Garden – Page 5 – Ephemerality

January 18, 2023May 4, 2023

Phenology 2022

As a famous whitetail deer once lamented: “Winter sure is long.” And here in zone 6a, I would concur. The last week of April through the last week of October are the only guaranteed growing times for anything not frost-resistant, and even that’s a gamble. The remaining half of the year is reserved for watching it rain. It certainly gives the mind some time to contemplate self-harm.

But then I discovered something: Phenology.

In an applied context to gardening, it correlates planting times to what local native plants are doing. For example, when the crocus blooms, it’s time to plant radishes.

The benefit being, some vegetables can, in theory, be planted ahead of last frost, thereby extending the gardening season. The practice is entirely anecdotal, as micro-climates are too variable to establish a regional constant. The information available is therefore crowdsourced, making for nice little community of gardening nerds.

It also made for a fun experiment. And with a basic internet search providing corollaries to what I planned to grow, I was able to create my own planting guide. The dates themselves I left blank, as I would fill them in myself, noting whether the incidence was successful or not. And so, after one year, I have my own vegetable garden planting time reference index, specific to my immediate geography:

Local Phenology 2022.xlsx

I intend to add more items, but for now the greatest revelation was that I could squeeze out a few more weeks’ growing time for peas and root vegetables. And with the carrots maturing earlier as a result, I was able to plant a winter crop far enough in advance of the hard freeze to yield some impressive roots.

So while Suicide Month will remain unchanged, I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that it’s the last month of the season that I can’t plant anything.

–Simon

June 22, 2022May 8, 2023

It’ll Cost a Bundle

2 years prior, Liz planted garlic. We then harvested that garlic the following summer.

Peasant Food

This year, that same garlic patch sprouted again. Apparently, not all of the seed garlic had been harvested. I’m new to garlic growing, so I’m uncertain if this is expected growing behavior or not. Regardless, we sure did get a nice bundle, however unexpected:

Maybe the trick is to grow in patches and harvest every 2 years. Or maybe it’ll come up again on its own. Dunno. Plenty of cooking to do in the meantime!

–Simon

February 25, 2022May 9, 2023

Root Cellar

Last year I mentioned the need for a root cellar.

Staple Solanums

This was predicated upon the expectation of a large potato crop–the results of my hand made potato box.

The final yield was, however, lackluster, and my other root crops, onions and garlic, don’t require root cellar conditions.

But the carrots did exceptionally well, and storing them in a combination of the crisper drawer in the fridge and the garage, well, was annoying. So I revisited my plans to convert the crawlspace.

All I intended was to add some shelving, but I never got around to it, and my earlier attempts at using it for storing radishes resulted in a box of moldy radishes. I abandoned the plan.

Then our chest freezer died. Its thermostat had always been finicky, refusing to settle anywhere between 0 and -30. And when the power went out, the compressor never clicked back on again.

It always had that busted corner too. Maybe that was part of the problem.

Everyone surely remembers the great toilet paper shortage of COVID. Faced with a temporary yet inconvenient possibility of having to wait a few days to buy what we wanted immediately, people began stockpiling items they were most afraid of going a day without: food, sanitary products…ammunition…?

You never know when you might need to shoot your neighbor because they bought all the toilet paper. And apparently that’s going to require a thousand rounds.

Anyway, on this list was deep freezers, to store all this frozen food that you might have to go a day without. And now, almost a year after the quarantines, they’re apparently still hard to find. But find one we did, at a former Sear’s warehouse, for too much money. But it was either that or lose all the steak, and I’ll be damned if I have to go a day without steak. So we bought it and lugged it home and hooked it up and…at that point I noticed the old freezer had finally clicked back on.

God dammit.

But then I got an idea. We could take it back, or I could convert the old glitchy one into a root cellar! Which is essentially just a giant refrigerator. It’s impossible to keep a dirt cellar 33-40 degrees with 98% humidity anyway. So while this approach might not be more efficient, it was certainly more effective.

But one problem remained: freezers aren’t refrigerators and aren’t designed to act as such. Fortunately, that problem had already been addressed. The market is flooded with thermostatic controller overrides, which turn the power on and off to the external cord independently of the freezer’s wonky and cheap internal thermostat.

So far it’s working pretty well, though I might add some water jugs in there to help regulate. It tends to turn on and off more frequently than I’d like. I know compressors don’t like that.

Or I could just add a bunch of beer in there instead…for thermoregulating purposes.

And with one last addition, milk crates, I have stackable storage in there too, which keeps things off the metal liner (hopefully this will also prevent frostbite). And even though these reduce the usable space, it’s still a ton of storage. I even thawed a turkey in there last week, so there’s certainly uses beyond just vegetables.

I won’t have to occupy an entire fridge door for a week brining pork belly for bacon, either. And that’s something I’m unwilling to go a day without!

–Simon

November 3, 2021May 9, 2023

The Great Carrot Harvest

The autumn breeze sliced the air. Daggers to the bone. The weather forecast confirmed what I already anticipated: it was time to harvest the final carrots.

While the carrots of 2020 were underwhelming, it would appear that conditions were perfect this year.