Vacation's over!

Primroses

It feels like I've hardly had time to think about gardening this past winter-- this is the first year that I've approached a gardening season feeling completely unprepared. It's not that the usual winter tasks didn't get accomplished. Seeds have been ordered, pots have been bleached and cleaned, potting mix has been purchased in abundance. But somehow, I'm adrift. Maybe it's a sort of gardening mid-life crisis? I guess spring will tell.

Last year's garden: a post-mortem:

• The radicchio finally formed loose heads! There is still quite a bit of it in the garden, as the husband does not share my enthusiasm for its bitterness.
  
  
• The pumpkins never ripened fully, and started to rot. If you can imagine 75 pounds' worth of partly-mushy pumpkins leaking their slimy orange pumpkin guts all over the lawn-- well, as much as I wanted those pumpkins, it was pretty funny.
  
  
• Remember those bulbs that I forgot to plant on time last year? So far, the daffodils, at least, are coming up just fine. The fritillarias haven't popped up yet, but I'm definitely seeing some alliums. Happily, 'Splendid Cornelia,' the hyacinth that I forced last winter, has also come up in its new home in a patio container. It may edge out the daffodils as first bulb to bloom this year.

Early-spring gardening:

• We've had a couple of weeks of beautiful weather, and as a result, the second giant clump of rhubarb has finally been divided. Three of the seven resulting clumps were adopted by a co-worker; two more are still looking for homes. I also have several French sorrel plants in search of a new home.
  
  
• Sweet peas and snow peas have been planted on time! I ordered particular sweet peas from a particular vendor this year and was really looking forward to them, and they somehow lost my order! So the replacement sweet pea seeds that I ended up grabbing at the store are some standard variety, but I'm really looking forward to the snow peas, which are a new-to-me variety called 'Carouby de Maussane.'
  
  
• Meet my very first orchid! It's an oncidium, probably 'Sweet Sugar.' So far, it's been in flower for about a month. If I can keep it alive, there's another oncidium that I have my eye on.
  
  
• I will spare you the introduction to my first David Austen rose, as it is currently nekkid (in a bare-root sort of way). I'm planning on acquiring one more, but I've got to find a place for it, first. One of my 2008 garden resolutions is to take better care of the roses this year. I've armed myself with horticultural oil, fungicide, and a fresh bottle of pyrethrin, but already have a nagging suspicion that it will take more work and more chemicals than I can stomach.
  
  
• The Northwest Flower & Garden Show has come and gone. It was my first year attending this huge PNW garden event. A few photos are posted here. The show featured dozens and dozens of plant vendors. I, of course, walked out with nothing but more frakking dahlia tubers :-/
  
  
• Finally, to explain the photo of the day: I did not grow these primroses. They came from the local nursery. However, I am attempting to stratify three flats' worth of primrose seed this year. Last year, my wintersown container of primroses was one of only two failures, so I've divided my containers into three separate batches and will try different methods to get the seeds to germinate. These aren't just any primroses, by the way-- they are mostly species auriculas, along with a batch of candelabra primroses. This task may prove to be beyond my skill level, but if even one of my three trial groups yields plants, I'll be thrilled.

Bullet-point posts are always random and exhausting, aren't they? Well, I'm sorry to unload all of that in one post, but it was time to get the blog all caught up. The 2008 growing season has arrived, and experience is beginning to teach me that there will not be time to wax nostalgic over past moments once things start taking off!

How sweet it is

Carrots - 'Purple Haze' and 'Nantes'

Last year, after being very impressed with myself for having grown my first carrot, I mentioned that I was going to try a variety called "Purple Haze." In the spirit of continuing to show off my carrots, here is "Purple Haze" mixed in with more of the Nantes type pictured in last year's photo. Pretty cool-looking, eh? Root crops are supposed to turn sweeter after frost; these post-frost carrots certainly do seem sweeter than their mid-season counterparts. I wish I'd planted fall beets!

Elsewhere in the vegetable garden, the sorrel is starting to succumb to the cold weather, after all; I'm debating whether to pull out my extra plants now, or wait until spring to give them away. I'm also worried about the leeks; they look fine so far, but I don't know how winter-hardy the variety I planted is. They're too small to use yet, though, so the decision to leave them in is a no-brainer. Finally, the radicchio is still not heading. I may pull out some of the plants and move them to an area that gets more sunlight. If that doesn't work, I'll be starting from scratch with a more sure-heading variety in the spring.

In the flower beds: last week, I cut back the dead dahlias to let the tubers cure. They're due to be dug up and stored next weekend. While I was messing around in the flowerbeds, I put in my fall-planted bulbs and rearranged the perennials to try and "fix" my plant height issues-- next year, I don't want to have to deal with two-foot larkspurs buried behind four-foot high dahlias again. Here are the before and after shots. The difference doesn't look very impressive right now, especially since the dahlias have been cut down and the annuals taken out, but by spring the improvement should be marked.

