A Cooking Life

Garden Report: April 8

Hard to believe, but it's almost that time again. Winter held on pretty tight until a few days ago, but the sun finally came out and it warmed up to seasonal levels – and all that snow finally started to melt away in earnest. If you can imagine, the chair in the garden was totally buried in snow for a good part of the winter.

Planning the garden is one of the things that keeps me from going nuts during the long grey cold months. Seed companies have it just right that they start mailing their catalogs just after the first of the year – they know forlorn housebound gardeners will leaf through the pages of bright photographs and lusty descriptions and drive themselves mad with desire for green leaves and dirt. And then order lots of seeds.

Hot Tomato

Jaune Flammée d'Orange. It's the name that does it. Or maybe its flawless beauty. Or maybe its perfect tomato taste. Put them all together, and this tomato gets my vote for The One Tomato I'd Grow If I Could Grow Only One.

Garden Report: August 12th

I've been thinking a lot about how off it might seem that I post so much about gardening on a blog that's supposed to be about cooking, and that I post so little about cooking (or that I post so little at all). The truth is, cooking and gardening occupy approximately the same coordinates in my firmament. If I lived in a place with a milder climate, and could garden for more than the few fleeting months allotted us in the hills of Vermont, my blog might easily have been called “A Constant Gardener”. I often fantasize about having my own paradise, overgrown with flowering plants and exotic fruits. But I suspect I'd tire of it, and I'd miss the snow.

The Vanguard Tomato

Well in advance of all the other tomatoes, this little gem – no bigger than a marble – came perfectly ripe today. Yes, I ate it. I relished it. And it was delicious – sweet, tart, and warm from the sun. It left me yearning for more.

Garden Report: July 18

The garden's just about growing out of control; I finally had some time over the weekend to catch up on chores – cultivating to keep weeds down, pruning the tomatoes, spraying for caterpillars, culling overgrown greens, pinching the basil, fertilizing. It rained like hell this morning, but a break in the rain this afternoon offered delicious light for taking some pictures. I love just hanging out in the garden; I can (and do) spend hours examining the tiniest wonders there.

Garden Report: July 6th

The garden is really hitting its stride now, even though the weather still isn't consistently warm. There's not much to eat from it yet, except for salad greens. There are a few pattypan squash that'll be ready for harvest any day. And I could take some of the young fennel bulbs, but I want to let them get a little bigger. I'll have cucumbers and beets in a couple of weeks, around the time we harvest the garlic. The peppers and tomatoes are all flowering and setting fruit; the eggplants are just beginning to flower, as are the beans.

This is a “panorama” pieced together of shots taken from the third-floor deck. Funny, it looks so small and dollhouse-like. It's not: the beds are each 4' x 8' feet with about 2' in between, so the overall length is probably close to 80'. At the far right are the two newest beds; I still need to get a load of mulch down around them just to tidy things up.

If you'd like to see this photo in all its gigantic glory, you can click here to view it on Imageshack; once the page loads, click on the image to get it even bigger.  If anyone has questions about the garden, or gardening in general, feel free to post your query in a comment and I'll answer as best I can.

First Garlic

I'm still about 3 weeks away from harvest on even the earliest garlic, but I impatiently yanked a bulb last week and left it to cure until today. Even thought it's the 4th of July, I didn't have anything special planned for dinner.

Grilled Garlic Scapes

When you grow garlic, there is always the question of what to do with the scapes (the curly-Q flower stalks on hardneck garlic varieties). They need to be removed to concentrate the plant's energy on forming the underground bulb. Problem is, they all need to be removed at the roughly the same time, and if you grow more than a few heads of garlic (we have 250) that's a whole lot of scapes to make sense of in a very short period.

What's Growing in that Little Garden

I just want to follow up with a more thorough catalog of what I've planted. I snapped a few more pictures today, but wasn't happy with most of them. So you get a photo of the baby fennel (that's my stepdaughter Annie at the far end of the bed).

It's an impossible garden to photograph, long and narrow as it is. There are 15 boxes total: 10 4' x 8' boxes along a narrow stretch, with a patch of rhubarb, then two more 4' x 8', plus 3 2' x 8' boxes along the edge. Really, the best way to see the layout is from the deck on the third floor. I'll try and patch together a panorama.

Following is a more or less complete list of my future harvest.

My Little Garden

Every season I have gardened in Vermont has presented its own set of challenges. The first year I gardened here – the first year I gardened, period – there was a killing frost in early July. Luckily, my garden was very small (10' x 15') and I was able to replant without going broker than I already was. But there was another killing frost in late August, making the total length of the growing season about 45 days. If you garden at all, you know that's not much of a growing season.