Outside

The End of 2006 . . . Finally

I can't lie - 2006 was sort of a crappy year for me. I will be very glad when the clock rolls over to 12:01 am tonight and it's officially 2007. The weather this morning definitely matched the mood of the year - 40 degrees and rainy.

Obviously, a new start can come at any time, but for me, January 1, 2007 is the perfect time. The primary area of my discontent in 2006 has been the business. It's still not going the way I would like it, and money has been a continual issue this year. Beyond the business, there is nothing I can complain about in my life. There is no doubt, however, that my mood surrounding work seeps into other areas of my life, with the money issues being particularly distressing.

So, it's time for a new start, a new attitude. I hope that tomorrow I wake up to see that the rain has turned to snow and that we have a clean, fresh, white slate on which to start the new year.

A Favorite Plant Memory

When I grew up - in the 70's - perennial and vegetable gardens in the suburbs were a rarity. However, my mother always had both flowers and vegetables growing in the yard. We lived on the corner of a busy street and a side street. The front yard held several perennials, and the back yard - next to the driveway - held a 15' by 25' vegetable garden.

Along one entire side of the vegetable garden, my mom grew asparagus. As most of you know, this is a vegetable that most kids detest. I once read that children's taste buds change as they grow into adults, and foods that they once found disgusting become delicious as their palates mature. This was certainly true for us. My mom didn't care, though, because of course it just meant more for her and dad.

As the summer progressed and the asparagus fronds grew taller, our cat - Ichabod - would spend more and more time in the shade of the asparagus. We all believed that he was getting back to his roots as a wild lion or tiger, hiding in the bush and waiting for prey. However, because he lived in an American suburb and not the African plains,  Ichabod's prey was small legs with bare feet. If any kid got too close to his lair, he would spring from the fronds and pounce.

For me, asparagus fronds are as much a part of summer as any other plant. This year I hope to make a new garden between our fence and the road. I'm hoping to have a 20' row of asparagus, serving as a frond-y backdrop for the prairie-type flowers I plan to plant. I know that as I work in that area of the garden, I'll always be a little nervous, waiting for a paw or two to appear from beneath the fronds.

Merry Christmas!

The day has dawned bright and sunny. Chickadees and nuthatches call from the trees. It's Christmas day, and we are in the quiet morning of the day before dinner is made and family arrives. Although there are many days of cold and snow before us, the days are getting longer, bringing us closer to spring.

A New Zone?

Was I ever shocked when I decided to check out the new zone map at the National Arbor Day Foundation. The Twin cities are now on the edge of Zone 5! Until now, we've been zone 4a, the colder half of zone 4.

Here's the map of the new zones 4 and 5. The entire northern half of Minnesota - or even a bit more than half - used to be zone 3 (with some pockets of zone 2). Now, most of the state is zone 4, with southern MN and the Mississippi river basin to the Cities being zone 5. My own crude estimate is that zone 4 moved north about 150 miles. Maybe from St. Cloud - which I know for sure was on the edge of zones 3 and 4 - to Cass Lake.

If you head over to the Arbor Day website, you should also take a look at the animation of the changes between 1990 and 2006. The change in the middle of the country is particularly unsettling. I was already a believer in global warming, but the animation makes it very real.

I suppose the good news is that I can start experimenting with plants that are marginally hardy in zone 4 and hardy in the northern portion of zone 5, but I'm not sure that makes up for the fact that our climate seems to be going to hell in a hand basket.

 

Credit goes to Susan over at Garden Rant for blogging about this first (or at least, first for me).

Welcome, Baby Henry!

My brother- and sister-in-law just had their first baby on Monday, December 18th. He's a healthy baby boy.

Here he is at about 20 hours old. Congratulations!

The Fruits of My Labor

Christmas is almost here, and although I'm not done with everything, at least some of my gifts were prepared early. I put up lots of jam this year so that I could give them as gifts (various strawberries, various blueberries, and plum).