As a final note, we pruned the grapes this past weekend. Do not try this at home! Grapes are normally pruned in spring, but since the recent frosts killed off most of the foliage, and since my husband doesn't like the way that the vines trap humidity against the garage, we now have two naked, scrawny trunks on either side of a wooden arbor, defenseless against the impending cold. Husband wants to move the grapes next year; I think they're going to be too much trouble to move, and would prefer replacing them with a more flavorful variety, or maybe even wine grapes.

Even though I'm not very fond of red seedless, I have to admit that owning our own grapevines has increased my interest in and respect for viticulture. The grapes in particular have taught me to be a vigilant and merciless pruner; every year, we cut them way back except for a very few of the strongest vines from the previous year, and the plants always seem to bounce back with increased vigor. Even though we neglected the vines after pruning this past year and let the birds get most of the year's bounty, in a way, the business of pruning is its own reward. There is a calm to it, a sense of purposeful effort that I enjoy.

There are still bulbs to plant, tubers to store, and gardening supplies to be cleaned. I keep thinking that the gardening season (and thus, my blogging season) is done, but it still seems like there's always something to do. I once joked to a greenhouse grower that I couldn't have a greenhouse and do the four-season gardening thing because I needed the winter break! But there really isn't a break-- just a slowdown. And I think I like it that way.

As of yesterday, we have frost!

Pumpkins, assembled

The forecast said that temperatures would get down to 31 degrees overnight on Thursday and Friday. Well, the night before the big frost, I decided not to chance harvesting the pumpkins early, since they're not fully orange yet and supposed to be able to take anything down to 27 degrees, but then the weather decided better and dropped to 26 degrees. Bad call on my part!

Luckily, the pumpkins appear to be fine, at least at initial examination. I cut them from the vines and moved them into the garage to finish ripening and curing, and swear that the largest two must weigh twenty pounds apiece. Of course, it may have just seemed that way after the fifty-yard dash from the back garden to the garage door! In any case, with some luck (and judicious use of the food processor and freezer) we'll have pumpkins to last the winter.

As for frost's toll on the rest of the garden, most of the vegetables had already been removed, but some dahlias that I hadn't gotten around to cutting were lost. On the other hand, I was surprised to discover that the sorrel made it through, which means we'll be able to enjoy more of the cream of sorrel soup that I finally got around to making this past week.

There have been tasks that I've been meaning to get to, like planting my legumes, shallots, and spring bulbs, that I hope to work on over the weekend. Then it will be on to cleaning out the pots and plant supports, and then, finally, I can sit down to my favorite winter pastime... planning next year's garden.

Sorrel

Harvest - June 18, 2007

I'm back, as promised-- we finally got the last kinks worked out of our broken computers yesterday, so after a little more fine-tuning, I'll finally have a chance to catch up on everyone's happenings.

A lot has happened in the garden since my last post. We've had some nice rains over the past week, and everything seems to be taking off. Right now, I'm harvesting bountiful quantities of radishes, lettuce, arugula, and swiss chard, but the surprise bumper crop of the moment is the French sorrel that I started from seed in early spring. My herb bed is full of its lush, tart foliage. Salmon with sorrel sauce is on the menu for tomorrow-- I can hardly wait.

I've actually never grown or even eaten sorrel prior to this spring, but the flavor of the raw stems and leaves is both familiar and nostalgic for me. Its tang comes from oxalic acid, a distinctive taste component in both rhubarb (a relative of sorrel) and wood sorrel (genus Oxalis). It's probably more likely that you've tasted rhubarb than wood sorrel, but as it happens, there was a patch of wood sorrel growing through a neighbor's fence into my parents' yard when I was a kid, so despite having a rhubarb patch now, wood sorrel is closer to my heart. I have fond memories of sitting out in the California shade and chewing on its crisp, succulent stems. The taste of French sorrel brings that memory right back, so lately it's not unusual to see me out grazing in the garden in the afternoons.

Since I've digressed into the subject of oxalis, I guess I should mention that as with rhubarb and French sorrel, it's possible to have too much of a good thing. Rhubarb leaves are considered toxic due to high concentrations of oxalic acid, and sorrel and wood sorrel can produce the same effects in large quantities. On a more epicurean note, there are many weedy species of oxalis (you know, those little shamrock plants in the lawn with yellow flowers and nasty pollen?), but those species probably aren't what you want to eat. First off, the stems are too tiny; second-- lawn pesticides, yuck! I don't have species for the types I remember from childhood, but they resembled the illustrations of Oxalis pre-caprae and Oxalis violacea on the right hand side of this page at Wikipedia.

I love reading about foraging for wild goodies like wood sorrel and will probably make more foraging posts in the future, but for now, I'll leave you with a link to images of wood sorrel being foraged in places like Central Park (wow!) If you have the time and inclination, the entire website is filled with fascinating photos of wild edibles (and inedibles). Enjoy!