Pleasant surprises: a garden's greatest gift

It's nearly summer, and I spent Monday night worrying about frost. According to the forecast, the overnight low was supposed to be 32. Our average last frost date is June 15, but like a lot of gardeners, every spring I convince myself that that date is a worst-case scenario and of course it won't happen this year and the one good thing about climate change is that we'll all be a zone warmer and sure I can fit another six pack of tomatoes in. Yes, we gardeners are often delusional.

So it was with some trepidation that I got up Tuesday morning and ventured out to water the garden before work. I expected curled, frost-blackened leaves. I expected to mourn the untimely passing of  my tomatoes, basil, peppers, squash, and everything else I shouldn't have planted so soon. I steeled myself for the carnage. I stepped warily over the threshold and into… paradise. The morning was cool, the air perfectly still and fresh. And there was no sign of Jack Frost nipping at my nightshades. Something else was missing too--the hordes of grasshoppers that have plagued my garden since the nights started warming a few weeks ago. There were a few hopping here and there, but the Biblical plague was MIA. I can only guess that it must have been cold enough to drive them back--but not cold enough to damage tender summer veggies.

I don't think I've ever enjoyed watering as much as I did on that cool, perfect almost-summer morning. I even had a pair of hummingbirds for company. Mornings like this are why I garden: why I spend weekends shoveling manure, why I fight my way through gale-force winds to plant and water and weed, why I strain my back moving rocks to build raised beds, and why I spend half my salary on soil amendments and irrigation supplies and plants. My time in the garden was short--I do have to work for a living, and I had an 8:30 meeting--but that half hour or so in my own little paradise let me start my day with beauty and peace. 

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?

Putting the garden to bed and taking stock

We've had an amazing fall here in Flagstaff. Our average first frost date is September 15, but I was harvesting tomatoes till about 2 days ago, when the warm spot in my front yard finally got below freezing. We seem to be getting our cold weather at last, so I hereby declare this weekend the End of Gardening Season for 2016.

It's been a good gardening year for me, when my enthusiasm for my favorite hobby rekindled, and I got to work on a bunch of projects (see the About page for my saga of gardening in Flagstaff to date). This year's accomplishments include:

1. Finishing the drainage ditch/dry creek bed in the front yard:



2. Hauling a crap ton of manure (tee hee. "crap ton" "manure" Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.) to attempt to create decent soil in our front yard garden. I still need to haul tons more, but the plants are already doing better (not that you can tell from these pictures; freezing temps killed off most signs of life).





3. Creating a container garden in a warm, sheltered corner by the front door, in hopes that I will have fresh herbs and green onions through at least part of the cold months. This plan is working so far; I harvested a big bunch of parsley for chimichurri last night, as well as a big bundle of green onions for topping baked potatoes.







4. Started constructing a new kitchen garden in a boring, formerly-unused corner of our front yard:





The new beds are filled with barn litter, straw and chicken manure from our coops, horse manure from a riding stable a few miles away, and old straw my husband scored from a guy at the dump. One of these days I'll write a post on frugal gardening and scavenging.

I'm using the Lasagna Gardening method, which I prefer to tilling. It served me well in Portland and Southern California; hopefully it will work just as well here. If you want to try it, here are a couple of books to get you started. The first one is the original Lasagna Gardening, and the second one adapts the techniques to smaller spaces. Both are excellent. And fall is a great time to gather materials for new lasagna beds!




And so another gardening year comes to a close. Time to celebrate the harvest and give thanks for our many blessings. Today I give thanks for the year that was, for the lessons I learned and the many joyful hours I spent in the garden.