Books: 2016 - Booklist

Now go rock these winter days!

Winter project: canning spaghetti sauce

Pretty much every family has its recipes, the ones passed down through the generations, modified by each cook, and treasured (or occasionally dreaded) by each new generation of kids. In my family there are only two of these, and both began, as far as I know, with my mother. One of them is the family spaghetti sauce recipe.

I learned to cook by helping my mother in the kitchen, starting when I was maybe 4 or 5. I liked cooking project days, when I would get in the way help Mom assemble whatever vat o' goodness she was making that day. I was always especially happy when it was spaghetti sauce day, because (like pretty much every American kid), I loved spaghetti. I especially loved the mushrooms in the sauce, so my dad would pick the mushrooms out of his portion and give them to me.

Once I was on my own, I asked my mother for her spaghetti sauce recipe. Of course she didn't have one--she just made it from memory, with a pinch of this and a glop of that, and it turned out magical. I made it with her one afternoon, and she tried to identify actual quantities, but of course the results were never quite the same as when she made it. So I fiddled with it over the years until it became my spaghetti sauce.

The recipe below makes about 7 quarts, which happens to be exactly what my pressure canner will hold (this is not a coincidence). You can make smaller or larger amounts as you wish and freeze it instead of can it if you prefer. Quantities of stuff are also negotiable. If you hate mushrooms, you're wrong you can leave those out. Whatever. It's spaghetti sauce, not a chemistry experiment. There are, however, a few caveats if you're going to can the stuff:

• You *must* use a pressure canner. This stuff has meat in it along with low-acid vegetables. It's a breeding ground for botulism. Do not try to can anything with meat or low-acid anything in a boiling-water canner. If you want to can spaghetti sauce in a boiling water bath, follow a meatless recipe designed for boiling-water-bath canning such as this one from the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

• This recipe is not an "official" "approved" home canning recipe. Normally that's a big no-no. I get around it by following the processing directions for the ingredient with the longest recommended processing time--the ground beef. You can find pressure canning recipes for meat sauce with shorter processing times, but since mine hasn't been laboratory-tested, I play it safe. My new year's resolution every year is to not give my family botulism. So far I have a 100% success rate with that one (we won't discuss my success rate with other resolutions). If you have any concerns about canning, just freeze it. I do that frequently when I'm too lazy to hassle with canning, and it works just fine.

OK, here we go:

The recipe

3 large onions, chopped

3 medium bell peppers, chopped

3 or so jalapenos or other chilies, minced (optional - add if you like a little heat with your spaghetti)

6-8 cloves of garlic, minced (or to taste)

About 90 oz tomatoes, fresh or canned. If using fresh, peel, core, and roughly chop them.

48 oz. tomato sauce

18 oz. tomato paste

3 heaping tbsp dried basil (or to taste - I often add more)

2 heaping tbsp dried oregano (or to taste - again, I often add more. I have a heavy hand with herbs.)

About 4 tsp salt or to taste

1 tsp pepper or to taste

24 oz. sliced fresh mushrooms (or more or less or none - whatever you like)

3 lbs. ground beef, browned and drained

Toss all of the above into a big (and I do mean *big*) stockpot and simmer for a few hours. Or do what I do: put it in a couple of slow cookers (I use one huge one and one smaller one; it fills both) and cook it on low for about 8-10 hours. I like to start the slow cookers at bedtime, let them cook all night, and can the sauce in the morning.

To can, follow the directions for pressure canning that came with your canner, adjusting for altitude if needed. As noted above, I use the processing time and pressure instructions for canning ground beef to be sure my sauce isn't under-processed. Makes about 7 quarts.