Now, here they are, all ready for the gift-giving season. Of course, as soon as I put them under the tree, Dexter had to come over. He has the need to smell every package. I just wonder what he's looking for?

The End of the 2006 Gardening Year

In the past few days, I've been performing some "lasts" regarding the vegetable garden. On Sunday, I mulched the garlic. That will be the last task in the garden until the snow melts in the spring (that is, if we ever get any snow).

Last night, we had the last truly local meal we'll be able to pull off until next May or June. We had the last of the carrots and garden potatoes. Because there weren't quite enough potatoes - Rose Finn Fingerlings - I had to add a few old red potatoes from the back of the refrigerator. I roasted the carrots and steamed the potatoes. To round out the meal, we had Swedish sausage from Ingebretsen's in Minneapolis.

All that's left from this year's garden are two meal's worth of fresh-frozen snap beans, a freezer bag of oven-dried tomatoes, some frozen pesto, and about 2.5 cups of dried shell beans.

(If you visit Ingebretsen's web site, all you'll see are Scandinavian gifts but they also have a great meat and specialty food market. I personally love the Swedish sausage, but if you're feeling particularly adventurous, you could also try some lutefisk. Although Wikipedia gives a Swedish spelling variation, my grandmother always assured us that only Norwegians ate lutefisk - not good Swedes. Whatever the case, I've tried to make it a practice to stay away from foods prepared with lye.)

Dexter Update: Kim was nice enough to ask about Dexter the dog. Way back on November 21, I mentioned that he was scheduled for an echocardiogram at the University of Minnesota Veterinary Hospital. It turns out that he does not yet have heart disease, but is going in that direction somewhat quickly. He has heart murmurs in two main valves, which has lead to his heart being enlarged (or as our regular vet said, "It's huge!"). At this point, there is nothing they can do. If he was a human, he would have valve replacement surgery, but I guess even the U doesn't do that on pets - it's much too expensive. However, once he gets heart disease, I guess there's a drug that can help the heart pump better. This drug has not yet been approved by the FDA, so we're now on a list to be able to get it from Canada if need be.

So, the final diagnosis on the big-hearted dog is that he has a bronchial infection. He's been through two 10-day cycles of antibiotics, but the cough is not quite gone. I think we're going to have to do another cycle of antibiotics to finally get rid of the cough (and all the phlegm he coughs up and immediately swallows - there's no accounting for a dog's taste).

In the Spirit of the Season

Everything is a little overblown and a bit gaudy at the holidays, so why not my blog? Once we get past New Year's Day, the blog - like the house - will get a thorough cleaning and emerge with a neat, sleek aesthetic for the winter months.

Vegetable Review: Loose Leaf Lettuces

I started reviewing the 2006 growing season with a discussion of peas way back on August 28th, and haven't done a thing since. It's time to rectify the situation.

Lettuces, 2006
Pond Ice Out: Wednesday, April 5
Planted: Wednesday, April 15
First Harvest?: Saturday, June 11 (probably earlier, but this is the first recorded harvest)

 

Click to enlarge

April 15               April 23            May 2             June 29

Varieties Planted (all ordered from The Cook's Garden)

• Black Seeded Simpson: Always dependable, always good, Black Seeded Simpson will always have a place in my garden. This was the first lettuce to pop out of the ground (the little green dots in the April 23 photo) and grew the most prolifically. Will plant again next year.
• Green Salad Bowl and Red Salad Bowl: Nothing special about either of these lettuces. Germination was spotty and plants did not grow as vigorously as Black Seeded Simpson. The red color of Red Salad Bowl was quite unimpressive. Will not grow again except to get rid of excess seed.
• Revolution: A beautiful lettuce - very frilly with a deep burgundy color. Although it did not germinate as prolifically as Black Seeded Simpson, it did better than either Salad Bowl variety. The color and texture of this looseleaf lettuce are a wonderful addition to any salad. Will grow again.

Growing Methods

• Raised bed with window screen fence  This worked fine. At the end of the season, I planted some greens, unfortunately much too late. However, I did notice that the day after I took down the fence, every single seedling was gone. I will need to fence off the beds again next year.
• Plant More  Next year I need to plant more lettuces to account for potential poor germination rates. I thought I had planted enough this spring, but when both varieties of Salad Bowl didn't germinate well, I wasn't left with much lettuce. (This year I planted 4 square feet, one per variety).
• Fall Planting  I half-heartedly threw some seeds in the ground in mid- to late-August, then promptly did nothing. If I want a fall harvest, I need to plant earlier and keep things watered.
• Cold Frames  I would really like to experiment with a cold frame, especially for planting earlier in the spring when the need for fresh garden greens is at its height. I won't get one for next spring, but need to keep this in mind for sometime in 2007.
• Fertilization  I just added compost in the spring and that was sufficient. Nothing else needed.
• Insect Pests  None.
• Other Pests  Damn rabbits. I need to keep greens fenced at all times.
• Diseases  None.

Overall Impressions

Lettuce is mandatory in even the smallest of gardens so that you get the first "hit" of fresh "greenness" in the spring.

However, ordering from The Cook's Garden is not mandatory. As I related in my pea review about the shelling variety Ellen's Delight, "Pods turned yellow before maturing. Would not grow again. Seed pack information was poor - was limited to describing 'peas' in general [rather than a description of how to grow shelling peas vs. a description of how to grow snap peas]. This was true of everything from The Cook's Garden." In addition, the prices were higher than just about anywhere else and there were fewer seeds per package as compared to other seed companies.

Because the founders are well-known for both cooking and seed-growing, I thought The Cook's Garden would be one of those places that may be a little higher in price but well worth it for the quality. However, I would have to say that I was let down. I don't plan to use them again.

Book Club: My Favorite Plant, part 1

I just started reading My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love, edited by Jamaica Kincaid. This is the December selection for the Garden Blogger's Book Club, hosted by Carol at May Dreams Garden. Since it's December in Minnesota, and there is very little to blog about in the garden, I will devote more than one post to the book.

Although I've read the first four selections, in this post I want to address design. Someone along the way - either the publisher or Kincaid herself - put a lot of thought into how My Favorite Plant is presented to the reader. It is obvious that conscious design decisions were made at each step.

The book itself is small - about 4.74" by 6.25" - and it feels good in the hand. Normally, I don't pay any attention to the size of a book unless it's very large and cumbersome. In this case, though, each time I pick it up, I think, "This is just the right size for a book." It has the pleasing solidity of a hardcover along with the useful size of a paperback. Nice.

As we turn to graphics and design, we again see how much thought has been put into the physicality of My Favorite Plant. The color of the hard cover (inside the dust jacket) matches the color of the title on the dust jacket, which picks up some of the tones in the photo of the hibiscus flower. Inside the book, each chapter begins on a right-hand page. The left-hand page has a two-color design (which is different for each chapter) - grayscale with one highlight color. The highlight color is the same as the color of the hard cover.

Even the typeface used for the text contributes to the design. The font is called "Mrs. Eaves" and it is a design I've never seen used for text. The version of "Mrs. Eaves" used in My Favorite Plant has a little "fillip" - I don't know how else to describe it - that connects certain letters. This little extra "something" shows that this is not just "some book" but a book that has been put together carefully to please the eye.

Here's a sample:

(However, although I appreciate how the font contributes to the overall design of the book, I personally don't like it. I find it distracting - I trip over the words as I read.)

At this point you're asking, what is she getting at? In some ways, the design of My Favorite Flower is a reflection of garden design. One of the precepts of "good" garden design is to re-use a few plants and/or colors throughout the garden to unify it and allow the eye to find a rhythm. In the same way, My Favorite Flower has also used specific design elements to tie the book together. This is an anthology with 33 different authors with vastly different writing styles, and contains a mix of poetry and prose. This particular "garden" could get messy very quickly. However, through a deft use of design, the disparate elements of My Favorite Flower are brought together and given a rhythm.

Now, if I could only be so disciplined in my own garden!